Margaret McGrath

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.

John Davison Rockefeller Jr. was an American philanthropist and the only son of John D. Rockefeller and Laura Spelman Rockefeller. Born in Cleveland in 1874 and educated at Brown University, he joined his father's office in 1897 and from about 1910 devoted himself entirely to giving the family fortune away. He married Abby Greene Aldrich, daughter of Senator Nelson W. Aldrich, in 1901, and they had six children. He financed and built Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, restored Colonial Williamsburg, built Riverside Church and the Cloisters, donated the land for the United Nations headquarters in New York and gave extensive acreage to Acadia, Grand Teton and other national parks. After Abby's death he married Martha Baird Allen in 1951.

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.

Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller was an American politician, businessman and art collector who served as the 41st Vice President of the United States. Born in Bar Harbor, Maine, in 1908, the second son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, he was named for his maternal grandfather, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich. He worked on Rockefeller Center, served as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs and then Assistant Secretary of State under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, and was elected Governor of New York in 1958, holding the office for four terms until 1973. He sought the Republican presidential nomination three times and was appointed Vice President by Gerald Ford in 1974. A lifelong patron of modern and Latin American art, he was president of the Museum of Modern Art.

Laurance Spelman Rockefeller was an American venture capitalist and conservationist, the third son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Born in New York in 1910 and educated at Princeton, he became one of the earliest American venture investors, backing Eastern Air Lines, McDonnell Aircraft and later Intel and Apple among many others. He was equally known for conservation: he developed the Rockresorts hotels, including Caneel Bay, gave the land that created Virgin Islands National Park, chaired the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission under President Eisenhower and advised several presidents on conservation and the environment. He married Mary French in 1934 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1991.

Winthrop Rockefeller was an American businessman, rancher and politician who served as the 37th Governor of Arkansas. Born in New York in 1912, the fourth son of John D. Rockefeller Jr. and Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, he worked in the Texas oil fields as a young man and enlisted in the United States Army in 1941, serving through the Pacific campaign and rising to lieutenant colonel. In 1953 he moved to Arkansas and built Winrock Farms on Petit Jean Mountain, becoming a noted breeder of Santa Gertrudis cattle and chairman of the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission. Elected governor in 1966, he was the first Republican to hold the office since Reconstruction and served two terms, pressing prison and civil service reform.