Family
She was born Gloucester, Virginia, as Mary Elliot Seawell, a member of one of the older families of to settle in North America and one of the first families of Virginia. Her father was John Tyler Seawell, a lawyer and orator and a nephew of President John Tyler. Her mother (Tyler's second wife), Frances Elizabeth Jackson Seawell, was a native of Baltimore whose father, Major William Jackson, had fought in the War of 1812.
Descendants of the original Seawells spell the family name in one of two forms: "Sewell" (as in Sewell's Point, Norfolk, Virginia) and "Seawell." Otis Notman interviewing Molly Elliot Seawell for the New York Times Saturday Review of Books noted that the regional pronunciation of the name was "Sowell," although Molly Elliot Seawell pronounced her name as it was spelled ("Talks" 392).
Read more about this topic: Molly Elliot Seawell
Famous quotes containing the word family:
“... a family I know ... bought an acre in the country on which to build a house. For many years, while they lacked the money to build, they visited the site regularly and picnicked on a knoll, the site’s most attractive feature. They liked so much to visualize themselves as always there, that when they finally built they put the house on the knoll. But then the knoll was gone. Somehow they had not realized they would destroy it and lose it by supplanting it with themselves.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.”
—Max Lerner (b. 1902)
“It is turning three hundred years
On our cisatlantic shore
For family after family name.
We’ll make it three hundred more”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)