Audubon was born in what is now Haiti, the son of a well-to-do married French naval captain and slave trader and his Creole servant-mistress. His mother died soon after his birth and his fa... [more]
Keats' father died in 1804 and his mother in 1810, but he did not live with her after the age of 10 (he was apprenticed to an apothecary), but rather with his grandmother, when he was not a... [more]
Kepler was born in Weil der Stadt, Swabia. His father was a merchant who went as a mercenary soldier to fight in the Spanish Netherlands when he was two. His mother was the daughter of an i... [more]
Leonowens was born Anna Harriette Crawford in Wales. Her father was in the army and her parents went to India when she was six, leaving her in Britain with a relative who ran a girls' schoo... [more]
List was born Elisabeth Driessen in a prison camp in Japanese-occupied Indonesia. Her mother died in 1945 and she and her father returned to the Netherlands where he remarried, but his new ... [more]
McRobbie was born to an Aboriginal-New Caledonian mother and Aboriginal father, and raised in the far north of Queensland. Her father died when she was a small child. When she was eight she... [more]
Melville was born into a comfortably well-off merchant family in New York, but his father went bankrupt and insane, and died when he was 12 (other sources say 14), leaving his mother a wido... [more]
Michabo is the Great Hare, the grandson of the Moon and son of the West Wind. His mother died in childbirth but he was not fostered, because he was born fully developed and with all knowled... [more]
Quetzalcoatl's mother died in childbirth, but he was born with speech, reason and wisdom (compare: Michabo ). Some sources say his father was murdered when he was a child, and he revenged ... [more]
The Trapps, Baron and Baroness von Trapp and their 10 children, are one of the world's most famous families, and the subject of one of the most successful stage musicals and films in histor... [more]