Family Life and Foster Care
The eldest of three children, Kingsley was born in Denver, Colorado, to Rachel Kingsley and Ralph Kingsley, Sr., who became estranged from his family, giving Rachel Kingsley custodial rights. Gregory's two younger brothers, Jeremiah and Zachary, remained with their mother, but Gregory went to live with his father, who forbid him to have any contact with them. Eventually, Gregory was reunited with his mother and two siblings; however, his mother's drug use prevented her from parenting, and so she voluntarily put her two oldest sons into foster care in 1990. Gregory was placed in a boys shelter, where he met and befriended George H. Russ, who had first come to the shelter as a member of a government commission exploring the "needs of children". He was a father and an attorney, and he empathized with Gregory, having had an unhappy childhood himself. In October 1991, he and his wife Lizabeth agreed to adopt Gregory, bringing him to live with their eight biological children.
Read more about this topic: Gregory Kingsley
Famous quotes containing the words family, life, foster and/or care:
“I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
“A native health and innocence
Within my bones did grow,
And while my God did all his glories show,
I felt a vigour in my sense
That was all spirit: I within did flow
With seas of life like wine;
I nothing in the world did know
But ‘twas divine.”
—Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)
“‘Way down upon de Swanee ribber,
Far, far away,
Dere’s where my heart is turning ebber,
Dere’s where de old folks stay.”
—Stephen Collins Foster (1826–1884)
“... we, like so many others who think more of working than of dying, care only to push on steadily, wishing less for cessation of toil than for strength to keep at it; and for wisdom to make it worthy of the ideal of labor and of life which we believe to be the most precious gift of Heaven to any soul.”
—Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (1844–1911)