The family tree of Helen Keller, with her teacher Anne Sullivan

Helen Keller opens The Story of My Life with her ancestry. Her father’s family descended from Caspar Keller, a native of Switzerland who settled in Maryland, and one Swiss ancestor was the first teacher of the deaf in Zurich. Caspar’s son took up large tracts of land in Alabama and settled at Tuscumbia.¹

Her Grandmother Keller was a daughter of Alexander Moore, one of Lafayette’s aides, and a granddaughter of Alexander Spotswood, a colonial governor of Virginia. Helen adds that she was a second cousin of Robert E. Lee.¹ On her mother’s side the line runs back to Benjamin Adams of Newbury, Massachusetts, whose son Charles moved to Helena, Arkansas.¹ Wikipedia names Kate’s father as Charles W. Adams.⁵

The choice of her own name came from both sides. Her father proposed Mildred Campbell, an ancestor he admired, and her mother chose the name of her own mother, whose maiden name was Helen Everett.¹

Arthur H. Keller had been a captain in the Confederate Army, and Kate Adams was his second wife and many years younger.¹ Wikipedia gives his years as 1836 to 1896 and hers as 1856 to 1921.⁵ The Helen Keller Birthplace describes him as a retired captain and editor of the local newspaper, and her as an educated young woman from Memphis.³

The family home was Ivy Green in Tuscumbia, built in 1820, one year after Alabama became a state.⁴ Helen wrote that it took its name from the English ivy that covered the house, the trees and the fences.¹ When she was about five the family moved to a larger house, and her earliest memory of her father is of finding him behind drifts of the newspapers he edited.¹

Arthur Keller died in 1896 after a short illness, while Helen was in the North.^1,2 Kate lived until 1921.²

Helen was born at Tuscumbia on 27 June 1880, the first child of her mother.¹ In February 1882, at nineteen months, an illness closed her eyes and ears.¹ The doctors called it brain fever, and the Encyclopedia of Alabama and the Birthplace both suggest it may have been scarlet fever, the Birthplace adding meningitis as a second possibility.^2,3

Helen wrote that the household was her father and mother, two older half-brothers and, afterward, a little sister.¹ Wikipedia names the half-brothers as James McDonald Keller and William Simpson Keller.⁵ Both appear in her early letters, Simpson as the brother who gave her a pet pigeon.¹

Mildred was born after the move to the larger house, about 1886. She later married and took the name Tyson.^1,5 When Helen was at school in Cambridge, Mildred joined her for six months, until their mother withdrew both girls.¹ Phillips Brooks Keller was nearly sixteen months old in a letter Helen wrote on 4 November 1892, which places his birth about July 1891. Helen named him herself, after her friend the Boston clergyman Phillips Brooks.¹

Anne Sullivan was born at Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, on 14 April 1866 and graduated from the Perkins school as valedictorian in 1886.⁶ She arrived at Ivy Green on 3 March 1887, three months before Helen turned seven.^1,3 At the well pump she spelled W-A-T-E-R into one of Helen’s hands while the water ran over the other, and by nightfall Helen had learned thirty words.³

Helen entered Radcliffe College in 1900 and graduated in 1904.² John Macy, a Harvard friend, helped publish and edit The Story of My Life and married Anne Sullivan on 3 May 1905.^2,6 By 1914 the Macys were living apart, though they never divorced, and he died in 1932.⁶ Anne Sullivan died in Forest Hills, New York, on 20 October 1936.⁶

Polly Thomson became Helen’s companion and interpreted for her by spelling into her hand.² Wikipedia gives her years as 1885 to 1960.⁵ Helen never married. Wikipedia records that in her thirties she was secretly engaged to Peter Fagan, a young reporter from the Boston Herald who worked as her secretary, and that the engagement did not lead to a marriage.⁵

Helen Keller died at her home, Arcan Ridge, in Easton, Connecticut, on 1 June 1968.⁵ More than 1,200 people attended her funeral at the National Cathedral in Washington. Her ashes lie there in a columbarium behind the Chapel of St. Joseph of Arimathea, with those of Anne Sullivan Macy and Polly Thomson.³ Ivy Green has been a permanent shrine since 1954.⁴