Former law firm partner Guy Rutherfurd dies

Guy G. Rutherfurd, former managing partner of one of New York City's oldest law firms whose lineage included a colonial governor of New York, a U.S. vice president and the mistress of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, has died. He was 96.

He died May 27 at his home in Manhattan after suffering from respiratory ailments, according to his son, Alec Rutherfurd.

Rutherfurd worked more than 50 years at Morris & McVeigh LLP, a Manhattan-based firm founded in 1862 to represent some of New York's founding families, from which he descended. Among them were the Morris family, owner of large parts of Morrisania (today's South Bronx), and the Stuyvesants, whose holdings included what is now the 80-acre Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village, Manhattan's biggest apartment complex.

Rutherfurd, who counted Peter Stuyvesant, the last Dutch governor of what became New York, and John Winthrop, the first governor of Massachusetts, among his ancestors, wasn't one to brag about his family's history and connections, said Macdonald Budd, who succeeded Rutherfurd as managing partner at Morris & McVeigh in the mid-1990s.

-- Bloomberg News