Gardiner Island ownership dispute

Gardiners Island, granted to Lion Gardiner and his heirs, by King Charles I, in 1639, in a royal patent, was the subject of an ownership dispute in the late 20th century.

While other nearby islands were also granted manorial rights Gardiners Island is the only location in the United States where members of the original family has continued to own the property.

Since 1639 the family has grown to have many branches. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries some branches of the family were wealthy and lived on Long Island or in nearby New York.

In 1936, when 23-year-old Winthrop Gardiner Jr. inherited the Island Sarah Diodati Gardiner purchased it from him, for $400,000. Her purchase kept the Island in the family, although The New York Times described her as a "distant cousin". She had been a close enough cousin to remember vacationing there, while a child.

Sarah, an author of works on American history, was 56 at the time of the purchase, had never married, and had no children. She planned to leave the property to her neice and nephew. However, she established a trust fund, which intended to pay the substantial on-going costs of the property's upkeep, to be administered by her neice and nephew.

Sarah Diodati Gardiner died in 1953. The trust remained in effect, even when the funds Sarah had set aside for maintenance ran out.

Robert David Lion Gardiner, although he had been married several times, also had no heirs. His sister Alexandra Gardiner Creel had two children, Alexandra Creel Goelet and Raymond J. Randall Creel Jr.. Alexandra Creel Goelet earned a degree in Forestry, and had detailed plans for how best to preserve the large relatively untouched original forests left on the Island, which brought her into conflict with her uncle.

She and her husband, Robert Guestier Goelet, who was also a naturalist, bought out her brother's interest in the Island before her mother passed away.

Robert David Lion Gardiner was so opposed to the idea that sole management of the Island would pass to his neice, when he died, because the terms of the trust did not permit him to leave his half to anyone but a relative, that he commissioned a search of the lineage of the descendants of Lion Gardiner, to see if he could find a distant cousin he could adopt to be his heir. Since inheriting his share of the