Public Family Trees/Vanderbilt/Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard
1845 - 1924 · Female · New York, United States
Daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt and Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt
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Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard
1845 - 1924
Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard was the eldest daughter of William Henry Vanderbilt and Maria Louisa Kissam, and a philanthropist in New York City. She married the lawyer and newspaper proprietor Elliott Fitch Shepard in 1868, and with the share of her father's estate left to her in 1885 she built Woodlea, a large country house at Scarborough on the Hudson that later became the Sleepy Hollow Country Club. She was…
Born1845
Born to William Henry Vanderbilt, Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt.
Family
A partnership that connects two branches of the Vanderbilt family.
Legacy
A defining role in the story of the Vanderbilt family.
Died1924
The close of a life whose connections continue through the family record.
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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 4 · 1873 - 1942
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.
Gen 4 · 1875 - 1942
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.
Gen 4 · 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 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.
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 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.
Gen 5 · 1898 - 1956
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.
Gen 6 · b. 1967
Anderson Hays Cooper is an American broadcast journalist and author, the anchor of Anderson Cooper 360 on CNN and a correspondent for CBS's 60 Minutes. Born in New York City, the younger son of the designer Gloria Vanderbilt and the author Wyatt Emory Cooper, he is a great great great grandson of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. He studied political science at Yale, then began reporting by carrying a camera into Burma, Vietnam and Somalia and selling the results to Channel One. He joined ABC News and then CNN, where his reporting from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 established him as one of the network's central figures. He wrote The Rainbow Comes and Goes with his mother and Vanderbilt: The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty with Katherine Howe.
Gen 2 · 1830 - 1882
Cornelius Jeremiah Vanderbilt was the younger surviving son of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and Sophia Johnson, and the brother of William Henry Vanderbilt. Born on Staten Island, New York, he was in poor health from childhood and never entered the family shipping or railroad businesses, living instead on allowances from his father and on money raised against the family name. When the Commodore died in 1877 leaving him only the income from a small trust while his brother received almost everything, he contested the will in a celebrated New York court battle that ran for more than a year and aired the family's private affairs in the press. The case was settled in 1879, and he died three years later.
The House of Glücksburg is the reigning royal house of Denmark and Norway and the former royal house of Greece, a branch of the ancient House of Oldenburg whose modern members all descend from King Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) and his wife Louise of Hesse-Kassel. Through the marriages of their six children, a minor ducal family from the Danish-German borderland became the common ancestor of monarchs in Copenhagen, Oslo and Athens, of a British queen consort, of a Russian empress, and of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. ## Origins The house takes its name from Glücksburg, a small castle town in Schleswig, and belongs to the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg line of the House of Oldenburg, which had held the Danish throne since 1448. Christian IX was a prince of that cadet branch with no expectation of ruling until the childless Frederik VII made the Danish succession an open European question. Christian succeeded him in 1863, and within months his second son was elected King of the Hellenes as George I, planting the family in Greece for 110 years. In 1905 his grandson Prince Carl of Denmark accepted the Norwegian throne as Haakon VII, giving Norway its own dynasty after centuries of union with Denmark and then Sweden. ## Notable members Christian IX was nicknamed the father-in-law of Europe: his daughter Alexandra married Edward VII of the United Kingdom, and his daughter Dagmar became Empress Maria Feodorovna of Russia, mother of Nicholas II. The Danish line runs through Christian X, Frederik IX and Queen Margrethe II, a trained archaeologist and illustrator who reigned from 1972 until her abdication in 2024, to her son King Frederik X and Queen Mary. The Norwegian line runs from Haakon VII and Queen Maud through Olav V, an Olympic sailing champion, to King Harald V and Crown Prince Haakon. The Greek line produced Constantine I, Paul, Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie, Queen SofÃa of Spain, and Prince Andrew's son Philip, consort to Elizabeth II for 73 years. ## Significance No other western dynasty connects as many surviving monarchies in a single documented lineage. Two of Europe's ten reigning royal families, Denmark and Norway, are Glücksburg in the male line, and the house also sits in the ancestry of the British and Spanish royal families. Its history traces the transformation of European monarchy itself: from the dynastic matchmaking of the 1860s, through the loss of the Russian and Greek thrones, to the constitutional, publicly accountable monarchies of modern Scandinavia. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | House name | Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, a branch of the House of Oldenburg | | Founding figure of the modern house | Christian IX of Denmark (1818 to 1906) | | Ancestral seat | Glücksburg Castle, Schleswig | | Thrones held | Denmark (1863 to present), Greece (1863 to 1973), Norway (1905 to present) | | Current heads of state | Frederik X of Denmark, Harald V of Norway | | Best-known member abroad | Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921 to 2021) | | Nickname of its founder | The father-in-law of Europe |
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 House of Stuart was the royal dynasty that ruled Scotland from 1371 and both Scotland and England from 1603 until 1714, giving Britain fourteen monarchs from Robert II to Queen Anne as well as the Jacobite claimants who carried its cause into exile. Spelled Stewart in Scotland and Stuart after Mary, Queen of Scots adopted the French form, the family holds the unusual distinction of having united two crowns by inheritance rather than conquest, and of ending in a disputed succession that reshaped the British constitution. ## Origins The family took its name from its office. The Stewarts were hereditary High Stewards of Scotland, a post granted in the twelfth century to a Breton house settled in Renfrewshire. In 1315 Walter Stewart, 6th High Steward, married Marjorie Bruce, daughter of King Robert the Bruce. Their son became Robert II in 1371 when the direct Bruce line failed, and the stewardship turned into a crown. For more than two centuries afterwards the Stewarts ruled Scotland alone, through a run of reigns cut short by battle, captivity and long royal minorities that left the nobility unusually powerful. ## Notable members James IV, the most cultivated of the Scottish kings, married Margaret Tudor in 1503 and so planted the claim that would carry his descendants to the English throne. His granddaughter Mary, Queen of Scots became queen at six days old, reigned briefly and turbulently, and was deposed in 1567 and executed in England twenty years later. Her son, James VI of Scotland, inherited the English crown in 1603 as James I and became the first monarch to rule both kingdoms. His son Charles I lost the Civil Wars and his throne; Charles II returned at the Restoration in 1660; James II and VII was deposed in the Revolution of 1688, after which his daughters Mary II and Anne reigned in his place. In exile his son James Francis Edward Stuart and grandson Charles Edward Stuart, remembered as Bonnie Prince Charlie, led the Jacobite attempts to recover the throne, ending with the rising of 1745. ## Significance No other British dynasty changed the shape of the state so much. The Stuarts brought Scotland and England under one sovereign, presided over the King James Bible and the theatre of Shakespeare's late career, lost a king to Parliament, and provoked the settlements of 1689 and 1701 that made the monarchy answerable to Parliament and Protestant by statute. When Queen Anne died childless in 1714, the crown passed under the Act of Settlement to the descendants of her cousin Sophia of Hanover, granddaughter of James VI and I, so every British monarch since is still a Stuart descendant. | Fact | Details | | --- | --- | | Founder | Robert II, King of Scots from 1371 | | Ruled | Scotland 1371 to 1714; England and Ireland 1603 to 1714 | | Origin | Renfrewshire, Scotland | | Union of the Crowns | 1603, under James VI of Scotland and I of England | | Last reigning monarch | Anne, Queen of Great Britain, died 1714 | | Jacobite claimants | James Francis Edward, Charles Edward and Henry Benedict Stuart | | Succeeded by | The House of Hanover, through Sophia of Hanover |
Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard's recorded parents are William Henry Vanderbilt, Maria Louisa Kissam Vanderbilt.
Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard married Elliott Fitch Shepard.
Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard has 7 recorded siblings: Cornelius Vanderbilt II, William Kissam Vanderbilt, Emily Thorn Vanderbilt, Florence Adele Vanderbilt Twombly, Frederick William Vanderbilt, Eliza Osgood Vanderbilt Webb, George Washington Vanderbilt II.
Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard is recorded as Philanthropist in the Vanderbilt family tree.
Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard's recorded native place is New York, United States.
4 ancestors and 0 descendants of Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard are recorded so far, within a tree of 60 people.
Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard is recorded as Cornelius Vanderbilt's Granddaughter.
Margaret Louisa Vanderbilt Shepard is recorded in the Vanderbilt family tree on My rOoOts, alongside 59 other people.
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