The daughter of Karrick Van Zandt Riggs, Pauline was descended from the Riggs family that settled in Maryland in the seventeenth century and from the Van Zandts who came to New York about that time. In 1926, she married Robert B. Noyes, a coffee plantation owner in Puerto Rico. Robert Noyes died in 1938. The Noyes had an appartment at the Savoy Hotel in New York and a home in Pomfret, CT.