Public Family Trees/Rockefeller/John Davison Rockefeller III
1906 - 1978 · Male · New York, New York, United States
Son of John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Greene Aldrich
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John Davison Rockefeller III
1906 - 1978
John Davison Rockefeller III was an American philanthropist and the eldest son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Born in New York in 1906 and educated at Princeton, he took on the role of steward of the family's institutional philanthropy while his brothers went into politics, banking and conservation. He founded the Asia Society in 1956 and the Population Council in 1952, chaired the Rockefell…
Born1906
Born to John Davison Rockefeller Jr., Abby Greene Aldrich.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Rockefeller family.
Next Generation
2 children recorded in this branch.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Rockefeller family.
Died1978
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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Gen 1 · 1810 - 1906
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.
Gen 2 · 1841 - 1922
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.
Gen 2 · 1845 - 1917
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.
Gen 3 · 1872 - 1932
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.
Gen 3 · 1878 - 1934
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.
Gen 3 · 1882 - 1973
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.
Gen 5 · 1932 - 2000
Rodman Clark Rockefeller was an American businessman and the eldest son of Nelson Rockefeller and Mary Todhunter Clark Rockefeller. Born in 1932 and educated at Princeton and Columbia Business School, he spent most of his career at the International Basic Economy Corporation, the development company his father founded in 1947 to invest in agriculture, housing and food distribution in Latin America, serving as its president and then chairman. He was also chairman of the Council of the Americas and a longtime advocate of private investment as a tool of Latin American development. He was a brother of Steven Clark Rockefeller and of Michael Rockefeller, and a trustee of Rockefeller family philanthropies.
Gen 5 · b. 1947
Peggy Dulany, born Margaret Dulany Rockefeller, is an American philanthropist and the third daughter of David Rockefeller and Peggy McGrath Rockefeller. Born in 1947, she studied at Harvard and took a doctorate in education, and worked in Brazilian favelas and in New York City government before founding the Synergos Institute in 1986. Synergos works to reduce poverty by building partnerships between civil society organizations, governments and business, and by developing what she calls bridging leadership, and it has run programs across Latin America, Africa and Asia. She also co-founded the Global Philanthropists Circle with her father and has served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.
Gen 5 · 1948 - 2006
Winthrop Paul Rockefeller was an American businessman and politician who served as Lieutenant Governor of Arkansas from 1996 until 2006. The only child of Governor Winthrop Rockefeller, he was born in 1948 and educated in the United States and Europe, served in the United States Army and worked for a time in the food industry before returning to Arkansas to run the family's Winrock Farms on Petit Jean Mountain, continuing its cattle breeding and agricultural research operations. Elected lieutenant governor as a Republican in 1996 and twice reelected, he focused on economic development, education and rural health, and he chaired Winrock International, the agricultural development organization created from his father's estate.
Gen 1 · 1813 - 1889
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.
Gen 3 · 1866 - 1906
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.
The Belgian royal family, formally the House of Belgium and dynastically a branch of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, is the reigning family of Belgium, founded when the German prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld accepted the throne of the newly independent kingdom in 1831 and continuing today through King Philippe and his heir, Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant. Belgium became independent from the Netherlands in 1830 and chose a constitutional monarchy. Its National Congress looked abroad for a sovereign who could balance French and British interests, and settled on Leopold, a widowed, well-connected and famously cautious prince who had already turned down the crown of Greece. He took the constitutional oath on 21 July 1831, still the Belgian national day. Seven monarchs have reigned since: Leopold I, Leopold II, Albert I, Leopold III, Baudouin, Albert II and Philippe. ## Origins The dynasty's roots are in the small Thuringian duchy of Saxe-Coburg, whose princes married into half the thrones of nineteenth-century Europe. Leopold I was the uncle of both Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert, and his second marriage, to Louise-Marie of Orleans, daughter of the French king Louis Philippe I, tied the new kingdom to Paris as well as London. The crown did not pass in a straight line: Leopold II's only son died at the age of nine, so the succession moved to Leopold II's brother Philippe, Count of Flanders, and then to Philippe's son, Albert I. Every Belgian monarch since 1909 descends from that collateral branch. ## Notable members Leopold II is the most studied and most criticised figure in the family, remembered for the industrial boom and monumental building of his reign and, above all, for his personal rule over the Congo Free State. Albert I and Queen Elisabeth of Bavaria became wartime symbols of Belgian resistance behind the Yser in 1914. Leopold III's surrender in 1940 and his conduct under occupation triggered the political crisis known as the Royal Question and ended in his abdication. Baudouin reigned for 42 years and presided over Congolese independence and Belgium's transformation into a federal state. Daughters of the house carried its blood outward: Charlotte became Empress Carlota of Mexico, Marie-Jose was the last Queen of Italy, and Josephine-Charlotte was Grand Duchess of Luxembourg. ## Significance In a country divided by language, the monarchy has been the one institution claimed by both Flemish and Walloon Belgians, and the king's role in brokering coalition governments remains politically real rather than ceremonial. The family has also changed with the country: equal succession was introduced in 1991, making Princess Elisabeth the first female Duchess of Brabant and the future first queen regnant of the Belgians, and in 2020 a court recognised Delphine of Saxe-Coburg as a daughter of Albert II. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Dynasty | House of Belgium (Saxe-Coburg and Gotha) | | Country | Kingdom of Belgium | | Founder | Leopold I, King of the Belgians (1790-1865) | | Reigning since | 21 July 1831 | | Monarchs to date | Seven, from Leopold I to Philippe | | Current head | King Philippe (born 1960), reigning since 2013 | | Heir apparent | Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant (born 2001) | | Principal residences | Royal Palace of Brussels, Castle of Laeken | | Motto | L'union fait la force / Eendracht maakt macht |
The House of Bernadotte is the royal family of Sweden, founded by the French marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who was elected Swedish crown prince in 1810 and reigned from 1818 as King Charles XIV John, and it has held the throne in an unbroken line ever since, down to King Carl XVI Gustaf, Crown Princess Victoria and Princess Estelle. ## Origins The dynasty began far from Sweden, in the Gascon town of Pau, where Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte was born in 1763 as the son of a provincial lawyer. He rose through the revolutionary French army to become a Marshal of the Empire and Prince of Pontecorvo. In 1810 the Swedish Riksdag, left without an heir after the deposition of Gustav IV Adolf and the accession of the childless Charles XIII, unexpectedly offered the succession to the French marshal. He accepted, converted to Lutheranism, took the name Charles John and in 1818 became king of both Sweden and Norway. His marriage to Desiree Clary, a Marseille merchant's daughter once engaged to Napoleon, produced the dynasty's second king, Oscar I. ## Notable members Oscar I's marriage to Josephine of Leuchtenberg, a granddaughter of the Empress Josephine, brought a descent from Sweden's older royal houses into the line, and Gustaf V's marriage to Victoria of Baden, a great granddaughter of the deposed Gustav IV Adolf, reinforced it. Later generations produced an unusual number of figures known for work outside the court: Prince Eugen, one of Sweden's foremost landscape painters; Gustaf VI Adolf, a working archaeologist and botanist; and Sigvard Bernadotte, an industrial designer. The family's daughters carried the name into the other Scandinavian monarchies and into Belgium: Ingrid became queen of Denmark, Astrid queen of the Belgians and Martha crown princess of Norway, which makes this tree a close relative of the Glucksburg line. ## Significance Under the Bernadottes the Swedish monarchy moved from real political power to a purely ceremonial role, settled by the constitution of 1974. In 1980 Sweden became the first monarchy to adopt full absolute primogeniture, making the infant Crown Princess Victoria heir ahead of her younger brother. Carl XVI Gustaf, who became heir at nine months old and king in 1973, is the longest reigning monarch in Swedish history. Several princes of the house lost their royal titles by marrying commoners and were created Counts of Wisborg by the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, a kinsman through Queen Sophia of Nassau, which is why the Bernadotte name is borne today both by a reigning royal house and by a line of counts. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Family name | House of Bernadotte | | Country | Sweden, and Norway until 1905 | | Founder | Charles XIV John, born Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte (1763 to 1844) | | Reigning since | 1818 | | Monarchs | Charles XIV John, Oscar I, Charles XV, Oscar II, Gustaf V, Gustaf VI Adolf, Carl XVI Gustaf | | Current head | King Carl XVI Gustaf, reigning since 1973 | | Heir apparent | Crown Princess Victoria, Duchess of Vastergotland | | Principal residences | Stockholm Palace, Drottningholm Palace, Haga Palace | | Royal motto | "For Sweden, with the times" (Carl XVI Gustaf) |
The Vanderbilts are an American family who rose from Dutch farming stock on Staten Island to hold the largest private fortune in the United States, built by Cornelius Vanderbilt, known as the Commodore, out of nineteenth century shipping and railroads, and known today for the Gilded Age houses their descendants built and for figures from Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, to the journalist Anderson Cooper. ## Origins on Staten Island The family descends from Jan Aertsen van der Bilt, a Dutch settler who reached New Netherland in the seventeenth century and whose descendants farmed on Staten Island for generations. Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877) was born there, the son of a boatman, and began work as a teenager carrying freight across New York Harbour in a single sailing barge. He married his first cousin Sophia Johnson in 1813. ## The railroad fortune Vanderbilt moved from sail to steam, dominated the Hudson River and coastal trade, and after the Civil War turned to railroads, consolidating the New York Central system and building Grand Central Depot. He left almost the whole fortune to one son, William Henry Vanderbilt, who nearly doubled it in eight years before dividing it evenly among his own eight children. They built the family's great houses: The Breakers and Marble House at Newport, Biltmore House in North Carolina, Hyde Park on the Hudson, Florham in New Jersey and Shelburne Farms in Vermont. ## Notable members The third and fourth generations produced Consuelo Vanderbilt, who married the 9th Duke of Marlborough and became a social reformer in England; the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art; Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, who died in the sinking of the Lusitania; and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt, who won the America's Cup three times and invented contract bridge. The modern line runs through Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt to the designer Gloria Vanderbilt and her son, the CNN anchor Anderson Cooper. ## Significance No American family is more closely identified with the Gilded Age. The Vanderbilts set the pattern for how new industrial wealth was spent, and then for how quickly such a fortune disperses across many heirs. What endures is institutional: Vanderbilt University, the Whitney Museum, and the houses at Newport, Hyde Park, Shelburne and Asheville that are now museums and public estates. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Cornelius Vanderbilt (1794-1877), the Commodore | | Origin | Staten Island, New York, of Dutch descent | | Source of wealth | Steamboat shipping, then the New York Central railroads | | Famous houses | The Breakers, Marble House, Biltmore House, Hyde Park | | Best known members | Consuelo Vanderbilt, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Gloria Vanderbilt, Anderson Cooper | | Generations covered | Five, from the Commodore to Anderson Cooper |
John Davison Rockefeller III's recorded parents are John Davison Rockefeller Jr., Abby Greene Aldrich.
John Davison Rockefeller III has 2 recorded children: John Davison Rockefeller IV, Alida Rockefeller.
John Davison Rockefeller III married Blanchette Hooker.
John Davison Rockefeller III has 5 recorded siblings: Abby Rockefeller, Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller, Laurance Spelman Rockefeller, Winthrop Rockefeller, David Rockefeller.
John Davison Rockefeller III is recorded as Philanthropist in the Rockefeller family tree.
John Davison Rockefeller III's recorded native place is New York, New York, United States.
6 ancestors and 2 descendants of John Davison Rockefeller III are recorded so far, within a tree of 43 people.
John Davison Rockefeller III is recorded as John Davison Rockefeller's Grandson.
John Davison Rockefeller III is recorded in the Rockefeller family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 42 other people.
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