Alexandra Creel Goelet (b.1939)

She graduated from Barnard College in Manhattan and the Yale School of Forestry. Her mother and uncle, Robert Gardiner, inherited Gardiner's Island from their unmarried aunt, Sarah, in 1953. Sarah had established a trust fund to maintain the island but by 1977 it had run dry. Alexandra had already clashed with her uncle over various decisions and as a result he refused to pay his share of the island's upkeep. In order to keep the island, Alexandra and her husband paid the whole amount (over $1-million) and went to court to have her uncle barred from stepping foot there.

Her uncle became obsessed with the idea that she was going to develop the island and having no children of his own he tried to find a relative (albeit one with pockets deep enough to afford the upkeep) who he could adopt and failing in that he then attempted to have the government expropriate the island. He was not successful in either attempt and backed by various other members of the family Alexandra became the 17th Proprietor on the death of her "estranged" uncle in 2004. In 1964, she married her first husband, Peter Tufo, a lawyer and real estate developer. After their divorce, she married Robert Guestier Goelet on Gardiner's Island in 1976. She has two children by her second marriage.