Childhood
Jacqueline Lee Bouvier was born in Southampton, New York, to Wall Street stock broker John Vernou Bouvier III (also known as 'Black Jack Bouvier') and Janet Norton Lee. Jacqueline's younger sister Caroline Lee—later known as Lee—was born in 1933. The Bouviers divorced in 1940. Janet Bouvier later married Standard Oil heir Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr. in 1942, and had two more children: Janet and James Auchincloss.
Her mother had Irish ancestry and her father's ancestry included French, Scottish, and English. Her maternal great-grandfather emigrated from Cork, Ireland, and later became the Superintendent of the New York City Public Schools. Michel Bouvier, Jacqueline's paternal great-great-grandfather, was born in France and was a contemporary of Joseph Bonaparte and Stephen Girard. He was a Philadelphia-based cabinetmaker, carpenter, merchant and real estate speculator. Michel's wife, Louise Vernou, was the daughter of John Vernou, a French émigré tobacconist, and Elizabeth Clifford Lindsay, an American-born woman. Jacqueline's grandfather, John Vernou Bouvier Jr., fabricated a more noble ancestry for his family in his vanity family history book, Our Forebears. Recent scholarship and the research done by Jacqueline's cousin John H. Davis in his book, The Bouviers: Portrait of an American Family, have disproved most of these fantasy lineages.
Bouvier spent her early years in New York City and East Hampton, New York, at the Bouvier family estate, "Lasata". Following their parents' divorce, the Bouvier sisters divided their time between their mother's homes in McLean, Virginia and Newport, Rhode Island, and their father's homes in New York City and Long Island. Bouvier attended the Chapin School in New York City.
At a very early age, she became an enthusiastic equestrienne, and horse-riding remained a lifelong passion.
Read more about this topic: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“The fact remains that the human being in early childhood learns to consider one or the other aspect of bodily function as evil, shameful, or unsafe. There is not a culture which does not use a combination of these devils to develop, by way of counterpoint, its own style of faith, pride, certainty, and initiative.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)
“When we raise our children, we relive our childhood. Forgotten memories, painful and pleasurable, rise to the surface.... So each of us thinks, almost daily, of how our own childhood compares with our children’s, and of what our children’s future will hold.”
—Richard Louv (20th century)
“The landscape of the northern Sprawl woke confused memories of childhood for Case, dead grass tufting the cracks in a canted slab of freeway concrete. The train began to decelerate ten kilometers from the airport. Case watched the sun rise on the landscape of childhood, on broken slag and the rusting shells of refineries.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)