Early Life and Education
Accounts of Menken's early life and origins vary considerably. In her autobiographical "Some Notes of Her Life in Her Own Hand," published in the New York Times in 1868, Menken said she was born Marie Rachel Adelaide de Vere Spenser in Bordeaux, France and lived in Cuba as a child before her family settled in New Orleans. Elsewhere, in 1865, she wrote that her birth name was Dolores Adios Los Fiertes, and that she was the daughter of a French woman from New Orleans and a Jewish man from Spain. About 1940, the consensus was that her parents were Auguste Théodore, a free black, and Marie, a mixed-race Creole, and she was raised as a Catholic. Ed James, a journalist friend, wrote after her death: “Her real name was Adelaide McCord, and she was born at Milneburg, near New Orleans, on June 15, 1835.” She may have recounted this version as well. She had a sister and a brother.
In 1990 John Cofran, using census records, said that she was born as Ada C. McCord, in Memphis, Tennessee in late 1830, the daughter of an Irish merchant Richard McCord and his wife Catherine. According to Cofran, her father died when she was young and her mother remarried; the family moved from Memphis to New Orleans. Based on Menken's assertions of being a native of New Orleans, Wolf Mankowitz and others have used Board of Health records and concluded that Ada was born in the city as the legitimate daughter of Auguste Théodore, a free man of color (mixed race) and his wife Magdaleine Jean Louis Janneaux, likely also a Louisiana Creole. Ada would have been raised as Catholic.
Ada was said to have been a bright student, and became fluent in French (which Creoles used and was still a prominent language in New Orleans) and Spanish. She was described as having a gift for languages. As a child, Adah performed as a dancer in the ballet of the French Opera House in New Orleans. In her later childhood, she performed as a dancer in Havana, Cuba, where she was crowned "Queen of the Plaza".
Read more about this topic: Adah Isaacs Menken
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