In his remarkable recent work of social observation and criticism, Old Money (1988: Alfred A. Knopf), Nelson Aldrich, Jr. combines telling anecdotes and autobiography to provide one of the most profound meditations on the continuing powerful hold of familial and class identity on upper-class Americans in the late twentieth century, despite the severe erosion of both self-confidence within this class as well as its ability to command respect, and indeed, to shape value in the public cultural space of mass, middle-class ociety. The core chapters on the institutions and customs of the American upper class are written with the distance and intimacy of a skilled ethnographer, while the two framing autobiographical chapters at the beginning and the end are, for me, themselves ethnographic documents. In this essay, I will be focusing entirely on these framing chapters because they so cogently raise issues that have been puzzling me in my own long-term research on wealthy, often dynastic families (Marcus 1980, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1988). Aldrich is the fourth-generation descendant of Nelson W. Aldrich (1841-1915) who rose from grocery clerk to be a powerful U.S. Senator from Rhode Island and key political ally of nineteenth-century captains of industry. In terms of clanship, the Aldriches might be understood as a collateral ineage of matrifiliated kin within the aura of the Rockefeller dynasty. This link was established by the marriage of Senator Aldrich's daughter, Abby, to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Aldrich is a keen and critical observer of his Rockefeller cousins, and at moments, with a tone bordering on the contemptuous, he attacks their expressions of ancestor worship: