"MRS. YZNAGA DEAD.
She Was Mother of the Dowager Duchess of Manchester.
Special to The New York Times.
NATCHEZ, Miss., Jan. 24 - Mrs. Ellen Yznaga del Valle, mother of the Dowager Duchess of Manchester and of Lady John Lister Pepys, died here to-day from pneumonia, age about 75. she had been in poor health for some time.
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Mrs. Ellen Yznaga. grandmother of the Duke of Manchester and widow of Antonio Yznaga, at one time a wealthy daughter of a Louisiana planter. Mr. Yznaga had possessions also near Natchez Louisiana, and a plantation on Lake Concordia in Louisiana, and some property in Cuba.
He was a member of the famous Yznaga del Valle family, a branch of which lived until recently in New York.
Soon after Mr. Yznaga's death, about forty-five years ago, Mrs. Yznaga took her four children abroad. In 1874 she was in New York with her eldest daughter, Consuelo. It was in 1876 that Lord Mandeville, heir of the seventh Duke of Manchester, was in this country recuperating from a fever contracted in Africa.
Mrs. Yznaga and her daughter, who knew him and his mother, the
Duchess, took him to their little house in Evergreen Place, East Orange, and nursed him back to health. His marriage to Consuelo at Grace Church in this city followed.
It was late in the seventies that Mrs. Yznaga arranged a position in a Wall Street firm for her son, Fernando. His marriage to Miss Virginia Smith, a sister of the first Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt (now Mrs. O.H.P. Belmont,) followed, and he had a substantial start in business from his brother-in-law. Mr. Vanderbilt, who remained his intimate friend after the first Mrs. Fernando Yznaga divorced him and married the late William Tiffany. Yznaga married Miss Mabel Wright, who also divorced him, and is now the Countess Bela Zichy.
Mrs. Yznaga's two other daughters, Nautica and Emily, went abroad, and it was Miss Emily and Lady Mandeville who introduced old plantation songs and banjo playing to the notice of the King, then Prince of Wales, at a house party, at which the royal visitor had been much bored. In 1881 Nautica married Sir John Lister Pepys Kaye. Emily has never married.
Mrs. Yznaga, since the settling of her children, has lived on her Ravenswood plantation, on Lake Concordia.
Mandeville succeeded his father as the eight Duke of Manchester in 1890, and died in 1892. Mrs. Yznaga's grandson, William Angus Drogo Montagu, the son of Consuelo became the ninth Duke. He married Miss Helen Zimmerman of Cincinnati in 1900.
By the closing of the Knickerbocker Trust Company Mrs. Yznaga lost her income for the year. Her daughter, the Duchess of Manchester, gave her a sum of money equal to the amount lost."
Source: New York Times Saturday January 25, 1908

Provided by Richard Yznaga.