Ernest Hemingway — Origins & Early Years
An ex-mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon told me some time ago that she was the great-great niece of Ernest Hemingway, on his mother’s side. She went on to say that it was something her family didn’t talk about much, although she was a fan of the novelist.
It’s a small world.
Although born on the 21st of July, 1899, in the very American, very upper-middle-class village of Oak Park, Illinois, just a stone’s throw from Chicago, Ernest Hemingway’s roots go much further back.
Both sides of Hemingway’s family came from Yorkshire, England. His maternal grandfather, Ernest Hall, was born in Sheffield in 1840, and as a teenager worked for the family cutlery business before, in 1860, emigrating to America. After serving bravely in the Civil War as a corporal with L Troop of the First Iowa Volunteer Cavalry — and stopping a Confederate rifle ball in his thigh — Hall, refusing a disability pension, started his own wholesale cutlery business in Chicago. He soon became wealthy and built a large house in Oak Park — near to the Lloyd-Wrights — and cultivated the appearance of an English country gentleman by sporting mutton chop sideburns, carrying a silver headed cane, smoking cigars, and walking his white Yorkshire Terrier.
Hemingway’s paternal grandfather, Anson Tyler Hemingway — born in East Plymouth Connecticut in…
