Quiet Lines & Spotlight Echoes: The Life of Eliphalet Nott Potter Iii

Updated on: August 11, 2025

Basic Information

A backstage pass I didn’t expect to have

If biographies were movies, the life of Eliphalet Nott Potter Iii would be one of those graceful, low-key character pieces — soft-focused interiors, a few crisp wide shots of family portraits, then a dissolve to a quiet gravestone. I walked through the names and dates like stepping into a faded playbill: the birth notice in 1906, a marriage in the roaring late-1920s, and a death in the heat of 1981. There’s no marquee with flashing neon for him — instead, there are genealogical waypoints, family-group sheets, and the occasional cameo in somebody else’s story. That’s its own kind of human drama: the life you glimpse from the front row of other people’s lives.

Family & Personal Relationships

Family felt central to Eliphalet’s outline — not as headlines, but as the repeated signatures on a ledger of marriages, births, divorces, and name-repeats (the Potter family loves the name Eliphalet). Here’s the cast list as it settles into focus:

There’s a gentle, repeating motif here: multiple marriages recorded in family compilations, an only son who carries the name forward, and the cautionary note that the Potters — like many New England families — reuse names across generations so fast that a genealogist could lose a hat in the shuffle. I felt a little like an archivist on a film set, keeping the props straight.

Career & Public Life — the silhouette, not the billboard

If you came hoping to read chapter-long dispatches about corporate mergers, civic honors, or a long-running public career, the files don’t oblige. The public trail for Eliphalet Nott Potter Iii is thin and domestic; he leaves footprints in cemetery records, family trees, and local-history compilations rather than in the Sunday newspaper’s business section. In plain terms: there’s no robust mainstream profile under his name that sketches an occupation or public office in sharp detail.

That said, being absent from the headlines doesn’t equal being invisible. In family lore and local pages he registers as socially present — a figure who anchored a household, a father whose son would carry the name into mid-century America, and a man who moved from Connecticut origins to a Florida resting place in Collier County, where his death is recorded in 1981. Think of him more like a steady character actor whose presence holds scenes together rather than the one who commands the opening number.

Net worth & public finances

Numbers can be cruel when the ledger is blank. There is no reliable public valuation of Eliphalet N. Potter III’s net worth — no business filings, no wealth profiles, no financial columns. The only honest summary: not available from trustworthy public sources.

News, gossip & the curious celebrity tangent

Here’s the part that reads like an unexpected connecting shot in a documentary: the social ripples around Eliphalet often reach him because of Phyllis — his first listed spouse — who later married entertainer Fred Astaire in 1933. That single connection makes Eliphalet’s name surface in celebrity-related biographies and in the kind of gossip columns that catalog marriages and social merges. Outside that crossover, the online presence is genealogical: memorials, family-tree pages, and a few fan posts that recycle the same facts.

Reliability & the small-print narration

I want to be frank — genealogical compilations are at once invaluable and famously idiosyncratic. There are competing dates, variations in the ordering of spouses, and the constant hazard of name-reuse (again, that family tradition of passing down “Eliphalet” like a baton). Treat the contours as trustworthy for names and core dates provided together, but be gentle with definitive claims about careers or precise sequences where different family pages conflict. It’s the kind of uncertainty that makes the past feel human instead of tidy.

Timeline (concise)

FAQ

Who was Eliphalet Nott Potter Iii?

He was a man recorded in genealogies and cemetery records — born in 1906 in Connecticut and died in 1981 in Naples, Florida — whose public life is primarily preserved through family documentation rather than mainstream press.

Was he related to the 19th-century Eliphalet Nott Potter of Union College?

He belongs to the broader Potter family line that shares the Eliphalet name, but he is a later generation and should not be conflated with the 19th-century college president.

Who were his spouses and children?

Records list Phyllis (Livingston) Baker as a first spouse (married 1927), later spouses in family records include Margaret Drumm Tiers and a Barbara Potter, and his son is Eliphalet Nott Potter IV, born 28 October 1928.

Did he have a public career or notable achievements listed?

No prominent mainstream professional biography or widely reported career highlights are documented under his name in the available public family and cemetery records.

Why does his name appear in celebrity biographies?

His first listed spouse, Phyllis, later married entertainer Fred Astaire, and that celebrity marriage creates an incidental link that causes his name to appear in biographies and social histories.

Are the dates and family relationships certain?

Most core dates (birth 1906, death 1981, son born 1928) are stable across records, but some marriage sequences and later-spouse details vary between genealogical compilations and therefore should be treated with cautious acceptance.