America's Secret Aristocracy (50 page)

Wedding garments of Mr. and Mrs. Auguste Chouteau worn by their descendants. Miss Beatrice Chouteau Turner and Mr. Auguste Chouteau VI (c. 1910–20).
MISSOURI HISTORICAL SOCIETY, NEGATIVE NUMBER: OBJECTS 204

Boston's staid Somerset Club, on Beacon Hill. Ladies still must use a separate entrance.
COURTESY MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, and its longtime headmaster, George Van Santvoord.
THE HOTCHKISS SCHOOL

Newport's reigning couple, Mr. and Mrs. John Jermain Slocum, at left, with Mr. Stanley F. Reed at right.

American royalty mixes well with British: J. Carter Brown. Jr., of Rhode Island and the Princess of Wales.
UPI/BETTMANN NEWSPHOTOS

A membership certificate of California's most exclusive club, the Society of California Pioneers. Members must prove an ancestor arrived before midnight on December 31, 1849.
COURTESY OF GEORGE T. BRADY, JR
.

Doña Francesca de Ortega de Brady of San Francisco and her son George T. Brady, Jr., in heirloom Spanish costumes (c. 1930).
COURTESY OF GEORGE T. BRADY, JR
.

New York's Henry H. Livingston and his family mansion. Oak Hill, on the Hudson River.

Periodically, Livingstons from all over the world—too many to crowd into a group photograph—assemble at Clermont on the Hudson River to celebrate almost three centuries of family continuity.
NYT PICTURES/PENNY COLEMAN

Still the life of the party at over ninety. Mrs. Margaret Trevor Pardee, great-great-granddaughter of Jacob and Hannah Lawrence Schieffelin and kin of Roosevelts, Jays, Lispenards, and Livingstons.
COPYRIGHT © 1984 BY SCOTT AREMAN

A NOTE ON SOURCES AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Two unusual sources were made available to me in the preparation of this book.

The first, and perhaps the more important, was the treasure trove of materials found in the New York apartment of Mrs. Margaret Trevor Pardee. For much the better part of a century, Margaret Pardee has collected anything of possible interest concerning her ancestors and relatives by marriage: the Schieffelins, Lawrences, Bownes, Jays, Trevors, Pardees, Lispenards, Roosevelts, Astors, Vanderbilts, and others to whom she is marvelously, almost Byzantinely, connected. This material includes genealogies, family histories, old diaries, sketches of personalities, family crests and mottoes, and much more that has never been previously published. Her collection also includes scrapbooks filled with family-connected newspaper and magazine stories and other documents. Unfortunately, most of these clippings were pasted in undated and without attribution to their specific newspaper or magazine sources. In some cases, I was able to arrive at approximate dates by guesswork—the scrapbook containing items from Mrs. Pardee's debutante year, for example—but in quoting, as I have done in the text, from some of these published accounts, it was impossible to ascertain exact dates or names of publications in which these stories appeared, particularly since in 1910 there were a great many more newspapers and magazines published than there are today. In the source notes that follow, therefore, I have been forced to be a little vague, and to attribute these sources to “Schieffelin-Trevor-Pardee
family papers” or to “Pardee scrapbooks.” This, however, does not diminish my gratitude to Mrs. Pardee for making her materials available to me for use in this book.

The second special source involved the lucky happenstance of my making the acquaintance of Mr. Scott Areman of Mount Vernon, New York. Mr. Areman, a talented young photographer, has spent many hours over the last several years photographing, and tape-recording interviews with, various members of old American families in and around New York with the idea of someday turning this material into a book. His book project may one day be realized, but in the meantime he was good enough to make his taped interviews available to me for first use here. Thus, in the following notes, the notation “interview with Scott Areman” indicates that this is material drawn from some forty-five hours of his taped conversations.