Announcing ... the Vanderbilt Family Tree

There are statesmen, businessmen, authors, and Congressmen. There are counts and countesses, lords and ladies. There are artists, museum founders, and America's Cup winners. There are actors, filmmakers, and musicians. There is someone who perished on the Lusitania. There is even a CNN anchor.

And at the heart of it all ... a railroad magnate.

But for me, at the heart of it all ...

a designer jeans icon.

And someone I have always admired.

And now for something completely different, as Monty Python would say ... I am a geeky girl, and I like to research stuff. At my heart I am a journalist, as well -- trained professionally, of course, with an actual degree in journalism and years of work in the field. I also happen to be a big follower (OK, fan) of Gloria Vanderbilt ever since I wore her designer jeans in junior high school in the early '80s. I have owned so many pairs of her jeans, cords and other pants over the years I lost count, and I have collected every kind of item she put out there besides -- other clothing, cologne, jewelry, dishware, art prints, whatever I could find on eBay, even a sterling silver bracelet once owned by her, which I treasure greatly. 

I have catalogued on this very blog the appearances of her jeans I have seen as I've rewatched beloved TV shows from my childhood: "Three's Company," "The Facts of Life," and "Soap" (and I can tell you, Fallon wore them on "Dynasty," Mindy wore them on "Mork and Mindy," and Melissa wore them on "Falcon Crest" -- I just haven't blogged about that yet).

I own every one of Gloria's books (even the obscure poetry book), and I've read several other books about her and her family, most recently the "Vanderbilt" historical book by her son, Anderson Cooper. And honestly, I'm not even sure how this particular research project started, but I know why:  It started because of that geeky girl thing I mentioned. I started compiling a family tree of the Vanderbilts. Maybe it was just to keep it all straight as I was reading through the books. But I thought, hey, why not; maybe there's not something like that out there, and I can contribute in some way to our culture's historical info? So I got geekier and geekier, and I dug and dug and kept digging, and I now have a first edition of what I would consider a moderately fluid family tree of the Vanderbilts, in Excel format.

At the center of all of this is Gloria, who passed away in her 90s in 2019, and my love for her, but there were (and are) so many notable people on this family tree. As Anderson Cooper writes in his book, the era of the Vanderbilts is gone and the dynasty they built has "fallen" (I guess, though I don't like to think of it that way), but there are so many people in this family line who have contributed a great deal to our country and culture.

So for whatever it's worth, produced after many hours of research and presented open-source and free to use in whatever way it could be helpful, is the ... 

Vanderbilt Family Tree

As mentioned, this is a fluid document. And it is compiled by human hands, not by AI. There are currently more than 720 blood Vanderbilts on it, and there are still some holes in it, here and there. So if you have any edits to it, I welcome them.

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Top two photos: Cornelius ("Commodore") Vanderbilt, produced by Mathew Brady's studio, restored by Michel Vuijlsteke, public domain. Gloria Vanderbilt, from a 1959 acting role on "The United States Steel Hour," public domain.

Other photos by the author.