OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
HOLMES, OLIVER WENDELL, son of the distinguished poet and essayist of the same name, associate and chief justice of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts for twenty years, and associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from December 4, 1902, was born in Boston, Suffolk county, Massachusetts, March 8, 1841. His first paternal ancestor in the direct line in America, John Holmes, settled at Woodstock, Connecticut, in 1686, and another ancestor, Evert Jansen Wendell, came from Emden, East Friesland, Holland, and settled in Albany, New York, about 1640. His great grandfather, Dr. David Holmes, served as captain in the Colonial army in the French and Indian war, and was a soldier in the war of the American Revolution. His maternal great grandfather, Jonathan Jackson (1743-1810), was a delegate to the Provincial Congress, 1775, to the Continental Congress, 1782; and was state treasurer. United States marshal, and a distinguished citizen of Massachusetts. His grandfather, the Reverend Abiel Holmes (1763-1837), Yale, A.B., 1783, A.M., 1786; A.M., Harvard, 1792; D.D., Edinburg, 1805; LL.D., Allegheny, 1822, was pastor of the First church, Cambridge, Massachusetts, for forty years. His grand-father, Charles Jackson (1775-1855), son of Honorable Jonathan and Hannah (Tracy) Jackson, and grandson of Edward and Dorothy (Quincy) Jackson and of Captain Patrick Tracy, was graduated at Harvard at the head of the class of 1793, became a lawyer, was judge of the Supreme Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, 1813-24, member of the State Constitutional Convention of 1820, overseer of Harvard, 1816-25, and a fellow, 1825-34. His father, was Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-94), the distinguished poet and essayist, and his mother, Amelia Lee (Jackson) Holmes, was the daughter of Judge Charles Jackson, a distinguished jurist and educator of Massachusetts.
He studied first in T. R. Sullivan's and was prepared for college in E. D. Dixwell's private Latin school, Boston; he was graduated at Harvard with the class of 1861, being selected as class poet. At
