Paul Douglas
Douglas was born on March 26, 1892 in Salem, Massachusetts, the son of Annie (Smith) and James Howard Douglas. When he was four, his mother died of natural causes and his father remarried. His father was an abusive husband and his stepmother, unable to obtain a divorce, left her husband and took Douglas and his older brother to Onawa, Maine in Piscataquis County, where her brother and uncle had built a resort in the woods.
Douglas Southall Freeman
Douglas Southall Freeman was born May 16, 1886 in Lynchburg, Virginia, to Bettie Allen Hamner and Walker Burford Freeman, an insurance agent who had served four years in Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. From childhood, Freeman exhibited an interest in Southern history. In Lynchburg, his family lived at 416 Main Street, near the home of Confederate general Jubal Early. The family moved to the former Confederate capital of Richmond, Virginia in 1892 at the height of the monument commemoration movement that memorialized Virginia's Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson.