Education, Teaching, Libraries

Amo, Anton Wilhelm

Amo was born on the Gold Coast (Ghana) about 1703 and taken to Amsterdam when he was about four. He was given to the Duke of Wolfenbüttel and baptised Anton Wilhelm. He was educated with su... [more]

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Angelou, Maya

Angelou was born Marguerite Johnson in California. Her parents divorced when she was a young child and she and her brother were sent by their father to live with his mother i... [more]

Antoine, Josephine Louise

Antoine was born in Denver, Colorado and adopted after being orphaned while still a baby. She began to study voice in 1921 at college. She won a scholarship to study at the Curtis Institute... [more]

Aristotle

Aristotle was the son of Nicomachus, physician to King Amyntas II. His parents died when he was still a very young boy and he was brought up by a guardian, Proxenus, who sent him to Plato's... [more]

Ballinger, John

Ballinger was orphaned as a child and left school at 14. He got a job as an assistant in the Cardiff Public Library in 1875 and rose to be chief librarian by 1885. In 1908 he became the fir... [more]

Barber, Dee Seton

Barber was adopted in 1938 by Ernest Thompson Seton (1860-1946) and his second wife, Julia Moses Buttree. Seton had founded the Woodcraft movement in 1902 in Connecticut, which developed in... [more]

Bede, the Venerable

Bede was sent to a monastery at the age of seven (see Oblates) and ordained a priest aged 30. He is most famous for his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, a history of the conversion o... [more]

Bellwood, James Charles

Bellwood was born James Charles Robertson to an unmarried Maori woman and a European salesman. He was fostered or adopted by the Bellwood family of Christchurch, who emotionally and physica... [more]

Bemo, John

Bemo, born Talamasmico in or before 1825, was the nephew of the great Seminole Chief Osceola. When he was nine or 10 (in 1835) his father died after a drunken brawl in St. Augustine, Florid... [more]

Best, James

Best was born Jules Guy in Powderly, Kentucky, to a poor coal mining family with six children. When he was three poverty forced the family to place him in an orphanage, but he was adopted t... [more]