Winston Churchill’s 150th birthday is on Nov. 30, and the “British Bulldog’s” legacy is being remembered more than ever. The global leader has a generations-long connection to Brooklyn, which guest researcher Martin McQuade traced for the Brooklyn Eagle.

“Brooklynites are renowned for toughness, forcefulness, confidence and bluntness. There should be no wonder that Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (1874-1965), the exemplar of these characteristics, could boast that his mother, nee Jennie Jerome (1854-1921), was born in the city of Brooklyn,” McQuade notes. “These are the very ingrained traits that enabled Britain’s wartime prime minister and America’s most unwavering World War Two ally to rescue Europe and the world at large from the clutches of Nazi Germany. Such characteristics also secured his place in history as the world’s salvation. Simply put, the path toward the survival of the free world passed through Brooklyn.”