Childhood
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born in Southampton, New York, to Wall Street stock broker John Vernou Bouvier III (also known as 'Black Jack Bouvier') and Janet Norton Lee. Jacqueline's younger sister Caroline Lee—later known as Lee—was born in 1933. The Bouviers divorced in 1940. Janet Bouvier later married Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr. in 1942, and had two more children: Janet and James Auchincloss.
Her mother had Irish ancestry and her father's ancestry included French, Scottish, and English. Her maternal great-grandfather emigrated from Cork, Ireland, and later became the Superintendent of the New York City Public Schools. Michel Bouvier, Jacqueline's paternal great-great-grandfather, was born in France and was a contemporary of Joseph Bonaparte and Stephen Girard. He was a Philadelphia-based cabinetmaker, carpenter, merchant and real estate speculator. Michel's wife, Louise Vernou, was the daughter of John Vernou, a French émigré tobacconist, and Elizabeth Clifford Lindsay, an American-born woman. Jacqueline's grandfather, John Vernou Bouvier Jr., fabricated a more noble ancestry for his family in his vanity family history book, Our Forebears. Recent scholarship and the research done by Jacqueline's cousin John H. Davis in his book, The Bouviers: Portrait of an American Family, have disproved most of these fantasy lineages.
Bouvier spent her early years in New York City and East Hampton, New York, at the Bouvier family estate, "Lasata". Following their parents' divorce, the Bouvier sisters divided their time between their mother's homes in McLean, Virginia and Newport, Rhode Island, and their father's homes in New York City and Long Island. Bouvier attended the Chapin School in New York City.
At a very early age, she became an enthusiastic equestrienne, and horse-riding remained a lifelong passion.
Read more about this topic: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her fingers’ touch
And from her fingers ate its bit.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“Children became an obsessive theme in Victorian culture at the same time that they were being exploited as never before. As the horrors of life multiplied for some children, the image of childhood was increasingly exalted. Children became the last symbols of purity in a world which was seen as increasingly ugly.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)