Alberta Montagu, Countess of Sandwich (née Sturges; September 17, 1877 – October 23, 1951) was an American heiress, diarist, and letter writer who was the wife of George Montagu, 9th Earl of Sandwich. Like many Gilded Age debutantes from the United States, she married into the British aristocracy and took on the running of her husband's family's ancestral seat, Hinchingbrooke House. Lady Sandwich was a close friend of Mildred Barnes Bliss and was an accomplished musician, writer, and linguist. She was a friend and devotee of the Hindu monk and philosopher Swami Vivekananda, whom she had met in her childhood when he stayed at her family's New York estate. Lady Sandwich hosted Vivekananda in Chicago, New York, and Paris, accompanied him on a trip to Rome, and corresponded with him throughout her life.
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Early life and family
Alberta Sturges was born in Chicago on September 7, 1877, to Betty MacLeod, of New York City, and William Sturges, of Chicago. Her maternal grandfather was a Scottish immigrant who lived in the American southeast, where he owned slaves; slavery being a common practice amongst the elite of this Antebellum South. Her paternal grandfather, of English descent, made a fortune through trade in Ohio. Through her father, she was a descendant of the Connecticut judge Jonathan Sturges and related to businessman Jonathan Sturges, art collector Kate Sturges Buckingham, and U.S. Congressman Lewis B. Sturges.
She was christened in New York, where the family lived at 21 West 34th Street. In 1880 she went with her family to Paris. In 1886, her father survived the sinking of the SS Oregon as it was sailing from Liverpool to New York, but died a few years later. After her father died, her mother remarried to New York wholesale grocer Francis H. Leggett in a small ceremony in Paris.