Edwin Gould I

Edwin Gould I

George Jay Gould I, brother

Helen Gould, sister
Anna Gould, sister
Frank Jay Gould, brother

Edwin Gould (February 26, 1866 – July 12, 1933), was an American capitalist and railway official.

He was born in New York City to railroad financier Jay Gould on February 26, 1866. He studied at Columbia University and he died in Oyster Bay, New York in 1933 of a heart attack.

TIME magazine writes on July 24, 1933:

His brothers and sisters, save for Helen, all insisted on marrying actresses or noblemen —generally more than once. His sister Anna divorced Count Boni de Castellane and married the Duc de Talleyrand. His brother Howard (now living abroad) married Actress Viola Kathrine Clemmons and separated from her. His brother Frank Jay Gould (now settled on the Riviera as owner of Nice's unprofitable Casino) married Margaret Kelly, a banker's daughter, then British Actress Edith Kelly, then French Actress Florence La Caze. His elder brother George had married Actress Edith Kingdon, by whom he had seven children, and after her death in 1921 married British Actress Guinevere Sinclair, legitimatizing three other children he had had by her. Not only the publicity of these affairs rose to trouble Edwin Gould but the legal entanglements arising from them. In 1916, Younger Brother Frank and Younger Sister Anna sued the four trustees for mismanagement of their father's estate. For eleven years this suit, to which there were innumerable parties, children, strange grandchildren, stranger great grandchildren, dragged on. Finally the law decided that Brother George had mismanaged the estate and a judgment for $50,000,000 was entered against the four trustees—settlement for which was made by compromise at $20,000,000. Meantime, however. Brother George had died, leaving an estate of $15,000,000 which was whittled down to $5,000,000 and promptly became the source of another legal battle between his seven legitimate and three legitimatized children and their diverse children by numerous marriages. All this was as distressing to Edwin Gould as the unanimity with which historians described his father as the greatest and most wicked pirate of the buccaneering age in U. S. industry. But he modestly went his way, made and gave away his modest millions, died without ostentation, of a sudden heart attack.