The Vanderbilt "Misconnection"

July 30-Aug 3, 2002

    Salt Lake City is a fantastic place to work on genealogy. As stated earlier, I undertook the puzzle of the connection of  my great grandfather, John H. Vanderbilt, to the Vanderbilts back east.

The family "story" is that John was the son of Jacob Vanderbilt and a nephew of Cornelius Vanderbilt and came to California about 1852. Cornelius Vanderbilt, with the nickname "Commodore", was considered the richest man in America at that time; he made his money initially in steamboats, and later in railroads. The" Commodore" title was unofficial and arose because of his excellent skill at piloting boats. While it is very appealing to think that we are related to a very rich family, there has been no proof of this story. What we do know about John is that he was in Placerville, CA in the late 1850s and shows up on the 1860 census, giving his birth place as New York. He states his age as 32, which puts him being born about 1828. There is also a John H. Vanderbilt in Calaveras County, CA on the 1850 census, but he gives his age as 26. Whether this is the same person is not certain.

     While I haven't been able to connect John to the Vanderbilts back east, the story about him being a nephew of Cornelius appears very unlikely. Cornelius had two brothers. One was named Jacob; he died at the age of 16 in 1805. Since John was born in the 1820s, this Jacob can't be his father. The other brother was named Jacob Hand Vanderbilt, who was born in 1807; according to one source he married in 1834. Another source states that this Jacob also had an earlier wife, Ann Hazard, but little is known about her except that they are known to have had one son, named Robert. There are no known records of this Jacob producing a son named John in the 1820s. One of the problems in tracing the origins of John Vanderbilt is that there were many Vanderbilts with the name John; one author stated, "virtually every Vanderbilt family had a son named John."

    An interesting side story is that Cornelius Vanderbilt had a son named Cornelius Jeremiah, who was born in 1830. He was addicted to gambling and ran away to the California goldfields in 1849, but he stayed only a short time and returned to New York. This has a certain similarity to John since he was reputed to have ran the pharo tables in Placerville.

    Clearly, I have much more work to do on John, but I am not giving up. Maybe I'll work more on it next year, if Nancy lets me come back to Salt Lake City.