[1][2] His father, a General during the Civil War,[3] remarried in 1886 to Louisa Francis Paine Allen (1832-1898) at the Park Hotel in Manhattan.
His paternal grandparents were John Church Hamilton (1792–1882)[5] and Maria Eliza van den Heuvel.
His paternal great-grandparents included Alexander Hamilton (1755/7–1804), a Founding Father of the United States, Elizabeth Schuyler (1757–1854), and Baron John Cornelius van den Heuvel, the one-time governor of Dutch Guiana.
"[2] Following Hamilton's divorce in 1894, he rented a cottage in Newport, Rhode Island the following summer and after it closed on August 1, 1895, he stated that he was going west to California to engage in mining.
[7] In January 1898, he filed a petition for bankruptcy, showing nominal assets of $115,361 in a "reversionary interest" in the estate of his brother, Robert Ray Hamilton, who committed suicide in 1890.