William Douglas Sloane

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.

William Henry Vanderbilt was an American railroad executive who, on inheriting the bulk of his father Cornelius Vanderbilt's estate in 1877, nearly doubled the family fortune in eight years and left about two hundred million dollars at his death. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, he was long dismissed by his father as unfit for business and sent to farm on Staten Island, where his success in running the Staten Island Railway won him a place in the family enterprises. As president of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad he extended the system westward and built the twin mansions on Fifth Avenue. With his wife Maria Louisa Kissam he had eight children, including Cornelius Vanderbilt II, William Kissam Vanderbilt and George Washington Vanderbilt II, and he divided his estate far more evenly among them than his father had.

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 II was an American railroad executive and philanthropist, the eldest son of William Henry Vanderbilt and head of the family after his father's death in 1885. Born at New Dorp on Staten Island, New York, he became chairman of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad and a director of many allied lines, and was known within the family as the hardest working and most devout of his generation. With his wife Alice Claypoole Gwynne he built The Breakers at Newport, Rhode Island, and the vast chateau at Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the largest private house ever built in New York City. Their surviving children were Cornelius Vanderbilt III, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt, Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt and Gladys, Countess Szechenyi.

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.

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.

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.