Sir James Jay was an American physician and politician. He was brother of John Jay, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. While initially a supporter of American independence, he later changed his views becoming a Loyalist and went into exile in London after the Treaty of Paris recognised independence.

The Van Cortlandt family was an influential political dynasty from the seventeenth-century Dutch origins of New York through its period as an English colony, then after it became a state, and into the nineteenth century. It rose to great prominence with the award of a Royal Charter to Van Cortlandt Manor, an 86,000-acre (35,000 ha) tract in today's Westchester County sprawling from the Hudson River to the Connecticut state line granted as a Patent to Stephanus Van Cortlandt in 1697 by King William III.