Peter G. Gerry

Peter Goelet Gerry (September 18, 1879 – October 31, 1957) was an American lawyer and politician who served in the United States House of Representatives and later, as a U.S.

He was a great-grandson of Elbridge Gerry, the fifth Vice President of the United States (who had given his name to the term gerrymandering).

[citation needed] In 1928 he was an unsuccessful candidate for re-election, but in 1934 he was again elected to the U.S. Senate over the man who had defeated him six years earlier.

[8] In 1910, Gerry married Mathilde Scott Townsend (1885–1949), the daughter of Richard H. Townsend (1850–1902), the President of the Erie and Pittsburgh Railroad, and the granddaughter of William Lawrence Scott (1828–1891), a Pennsylvania railroad and coal magnate who was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Pennsylvania.

[9] On October 22, 1925, Gerry married Edith Stuyvesant Dresser (1873–1958), the widow of George Washington Vanderbilt II (1862–1914).

[10][11] Edith, a daughter of Maj. George Warren Dresser, was the mother of Cornelia Stuyvesant Vanderbilt (1900–1976), who married John Francis Amherst Cecil, son of Lord William Cecil and Mary Rothes Margaret Tyssen-Amherst, 2nd Baroness Amherst of Hackney.

Portrait of Gerry's first wife, Mathilde Townsend, painted by John Singer Sargent , 1907
Portrait of Gerry's second wife, Edith Stuyvesant Dresser , painted by Giovanni Boldini , 1900