page_title: Fernando Yznaga
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Fernando Yznaga / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Mrs. Fernando Yznaga, née Miss Mabel Wright, of New York.
context_page_description: Fernando Alfonso Yznaga del Valle was a Cuban American banker who was one of the best-known men of New York and foreign society and club life. Described as "one of the most entertaining of men, very clever at epigram and repartee, and famous for quaint sayings. His life had been adventurous and, from a domestic point of view, somewhat of a stormy nature."
context_section_description: On September 22, 1880, Yznaga was married to Mobile, Alabama born Mary Virginia "Jennie" Smith (1856–1926), sister of Alva (née Smith) Vanderbilt at the Vanderbilt home in Oakdale on Long Island. They were daughters of Murray Forbes Smith, a commission merchant, and Phoebe Ann (née Desha) Smith (daughter of US Representative Robert Desha). After their divorce in 1886, Jennie remarried to William George Tiffany of Baltimore (a nephew of Mrs. August Belmont and first cousin of Charles Lewis Tiffany) in 1888 and moved to Maisons-Laffitte near Paris (before their eventual divorce in 1903).
  Fernando's engagement to Mabel Elizabeth Wright (1869–1926) was announced in what was described as an astonishment to society. At the time, she was living with her father, a designer of carpets for Higgins Mills, in a boarding house and "her face was her fortune." The wedding took place a week later on March 4, 1890 at the boarding house and they set sail for Europe the following day.  Upon their return, they lived in New York and at Tuxedo Park. Mabel later went to South Dakota where she divorced Fernando in 1895 and, soon after, married the Hungarian Count Bela Zichy (nephew of Mihály Zichy) and became the mother of Count Theodore Zichy.  There were rumors of his engagement to be married a third time, including to Constance Biddle a few weeks before his death, but they were all denied.
  Yznaga died of diphtheria at the Minturn Hospital in New York City on March 6, 1901.  After a funeral at the Little Church Around The Corner, he was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx.  Upon his death, his estate worth about $2,000,000, was left primarily to his sister, then the Dowager Duchess of Manchester.
caption: Mrs. Fernando Yznaga, née Miss Mabel Wright, of New York, c. 1894.
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