Were there only three Schuyler sisters?

In the musical: Angelica, Eliza and Peggy sing as a trio, and Peggy then disappears from the story.

The real family: Philip Schuyler and Catherine Van Rensselaer had a large family, often cited as 15 children, of whom eight survived to adulthood. There were five surviving daughters, not three: Angelica, Elizabeth (Eliza), Margarita (Peggy), Cornelia and Catherine, along with three sons, John Bradstreet, Philip Jeremiah and Rensselaer.

Peggy was real. She married Stephen Van Rensselaer III, heir to the vast Van Rensselaer estate and one of the richest men in New York, and died in 1801. Her husband outlived her by four decades; in 1824 he founded the school in Troy, New York, that became Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), one of the oldest technological universities in the English-speaking world.

A family habit: three of the five daughters eloped. Angelica ran off with John Barker Church in 1777, Peggy with Stephen Van Rensselaer in 1783, and Cornelia with Washington Morton in 1797. Eliza, who married Hamilton at the family home with her father's blessing, was the exception.

Why only three on stage: a trio of sisters gives the show a girl-group number and a clear set of contrasts — the wit, the romantic, and the youngest who just wants to keep up. Peggy's actor then returns in Act Two as Maria Reynolds.

Fact-check verdict: a stage simplification. There were five Schuyler sisters, and the real family was even more headstrong than the musical suggests.