The club's exact foundation date in the eighteenth century is unknown but its members are thought to have had Jacobite sympathies and its name to have derived from the toast they drank to 'The Family over the water'. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth century, its members, senior male academics and administrative officers, numbered no more than twelve and met fortnightly during term for 'good wine, good talk and good fellowship'. Among nineteenth century members were Registraries Romilly and Clark, William Whewell, John Couch Adams, Alfred Newton and J.J. Thomson; among twentieth, A.E. Housman, A.S.F. Gow, Lord Adrian, A.L. Hodgkin, and John Leslie Martin. Hosted by members at their Colleges, dinners were elaborate multi-course affairs, the last of which was held in 1942. Thereafter, the club met for wine and dessert. For background information, see S.C. Roberts, The Family. The history of a dining club (Cambridge 1963) catalogued as UA SOC.118.8.