The Guggenheim family, early Americans who made a fortune in mining, provided its fair share of gossip-column inches in the 20th century. Benjamin Guggenheim, one of 11 children to patriarch Meyer Guggenheim (1828–1905), went down with the Titanic in 1912. He left a widow, Florette Seligman, and three daughters, one of whom would grow up to become the famed art patron Peggy Guggenheim. (Benjamin’s brother Solomon is the man whose name sits atop the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed museum on New York’s Fifth Avenue, which was called both a parking garage and a giant toilet when it debuted. But that’s a whole other story.)
