Abby Greene Aldrich

William Avery Rockefeller was an American traveling salesman and the father of the Rockefeller dynasty. Born in Granger, New York, in 1810, he married Eliza Davison in 1837 and the couple raised six children in Richford, Moravia and Owego in upstate New York before the family moved to Strongsville, Ohio, near Cleveland. He sold patent remedies and traded goods across the countryside and was away from home for long stretches, leaving the household largely to his wife. His son John D. Rockefeller later said his father had trained him in bargaining and bookkeeping from boyhood. Two of his sons, John D. Rockefeller and William Rockefeller, went on to found the Standard Oil Company.

John Davison Rockefeller was an American industrialist and philanthropist who founded the Standard Oil Company and became the defining business figure of the Gilded Age. Born in Richford, New York, to William Avery Rockefeller and Eliza Davison, he moved with his family to Ohio as a teenager, worked as a bookkeeper in Cleveland and entered oil refining in 1863. He incorporated Standard Oil in 1870 with his brother William and partners including Henry Flagler, and built it into a near total monopoly on American refining until the Supreme Court ordered its breakup in 1911. With his wife Laura Spelman he raised four children who reached adulthood. In retirement he gave away much of his fortune, founding the University of Chicago, the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the Rockefeller Foundation.

William Rockefeller was an American businessman and financier and a co-founder of the Standard Oil Company. The younger brother of John D. Rockefeller, he was born in Richford, New York, in 1841 and grew up in Ohio, entering the oil trade alongside his brother and taking charge of Standard Oil's New York office and its export business from 1866. He became one of the most prominent financiers of his era, with major interests in Anaconda Copper, the National City Bank of New York and several railroads. He married Almira Geraldine Goodsell, and their children included Percy Avery Rockefeller and the philanthropist Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge. His country estate, Rockwood Hall, stood near Tarrytown, New York.

Franklin Rockefeller, generally known as Frank, was an American businessman and the youngest brother of John D. and William Rockefeller. Born in upstate New York in 1845 and raised in Ohio, he served in the Union Army during the American Civil War and afterward went into business in Cleveland, holding interests in iron and steel concerns and in Standard Oil. He later ran a large cattle ranch in Kansas and was active in the livestock trade. His relationship with his eldest brother was strained for much of his adult life, and the two were often at odds over business matters, a division that was widely reported at the time.

Edith Rockefeller McCormick was an American arts patron and analytical psychologist and the youngest daughter of John D. Rockefeller. Born in Cleveland in 1872, she married Harold Fowler McCormick, heir to the McCormick harvesting machine fortune, in 1895, and became one of the leading figures of Chicago society, presiding over the Villa Turicum estate at Lake Forest. She was the principal financial backer of the Chicago Grand Opera and later the Chicago Civic Opera. From 1913 she spent eight years in Zurich studying with Carl Jung, helped fund the publication of his work in English and returned to Chicago to practice as an analyst herself. Her son Fowler McCormick later led International Harvester.

Percy Avery Rockefeller was an American financier, the younger son of Standard Oil co-founder William Rockefeller and a nephew of John D. Rockefeller. Born in New York in 1878, he graduated from Yale, where he was a member of Skull and Bones, and became a director of a long list of corporations including Remington Arms, the Brown Brothers banking house, Bethlehem Steel and several Standard Oil successor companies. He married Isabel Stillman, daughter of the banker James Stillman, in 1901, and lived at Owenoke Farm in Greenwich, Connecticut. He was an active yachtsman and thoroughbred owner and remained one of the leading figures of the second Rockefeller generation on Wall Street.

Ethel Geraldine Rockefeller Dodge was an American philanthropist, art collector and animal welfare patron, the daughter of Standard Oil co-founder William Rockefeller and a niece of John D. Rockefeller. Born in New York in 1882, she married the Remington Arms head Marcellus Hartley Dodge in 1907, a union widely reported at the time as joining two great American fortunes. From her Giralda Farms estate in Madison, New Jersey, she founded and ran the Morris and Essex Dog Show, for decades the largest in the United States, and bred prize dogs and cattle. A major collector of paintings and sculpture, she left her collection and much of her fortune to museums and to animal welfare causes, endowing the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation.

Eliza Davison Rockefeller was the mother of John D. Rockefeller and the matriarch of the Rockefeller family. Born in Niles, New York, in 1813 to a farming family, she married William Avery Rockefeller in 1837 and raised their six children largely on her own while her husband traveled. A devout Baptist, she ran a frugal, orderly and religious household, first in upstate New York and later in Ohio, and her habits of thrift, record keeping and regular charitable giving were repeatedly cited by her eldest son as the foundation of his own character. She lived to see Standard Oil become the dominant force in American oil refining.

Elizabeth Rockefeller Strong, known as Bessie, was the eldest child of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller. Born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1866, she was educated at home and at Vassar College, and in 1889 married the philosopher and psychologist Charles Augustus Strong. The couple lived in Chicago and New York before settling in Europe, where Bessie spent most of her later years, and their daughter Margaret was raised largely abroad. She was the sister of Alta Rockefeller Prentice, Edith Rockefeller McCormick and John D. Rockefeller Jr., and she died in Switzerland in 1906, the first of the Rockefeller children to die.

William Goodsell Rockefeller was an American businessman and banker, the eldest son of Standard Oil co-founder William Rockefeller and a nephew of John D. Rockefeller. Born in New York in 1870 and educated at Yale, he entered his father's business interests and held directorships in the National City Bank of New York, Standard Oil companies and a number of railroads. He married Elsie Stillman, a daughter of the National City Bank president James Stillman, strengthening the long association between the Rockefeller and Stillman families; his brother Percy Avery Rockefeller married her sister Isabel. He lived at Rockwood Hall and in Greenwich, Connecticut, and died in 1922, the same year as his father.

Alta Rockefeller Prentice was an American philanthropist and the second daughter of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller. Born in Cleveland in 1871, she was raised in the family's Forest Hill and New York households and took an early and active part in church, settlement and welfare work in Cleveland. In 1901 she married the lawyer and agricultural writer Ezra Parmalee Prentice, and the couple divided their time between New York City and Mount Hope Farm in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where Prentice conducted well known experiments in cattle and grain breeding. She supported a wide range of educational and charitable causes throughout her long life and was the sister of Edith Rockefeller McCormick and John D. Rockefeller Jr.