Joan (Whitney)Payson owned the New York Mets('61-75). She was born in
NYC on Feb.5,1903 and died in NYC on Oct.4,1975. I need her middle
name. (Whitney was her maiden name, NOT a middle name. I will pay
$3.00.

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Request for Question Clarification by aditya2k-ga on 21 Nov 2002 06:07 PST

Are you sure Whitney was her maiden name and not middle name? All
references on the web mention Joan "Whitney" Payson or Joan "W"
Payson...

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Clarification of Question by bluestreak-ga on 21 Nov 2002 07:24 PST

Joan Whitney Payson was the daughter of Payne Whitney, a man who was
so rich, it was hard to estimate. He paid $2,041,951. in income taxes
in 1924, when income taxes were very low. That is why it was hard for
her to let go her maiden name, I suppose.

Hello bluestreak, 

I tried a different tactic with this one and once I had finished
searching the regular way for Joan Payson, I tried getting information
by instead investigating her father.

Once again I believe that Joan did not have a middle name, but I have
also come up with what I believe is a plausable theory as to why.

First let me show you this geneology site. 

Whitney Geneology.
http://www.whitneygen.org/archives/biography/williamc.html

As you will see this traces Joan's family back to her grandfather in
1841.

If you look through the list of subsequent children, you will note
that her Grandfather was a Mr William Collins Whitney and Her
Grandmother a Ms Flora Payne.

When they were married, Flora Payne kept her maiden name and became
Mrs Flora Paye Whitney and so most of the children became Payne
Whitneys. The curious thing was that Payne Whitney himself was just
that and no other christian name was given to him.

So they had a tradition in this family when someone was married that
the bride would keep her maiden name as well as adopt her husbands
name and this name would then be passed on to the children.

Payne Whitney married Helen Hay and they had two children, Joan
Whitney and John Hay Whitney.

This carried on when Joan had a son and named him John Whitney Payson.

Therefore if Joan Whitney were going to have a middle name in this
family it would have been Hay. But the person who wrote this page has
obviously done a lot of work on the Whitney family and seen all the
necessary records.

Whitney research group
http://www.whitneygen.org


Additional Links
****************
Her grave only reports the name Payson, which is a little
disappointing since she held onto the name Whitney her whole life only
to be interred in a grave bearing only her husbands family name

Find a grave
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=8748

Search Strategy
***************
I also checked with the following searches

"Joan * Whitney" ", "Whitney Joan *" "Joan Whitney" "full name"
"middle name"
"born" "Payne Whitney" daughter "Helen Hay" Daughter 

I Hope this helps. 


Johnny Phoenix

Excellent digging johnny_phoenix. Nice work. I accept your findings
again. I guess it was hard for me to realize that the previous
generations were not as conditioned as we are to 2 names. I might be
culturally locked in my mind-set.