• Plantation Owner and Founding Father Robert "Councillor" Carter III, 1727
• Military Officer and Entomologist Leonard Gyllenhaal, 1752

Robert Carter III was the grandson of Virginia land baron Robert "King" Carter of Corotoman.

Robert Carter III married Frances Ann Tasker, and they had seventeen children.

King George II appointed Carter to the Virginia Council. He continued to serve by a reappointment by King George III. Later, despite expressing support of the crown after George III's repeal of the Stamp Act 1765, Carter resigned as Councillor and eventually supported the American cause in the Revolution.

In the two decades after the Revolutionary War, numerous slaveholders in the Chesapeake Bay area freed their slaves. They were inspired by Quaker, Methodist and Baptist preachers, as well as the principles of the Revolution. Often they made provision for freeing slaves in their wills or deeds, in which they noted the principles of equality as reason for their decisions. The percentage of free blacks increased in the Upper South from less than one percent before the Revolution, to 10 percent by 1810. In Delaware, three - quarters of all blacks were free by 1810.

From Baptist and Swedenborgian influences, Carter concluded that human slavery was immoral. He instituted a program of gradual manumission of all slaves attached to his estate. It started in his lifetime in 1791 and continued after his death. He designed the program to be gradual to reduce the resistance of white neighbors. Frequently, Carter rented land to recently freed slaves, sometimes evicting previous white tenants in the process. His release of slaves, numbering 452, is the largest known manumission in the United States.

He also took pains to pass his beliefs to his children. He wrote to James Manning (first President of what is now Brown University) in February 1786 of his sons, George and John Tasker Carter: “they [are] to be Sent from Boston immediately upon their Arrival there to your College in Providence. I beg leave to appoint you their Foster Father intimating that my desire is that both my Said Sons shd. be active Characters in Life ... The prevailing Notion now is, to Continue the most abject State of Slavery in this Common - Wealth – On this Consideration only, I do not intend that these my two Sons shall return to this State till each of them arrive to the Age of 21 years.”

Toward the end of his life, Carter moved from Virginia to Baltimore, Maryland. In part he wanted some distance from family and neighbors who looked askance at his Swedenborgian faith and program of manumission. In 1803 the year before his death, Carter wrote his daughter Harriot L. Maund, "My plans and advice have never been pleasing to the world."

Born on the Ribbingsberg manor in Västergötland in west Sweden, Leonard Gyllenhaal was son of an army officer and belonged to a family of the lower nobility. He went to school (Skara trivialskola) in the cathedral town of Skara together with, among others, the future poet Johan Henrik Kellgren, and later renowned naturalists Anders Dahl and the brothers Adam and Johan Afzelius, with whom he went on natural excursions. Like some of his friends he went to Uppsala to study under Linnaeus in 1769. He never matriculated and remained in Uppsala only one semester, before switching to a military career in accordance with the wishes and traditions of the family, enrolling in the Adelsfanan ("Banner of Nobles") cavalry regiment, and a few years later transferring to the drabantkåren (Garde du Corps). Gyllenhaal, however, remained in contact with Linnaeus through an extensive correspondence and continued to work as an amateur naturalist.

He remained in military service until 1799, when he retired with the rank of major. As this did not take all of his time – different detachments of the Garde du Corps served at the royal court for only brief periods each year – he worked on his father's estate Höberg in Norra Vånga parish in Västergötland, which he managed on his own from 1784. He developed the estate, experimenting with new crops such as the American maize.

His main interest ever since youth was entomology, and already in 1775 he had collected some 1300 largely unidentified beetle species from the western part of Götaland. He built a private entomological museum, library and study on Höberg which he called the "Fly house". At his death, he had a collection of 400 boxes of prepared and identified insects, which he left to the Royal Swedish Society of Sciences in Uppsala (later deposited at the Uppsala University Museum of Zoology). His main publication was the Insecta Suecica, describing the insects of Sweden, which took him 30 years to complete and was awarded the gold medal of the Academy of Sciences. Another claim to fame for Gyllenhaal is the fact that he named the common beetle family of Histeridae. He was also elected an honorary member of the French Société entomologique. He was appointed a Knight of the Royal Order of Vasa.

Leonard Gyllenhaal was a leading Swedenborgian who supported the printing and spreading of Swedenborg's writings. His grandson, the Swedish - American journalist Anders Leonard Gyllenhaal, retained the faith of his grandfather and was a member of the Swedenborgian New Church. His descendants in the American branch of the family include the actor siblings Jake and Maggie Gyllenhaal.