George Washington Vanderbilt II

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.

Cornelius Vanderbilt III was an American military officer, engineer and yachtsman, the eldest surviving son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II. Born in New York City and trained at Yale in mechanical engineering, he patented improvements to locomotives and railway cars and held senior posts in the New York Central system. His marriage in 1896 to Grace Graham Wilson, made against his father's wishes, cost him his place as principal heir, most of the estate passing instead to his younger brother Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt. He served in the Spanish American War and commanded engineer troops in France in the First World War, rising to brigadier general, and was a prominent member of the New York Yacht Club.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was an American sculptor, art patron and the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. The eldest surviving daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice Claypoole Gwynne, she was born in New York City and married Harry Payne Whitney in 1896. She trained in New York and Paris and won major public commissions in her own right, among them the Titanic Memorial in Washington, the Buffalo Bill monument at Cody, Wyoming, and the American war memorial at Saint Nazaire in France. She opened the Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village to show living American artists, and when the Metropolitan Museum declined her collection she founded the Whitney Museum in 1930. Her children included Flora Payne Whitney and Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney.

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 colours. He married Elsie French in 1901 and Margaret Emerson in 1911. He died in May 1915 in the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania off the Irish coast, where survivors described him helping women and children into the boats. His sons included William Henry Vanderbilt III and Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Jr.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Lord Ivor Charles Spencer-Churchill was a British art collector, the younger son of the 9th Duke of Marlborough and Consuelo Vanderbilt. Educated at Eton and at Christ Church, Oxford, and free of the duties that fell to his elder brother the 10th Duke, he devoted himself to modern painting, assembling a notable collection of French Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that he lent to public exhibitions in London. He was close to his mother and spent long periods with her and Jacques Balsan in France. He remained a largely private figure, known chiefly within the art world, and died in 1956.

Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, known as Sonny, was an American businessman, film producer, thoroughbred owner and writer, the son of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and Harry Payne Whitney. He was a founder and later chairman of Pan American Airways, having helped launch the airline in the 1920s, and served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force and Under Secretary of Commerce in the Truman administration, having flown with the Army Air Forces in the Second World War. With his cousin John Hay Whitney he backed Selznick International Pictures, the studio behind Gone with the Wind, and under his own company he produced The Searchers. His racing stable, extended from his father's, bred many stakes winners.