William Kissam 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Reginald Claypoole Vanderbilt was an American horseman and sportsman, the youngest son of Cornelius Vanderbilt II and Alice Claypoole Gwynne. Born in New York City and educated at Yale, he never pursued a career in the family railroads, living instead on his inheritance at Sandy Point Farm in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where he bred and showed hackney and saddle horses and served as an officer of the National Horse Show Association. He married Cathleen Neilson in 1903 and, after their divorce, Gloria Morgan in 1923. His daughters were Cathleen Vanderbilt and the designer Gloria Vanderbilt, which makes him the grandfather of the journalist Anderson Cooper.