John Jacob Astor IV IV was born on July 13, 1864 at his parents' country estate Ferncliff in Rhinebeck, New York. He was the youngest of five children and only son of businessman, collector, and race horse breeder/owner William Backhouse Astor, Jr. and socialite Caroline Webster "Lina" Schermerhorn. His four elder sisters were Emily, Helen, Charlotte, and Caroline ("Carrie"). He was a great-grandson of fur-trader John Jacob Astor and Sarah Cox Todd, whose fortune made the Astor family one of the wealthiest in the United States. Astor's paternal grandfather William Backhouse Astor, Sr. was a prominent real estate businessman. Through his paternal grandmother, Margaret
David Astor known under his pen name George Orwell. Astor bought both burial plots when he learned that Orwell had asked to be buried in an English country churchyard. David Astor Francis David Langhorne Astor CH (5 March 1912 – 7 December 2001) was an English newspaper publisher and member of the Astor family. David Astor was born in London, England, the third child of American-born English parents, Waldorf Astor (1879–1952) and Nancy Witcher Langhorne (1879–1964). The product of an immensely wealthy business dynasty, and raised in the grandeur of a great country estate where the political and intellectual elite gathered, he