![[picture: ER and her brothers Elliott, Jr., and Gracie Hall]](../../images/er_siblings.jpg)
Eleanor Roosevelt was born October 11,1884, eleven months
after Elliott and Anna
married. Although he adored his daughter, the responsibilities
of fatherhood overwhelmed Elliott. His battles with depression
and drink became more frequent and threatened the family's
happiness. In 1889, after the birth of Elliott, Jr., Elliott
went south in hopes of finding a cure but, when he returned,
he was no better. The family then went abroad, sightseeing
and traveling to health resorts. ER cherished this time
with her father and for a time he controlled his drinking.
After the birth of Hall,
Anna and Elliott's third and last child, in Paris in 1891,
Elliott again relapsed and entered a French sanitarium.
Angry, sad, and humiliated, Anna took the children and
went
back to New York. Elliott's brother, Theodore,
then intervened, insisting that Elliott spend two full
years
on his own and not return to his family until he was fully
rehabilitated. Elliott went to live alone in Abingdon,
Virginia,
where he managed land holdings belonging to the family
of his brother-in-law, Douglas Robinson. ER, now seven,
could not
understand why her father had to be away and why her mother
was so unhappy. When ER was eight, her mother died of
diphtheria
after an operation. In her will, Anna requested that her
children be brought up by her mother, Mary
Livingston Ludlow Hall. ER and her brothers went
to live at their grandmother Hall's Manhattan brownstone
and,
in summers, at her country home in
Tivoli, on the Hudson River. Elliott visited ER and
promised someday to make a home for them again. They wrote
loving
letters to each other and her father sent her gifts. ER
adored him, calling him "the one great love of my life
as a child." But he returned to drinking and died in
1894 after a drunken fall. ER was not yet ten. Her brother
Ellie had
died of diphtheria the year before and ER and her brother
Hall were orphans. ER continued to live with her strict
and somber grandmother Hall and her four, sometimes unruly
grown children (who still lived at home) until she left
to attend Allenswood
Academy in 1899.
Sources:
Cook, Blanche Wiesen. Eleanor Roosevelt:
Volume One, 1884-1933. New York: Viking Press, 1992, 77-82.
Lash, Joseph P. Eleanor and Franklin.
New York: Signet Press, 1971, 73-78.
