Public Family Trees/Vanderbilt/Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt
1877 - 1915 · Male · New York, New York, United States
Son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt
4
Generation
6
Ancestors
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Descendants
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Children
2
Marriages
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt
1877 - 1915
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was an American businessman and sportsman who became the principal heir of his father Cornelius Vanderbilt II after his elder brother's marriage displaced him. Born in New York City and educated at Yale, he held directorships in the family railroads but was best known as a coaching enthusiast, reviving four in hand coach driving on English and American roads and racing horses under his own co…
Born1877
Born to Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Vanderbilt family.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Vanderbilt family.
Next Generation
3 children recorded in this branch.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Vanderbilt family.
Died1915
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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Gen 1 · 1794 - 1877
Cornelius Vanderbilt, known throughout his life as the Commodore, was an American shipping and railroad magnate who built the largest private fortune in the United States of his day. Born on Staten Island, New York, into a family of Dutch descent whose father worked as a boatman, he began with a single sailing barge in New York Harbour as a teenager, expanded into steamboats on the Hudson and on coastal and transatlantic routes, then moved into railroads after the Civil War, consolidating the New York Central system and building Grand Central Depot in Manhattan. He married his first cousin Sophia Johnson and, after her death, Frank Armstrong Crawford. Of his thirteen children he entrusted the fortune almost entirely to his eldest surviving son, William Henry Vanderbilt. A gift of one million dollars in 1873 founded Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Gen 1 · 1839 - 1885
Frank Armstrong Crawford Vanderbilt was the second wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt, whom she married in 1869, and a distant cousin of his through her mother. Born in Mobile, Alabama, and given a man's name after a family friend, she was educated in the South and was some forty five years younger than her husband. She is remembered chiefly for persuading him to make the gift of one million dollars that in 1873 endowed the Central University of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in Nashville, renamed Vanderbilt University in his honour; the institution's founder, Bishop Holland McTyeire, was her kinsman. She had no children with Vanderbilt and survived him by eight years.
Gen 3 · 1849 - 1920
William Kissam Vanderbilt was an American railroad executive, thoroughbred breeder and yachtsman, the second son of William Henry Vanderbilt. Born at New Dorp on Staten Island, New York, he managed the family's railroad interests alongside his brother Cornelius Vanderbilt II before withdrawing from business to concentrate on racing in France and on collecting. With his first wife Alva Erskine Smith he built the Petit Chateau at 660 Fifth Avenue and Marble House at Newport, and used the celebrated costume ball of 1883 to force open the doors of Mrs Astor's New York society. Their children were Consuelo, Duchess of Marlborough, William Kissam Vanderbilt II and Harold Stirling Vanderbilt. After his divorce in 1895 he married Anne Harriman.
Gen 3 · 1852 - 1946
Emily Thorn Vanderbilt was a daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt and Maria Louisa Kissam and a philanthropist in New York City. She married William Douglas Sloane of the furnishings firm W. and J. Sloane in 1872, and with him built Elm Court at Lenox in the Berkshires, one of the largest shingle style houses in America. She was a principal benefactor of the Sloane Hospital for Women in New York, endowed with her husband, and of institutions at Lenox and in the city. Widowed in 1915, she married the diplomat Henry White in 1920. Sister of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, William Kissam Vanderbilt and George Washington Vanderbilt II, she lived to the age of ninety three.
Gen 3 · 1856 - 1938
Frederick William Vanderbilt was an American railroad director and yachtsman, the third son of William Henry Vanderbilt. Born at New Dorp on Staten Island, New York, and educated at Yale, he sat on the boards of more than twenty railroad companies, including the New York Central, and was reckoned the most capable investor of his generation of the family, increasing his inherited share many times over. He and his wife Louise built a Beaux Arts mansion at Hyde Park, New York, designed by McKim, Mead and White, now preserved as the Vanderbilt Mansion National Historic Site. The couple had no children, and much of his fortune passed to a niece and to Vanderbilt and Yale universities.
Gen 3 · 1862 - 1914
George Washington Vanderbilt II was an American art collector and estate builder, the youngest child of William Henry Vanderbilt and the creator of Biltmore House near Asheville, North Carolina, the largest private residence in the United States. Born at New Dorp on Staten Island, New York, he was a scholarly man who read widely in several languages and never entered the railroad business. From 1889 he assembled some 125,000 acres in the North Carolina mountains and commissioned Richard Morris Hunt to design a French Renaissance chateau there, with grounds by Frederick Law Olmsted and a pioneering programme of scientific forestry. He married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser in 1898; their only child was Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt.
Gen 4 · 1877 - 1964
Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, was an American born duchess, memoirist and social reformer, the daughter of William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Erskine Smith. Born in New York City, she was pressed by her mother into marrying Charles Spencer-Churchill, 9th Duke of Marlborough, in 1895, a match that brought a large Vanderbilt settlement to Blenheim Palace and made her the most famous of the American heiresses who married into the British aristocracy. In England she campaigned for prisoners' welfare and for working women and served on the London County Council. Separated from Marlborough in 1906, she married the French airman Jacques Balsan in 1921 and later wrote the memoir The Glitter and the Gold.
Gen 4 · 1878 - 1944
William Kissam Vanderbilt II, known as Willie K., was an American motor racing pioneer, yachtsman and amateur naturalist, the elder son of William Kissam Vanderbilt and Alva Erskine Smith. Born in New York City, he set a world land speed record in 1904, founded the Vanderbilt Cup automobile races on Long Island and built the Long Island Motor Parkway, one of the first roads designed for cars alone. He later made a series of long ocean voyages aboard his yachts Ara and Alva, collecting marine and ethnographic specimens that he housed in his own museum at Centerport on Long Island, now the Vanderbilt Museum. He held directorships in the New York Central system and served in the United States Navy in the First World War.
Gen 5 · 1897 - 1986
Flora Payne Whitney was an American art patron and museum administrator, the eldest child of the sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Harry Payne Whitney. Born in New York City, she grew up between her mother's studio world and the Whitney racing stables, and made the Whitney Museum of American Art her life's work, serving as its president and later its chairman and guiding it through the move to the Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue in 1966. She was engaged to Quentin Roosevelt, the youngest son of Theodore Roosevelt, who was killed in action in 1918, and afterwards married Roderick Tower and then George Macculloch Miller.
Gen 5 · 1897 - 1972
John Albert Edward William Spencer-Churchill, 10th Duke of Marlborough, was a British peer, the elder son of the 9th Duke and Consuelo Vanderbilt and therefore a grandson of William Kissam Vanderbilt. Educated at Eton, he served in the Life Guards in the First World War and again in the Second, during which Blenheim Palace, which he had inherited in 1934, was given over first to a relocated school and then to government intelligence work. He sat in the House of Lords, held county office in Oxfordshire, and worked to keep Blenheim intact by opening it more fully to visitors. He was a first cousin once removed of Winston Churchill.
Gen 5 · 1898 - 1974
Cornelius Vanderbilt IV, known as Neil, was an American journalist, newspaper publisher and author, the son of Cornelius Vanderbilt III and Grace Graham Wilson. Born in New York City, he broke with family expectation by taking work as a reporter on the New York Herald rather than entering business, then founded a short lived chain of tabloid newspapers in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Miami in the 1920s. He worked afterwards as a foreign correspondent and lecturer, interviewing European leaders in the 1930s, served in the United States Army in the Second World War, and wrote several books of memoir and reportage, among them Farewell to Fifth Avenue, a critical account of the world he was born into.
The House of Hohenzollern is the German dynasty that ruled Brandenburg from 1415, held the Prussian crown from 1701, and gave Germany its three emperors between 1871 and the fall of the monarchy in 1918. This tree follows the senior Prussian line in one unbroken descent, from Frederick William the Great Elector, through the kings of Prussia and the German Emperors, down to Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, the present head of the house. ## Origins The family takes its name from Hohenzollern Castle on a hill in the Swabian Alb, where a line of counts is recorded from the eleventh century. A Swabian Zollern married into the burgraviate of Nuremberg in 1192, and the Franconian branch that grew from it spent two centuries accumulating lands and credit with the Holy Roman Emperors. The decisive moment came in 1415, when Emperor Sigismund invested Frederick VI of Nuremberg as Elector of Brandenburg in return for his political and financial support. The Duchy of Prussia, a separate inheritance lying outside the Empire, passed to the Brandenburg electors in 1618, and Frederick William, the Great Elector, welded the two into a single functioning state after the devastation of the Thirty Years' War. ## Notable members Frederick I turned the electorate into a kingdom in 1701. His son Frederick William I, the Soldier King, built the army and the treasury that his own son, **Frederick the Great**, used to seize Silesia and to make Prussia a European power, while also composing music, building Sanssouci and corresponding with Voltaire. **Queen Louise** became the emotional centre of Prussian resistance to Napoleon. **Wilhelm I**, with Otto von Bismarck as his minister president, was proclaimed German Emperor at Versailles in 1871. His son **Frederick III** and the liberal English princess he married, Victoria, daughter of Queen Victoria, reigned for only ninety nine days. **Wilhelm II**, the last Kaiser, abdicated in 1918 and died in Dutch exile in 1941. ## Significance No other German family shaped the modern state so directly. Hohenzollern rulers created the Prussian civil service, compulsory schooling and the general staff, sponsored the Berlin academies and the Humboldt university model, and then used Prussian power to unify Germany around themselves. The monarchy ended with the revolution of November 1918, but the house continues as a private family: the headship passed from Wilhelm II to his eldest son, then to Louis Ferdinand, and in 1994 to Georg Friedrich, whose own father and uncles are part of the succession story told in this tree. ## Quick facts | Fact | Details | |---|---| | Family name | Hohenzollern | | Place of origin | Hohenzollern Castle, Swabia, southern Germany | | Ruled | Brandenburg from 1415, Prussia from 1618, Germany from 1871 | | Royal title | King in Prussia from 1701, King of Prussia from 1772 | | Imperial title | German Emperor, 1871 to 1918 | | German Emperors | Wilhelm I, Frederick III, Wilhelm II | | Monarchy ended | 9 November 1918 | | Present head of the house | Georg Friedrich, Prince of Prussia, since 1994 | | Principal residences | Berlin City Palace, Sanssouci and Cecilienhof at Potsdam, Charlottenburg | | Branch shown here | The senior Prussian line only, not Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen |
The House of Tudor was the royal family that ruled England and Wales from 1485 to 1603, founded by Henry VII after his victory at Bosworth Field and ending with the death of his granddaughter Elizabeth I. In five reigns the dynasty took England out of the Roman Catholic church, made the monarch the head of a national religion, and turned a peripheral kingdom into a naval and literary power. This tree follows the line from the Welsh courtier Owen Tudor and the dowager queen Catherine of Valois down to Elizabeth I, together with the Brandon, Grey and Clifford cousins and the Scottish line that ended in James VI and I. ## Origins The family name comes from Penmynydd in Anglesey, north Wales, where the Tudors were landed gentry in the service of the princes of Gwynedd. Owen Tudor came to the English court in the 1420s and married Catherine of Valois, the widow of Henry V. Their sons Edmund and Jasper Tudor were half-brothers of Henry VI, who raised them to earldoms in 1452. Edmund's marriage to Lady Margaret Beaufort, a great-granddaughter of John of Gaunt, added the senior Lancastrian claim to the throne, and their only child, born after his father's death, became Henry VII. His marriage to Elizabeth of York, eldest daughter of Edward IV, joined the two houses whose rivalry had driven the Wars of the Roses and gave the dynasty its red and white rose. ## Notable members Henry VII rebuilt the crown's finances and secured the new dynasty through marriage alliances with Spain and Scotland. Henry VIII married six times and broke with Rome, and his three surviving children each reigned in turn: Edward VI as a Protestant boy king, Mary I as the first queen to rule England in her own right, and Elizabeth I for forty-four years. Around them stand the cousins who carried royal blood without the crown, among them Lady Jane Grey, queen for nine days, her sisters Catherine and Mary Grey, and Margaret Pole, Countess of Salisbury, one of the last Plantagenets. ## The Scottish and Suffolk lines Henry VII's daughters carried the blood outward. Margaret Tudor married James IV of Scotland, and her line runs through James V and Mary, Queen of Scots, to James VI and I, who inherited England in 1603. Mary Tudor married Charles Brandon, 1st Duke of Suffolk, and their daughters Frances and Eleanor Brandon produced the Grey and Clifford claimants whom Henry VIII's will preferred over the Scottish descendants of his elder sister. ## Significance No English dynasty changed the country more in so few generations. The Tudors created the Church of England, absorbed the wealth of the monasteries into the crown, brought Wales formally into the English legal and parliamentary system, and built the navy that met the Spanish Armada. The Elizabethan settlement shaped English religion for centuries, and the Elizabethan decades produced Shakespeare, Spenser and the first English voyages to the Americas. When Elizabeth I died unmarried in 1603, the throne passed peacefully to her Scottish cousin, and the two crowns were joined in one person for the first time. | Fact | Details | |---|---| | Origin | Penmynydd, Anglesey, Wales | | Ruled | England, Wales and Ireland, 1485 to 1603 | | Founder | Owen Tudor, through his son Edmund Tudor | | Monarchs | Henry VII, Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I, Elizabeth I | | Emblem | The Tudor rose, red and white combined | | Principal seats | Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court and Whitehall palaces | | Ended | Death of Elizabeth I in 1603, succeeded by James VI of Scotland |
The House of Plantagenet was the royal dynasty that ruled England for 331 years, from the accession of Henry II in 1154 to the death of Richard III at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, making it the longest-reigning royal house in English history. Fourteen Plantagenet kings held the throne in unbroken succession, and in the fifteenth century the family's two junior branches, the houses of Lancaster and York, fought each other for the crown in the civil wars later known as the Wars of the Roses. ## Origins The dynasty came from Anjou in western France. Geoffrey V, Count of Anjou, is said to have worn a sprig of broom, *planta genista*, in his cap, and from that nickname the family eventually took its name, although it was not used as an actual surname until Richard, 3rd Duke of York, adopted it in the 1440s. Geoffrey's marriage in 1128 to Empress Matilda, daughter and designated heir of Henry I of England, gave their son a claim to the English throne that he made good in 1154. With Normandy and Anjou behind him, and Aquitaine gained through his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine, Henry II ruled lands reaching from the Scottish border to the Pyrenees, the assemblage historians call the Angevin Empire. ## Notable members The early, or Angevin, kings are among the most familiar names in English history: Henry II, whose itinerant justices and sworn juries laid the foundations of the common law; Richard the Lionheart, a leading commander of the Third Crusade; and King John, who sealed Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215. Henry III rebuilt Westminster Abbey, Edward I conquered Wales and summoned the Model Parliament, and Edward III opened the Hundred Years' War and founded the Order of the Garter. Later generations produced Edward the Black Prince, the victor of Poitiers, Henry V of Agincourt, and Richard III, whose lost grave was rediscovered in Leicester in 2012. ## Lancaster and York Edward III's many sons divided the dynasty. From his third surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, came Henry IV, Henry V and Henry VI, and, through Gaunt's Beaufort children, Margaret Beaufort and her son Henry VII. From his fourth son, Edmund of Langley, Duke of York, combined with the senior Mortimer descent from his second son, Lionel of Antwerp, came Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and his sons Edward IV and Richard III. The rivalry of those branches produced thirty years of intermittent civil war, ending when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III at Bosworth and married Elizabeth of York, uniting the red and white roses. ## Significance No other family has shaped English institutions so deeply. Under the Plantagenets, Magna Carta became a settled principle, parliament grew from an occasional royal council into a body whose consent was needed for taxation, the common law took its enduring form, and English displaced French as the language of the court. Their castles, abbeys and cathedrals still define the medieval landscape of England and Wales. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Ruled | England, 1154 to 1485 | | Founder | Henry II, son of Geoffrey V of Anjou and Empress Matilda | | Place of origin | Anjou, France | | Kings | Fourteen, from Henry II to Richard III | | Branches | Angevin, Lancaster, York | | Emblems | The broom flower, the red rose of Lancaster, the white rose of York | | Last king | Richard III, killed at Bosworth in 1485 | | Legacy | Magna Carta, English common law, the growth of parliament |
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt's recorded parents are Cornelius Vanderbilt II, Alice Claypoole Gwynne Vanderbilt.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt has 3 recorded children: William Henry Vanderbilt III, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Jr., George Washington Vanderbilt III.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt was married to Elsie French Vanderbilt, Margaret Emerson.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt has 4 recorded siblings: Cornelius Vanderbilt III, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt, Gladys Vanderbilt Szechenyi.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt is recorded as Businessman and sportsman in the Vanderbilt family tree.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt's recorded native place is New York, New York, United States.
6 ancestors and 3 descendants of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt are recorded so far, within a tree of 60 people.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt is recorded as Cornelius Vanderbilt's Great-Grandson.
Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt is recorded in the Vanderbilt family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 59 other people.
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