Talcott Parsons - Biography

Biography

Parsons was born 13 December 1902 in Colorado Springs. Parsons was the son of Edward Smith Parsons (1863–1943) and Mary Augusta Ingersoll (1863–1949). His father had attended Yale Divinity School and was ordained as a Congregationalist minister, serving first as a minister for a pioneer community in Greeley, Colorado. At the time of Parsons' birth Edward S. Parsons was a professor in English at Colorado College and vice-president of the college.

During his Congregational ministry in Greeley, Edward S. Parsons had become sympathetic to the social gospel movement; yet, at the same time, he tended to view this question from a higher theological position and he was hostile to socialism as a sheer ideology. Also both Edward S. Parsons and his son Talcott would be familiar with the theology of Jonathan Edwards. The father would later become the president of Marietta College in Ohio. Parsons' family is one of the oldest families in American history; his ancestors were some of the first to arrive from England in the first half of the seventeenth century. The family's heritage consisted of two separate and independently developed Parsons lines, which both went back to the early days of America and indeed deeper into British history. On the father's side the family could be traced back to the Parsons of York, Maine. On the mother's side, the Ingersoll line was connected with Jonathan Edwards and from Edwards on there would be a new independent Parsons line because his eldest daughter Sarah married Elihu Parsons on June 11, 1750.