A small pureblood family of Welsh origin, the Vaughns came to America after adventure and wound up settling in the North Georgia foothills. Disinterested in the machinations of so-called polite society, they have, with only a few flighty and excessively ambitious exceptions, kept to themselves for the most part, intermarrying with small, financially modest pureblood families, some of those now extinct, and leaving politics to the politicians. A vein of instability in the female line led to the family's outside influence being even more negligible, since many of the girls never married. By -99 SI (-104 SA), daughters were considered a disaster just waiting to happen.

The only member of the family in recent memory to make a public figure of herself is Lorena Annabelle Carey, née Vaughn. The eldest of three, she spent most of her girlhood plotting with her brothers, her dreamy twin George and the more realistic, solidly based Frank, about the day they all made it big. Removed from school at fifteen to prevent her being expelled for setting her dorm on fire after years of inhibitionless troublemaking, she became a short-term fling for Savannah Carey patriarch Alasdair - until she got pregnant and used both the affair itself and the resulting baby to blackmail him into marriage. Following a nervous breakdown after George's death, she spent much of her time in the care of Healers, and has been institutionalized on and off for six years since her son Edmond's birth. Her daughters, Gwenhwyfar and Morgaine, are both students at Sonora Academy.

Frank, the family heir after George's death, became an Auror noted as having a flair for forensics. He lives at the Vaughn farm of Pine Hill with his parents Henry and Rosemary, his Aunt Priscilla, his wife Olivia, and his daughter Marissa.