William Henry Vanderbilt

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.

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.

William Henry Vanderbilt III was an American politician who served as Governor of Rhode Island from 1939 to 1941, the son of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt and his first wife Elsie French. Educated at Harvard, he entered Rhode Island politics as a state senator and was elected governor as a Republican in 1938, the first member of the family to hold high public office. His single term is remembered for administrative and civil service reform. He served in the United States Navy in the Second World War and afterwards settled at Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he was a trustee of Williams College and a supporter of conservation and public health causes.

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.

Carter Vanderbilt Cooper was the elder son of the designer Gloria Vanderbilt and the author Wyatt Emory Cooper, and the brother of the journalist Anderson Cooper. Born in New York City, he was educated at the Dalton School and at Princeton University, where he read history and graduated in 1987, and he was working as an editorial assistant at the magazine American Heritage in New York when he died in July 1988 at the age of twenty three. His mother wrote about him in her memoir A Mother's Story, and his brother has written and spoken about him throughout his career.

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt Jr. was an American thoroughbred racing figure, the son of Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt and Margaret Emerson. Raised in New York and Maryland, he came into a share of the family fortune as a young man and acquired the Sagamore Farm stud in Maryland at twenty one. He became the youngest president of Pimlico Race Course and later president of Belmont Park, and in 1938 arranged the celebrated match race at Pimlico between Seabiscuit and War Admiral. He bred and owned Native Dancer, one of the outstanding American racehorses of the century and an early television favourite of the sport, and was honoured by the National Museum of Racing for his contribution to the turf.

Gloria Laura Vanderbilt was an American fashion designer, artist, author and socialite, the daughter of Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt and Gloria Morgan. Born in New York City and left fatherless at eighteen months, she became known as the poor little rich girl of the 1934 custody trial in which her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney won charge of her from her mother. As an adult she worked as an actress, painter and collage artist before licensing her name to a line of designer denim jeans in the late 1970s that made her one of the first celebrity fashion brands. She married four times, wrote several memoirs, and was the mother of Carter Vanderbilt Cooper and the journalist Anderson Cooper.