Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones

Mary Cadwalader Rawle Jones (December 12, 1850 – September 22, 1935) was an American author, socialite, and social leader during the Gilded Age. Early life Mary, who was known as Minnie, was born on December 12, 1850, at Powel House, her family home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the daughter of William Henry Rawle (1823–1889) and Mary Binney (née Cadwalader) Rawle (1829–1861), both from prominent old Philadelphia families, the Rawles and the Cadwaladers. She had one younger brother, who died young of diphtheria in 1860, around the same time her mother died. Her father, with whom she had a warm relationship, was a prominent attorney in Philadelphia with Rawle & Henderson, a firm founded by her great-grandfather in 1783. When she was eighteen years old, her father remarried to Emily Cadwalader, the daughter of Thomas McCall Cadwalader, her mother's cousin and Mary's own cousin twice removed. Her paternal grandparents were William Rawle Jr. and Mary Anna (née Tilghman) Rawle, the granddaughter of Chief Justice Benjamin Chew. Her great-grandfather was William Rawle, the U.S. District Attorney in Pennsylvania who was a founder, and first president, of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, and a trustee of the University of Pennsylvania for 40 years. Her mother was the eldest daughter of John Cadwalader, a U.S. Representative and Federal Judge, and his first wife, Mary (née Binney) Cadwalader, a daughter of Horace Binney, also a U.S. Representative who was known for his public speeches as well as the founding of the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard. Society life In 1892, both Mary and her daughter were listed as "Mrs. F.R. Jones" and "Miss Beatrix Jones" in Ward McAllister's "Four Hundred", purported to be an index of New York's best families, published in The New York Times. Conveniently, 400 was the number of people that could fit into Mrs. Astor's ballroom. In her New York Times obituary, it stated: