Herman Melville (1819 - 1891): Our Family History

1819 - 1891 (72 years) Has 34 ancestors and 4 descendants in this family tree.

Name	Herman Melville
Birth	1 Aug 1819	Manhattan, New York, New York, United States
Christening	19 Aug 1819	New York City, New York, New York, United States
Gender	Male
Death	28 Sep 1891	Manhattan, New York, New York, United States
Initiatory (LDS)	22 May 1924	SLAKE
FamilySearch ID	LCVG-ZFL
Burial	Bronx, New York, New York, United States
Headstones	Submit Headstone Photo
Person ID	I100340	mytree
Last Modified	25 Feb 2024

Father	Allan Melville, b. 7 Apr 1782, Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States d. 18 Jan 1832, Albany, Albany, New York, United States (Age 49 years)
Mother	Maria Paterse Gansevoort, b. 6 Apr 1791, Albany, Albany, New York, United States d. 1 Apr 1872, Burrillville, Providence, Rhode Island, United States (Age 80 years)
Marriage	4 Oct 1814	Reformed Dutch Church of Albany, Albany, New York, United States
Family ID	F31512	Group Sheet \| Family Chart

Family Elizabeth Knapp Shaw, b. 1822, Cambridge, Middlesex, Massachusetts, United States d. 31 Jul 1906, Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States (Age 84 years)

Marriage 4 Aug 1847 New York City, New York, New York, United States

Children

	1. Malcolm Melville, b. 16 Feb 1849, Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States d. 11 Sep 1867, New York City, New York, New York, United States (Age 18 years)
	2. Stanwix Melville, b. Oct 1851, Pittsfield, Berkshire, Massachusetts, United States d. 25 Feb 1886, San Francisco, San Francisco, California, United States (Age 34 years)
	3. Elizabeth Melville, b. 22 May 1853, Pittsfield, Berkshire, Massachusetts, United States d. 1908, New York City, New York, New York, United States (Age 54 years)
	4. Frances Melville, b. 2 Mar 1855, Pittsfield, Berkshire, Massachusetts, United States d. 15 Jan 1938, Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United States (Age 82 years)

Family ID F31514 Group Sheet | Family Chart

Last Modified 6 Mar 2025

Event Map

	Birth - 1 Aug 1819 - Manhattan, New York, New York, United States
	Christening - 19 Aug 1819 - New York City, New York, New York, United States
	Marriage - 4 Aug 1847 - New York City, New York, New York, United States
	Death - 28 Sep 1891 - Manhattan, New York, New York, United States
	Initiatory (LDS) - 22 May 1924 - SLAKE
	Burial - - Bronx, New York, New York, United States

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Photos
Melville, Herman B1819 - Portrait

Melville, Herman B1819 - Portrait

Notes

An American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, best known for his n o vels of the sea, including his masterpiece, Moby Dick (1851).

Heritage and youth
Melville’s heritage and youthful experiences were perhaps crucial in for m ing the conflicts underlying his artistic vision. He was the third chi l d of Allan and Maria Gansevoort Melvill, in a family that was to gro w t o four boys and four girls. His forebears had been among the Scottis h an d Dutch settlers of New York and had taken leading roles in the Amer ica n Revolution and in the fiercely competitive commercial and politica l lif e of the new country. One grandfather, Maj. Thomas Melvill, was a m embe r of the Boston Tea Party in 1773 and was subsequently a New York im porte r. The other, Gen. Peter Gansevoort, was a friend of James Fenimor e Coope r and famous for leading the defense of Fort Stanwix, in upstat e New York , against the British.

In 1826 Allan Melvill wrote of his son as being “backward in speech an d s omewhat slow in comprehension... of a docile and amiable disposition. ” I n that same year, scarlet fever left the boy with permanently weakene d ey esight, but he attended Male High School. When the family import bus ines s collapsed in 1830, the family returned to Albany, where Herman enr olle d briefly in Albany Academy. Allan Melvill died in 1832, leaving hi s fami ly in desperate straits. The eldest son, Gansevoort, assumed respo nsibili ty for the family and took over his father’s felt and fur busines s. Herma n joined him after two years as a bank clerk and some months wor king on t he farm of his uncle, Thomas Melvill, in Pittsfield, Massachuse tts. Abou t this time, Herman’s branch of the family altered the spellin g of its na me. Though finances were precarious, Herman attended Albany C lassical Sch ool in 1835 and became an active member of a local debatin g society. A te aching job in Pittsfield made him unhappy, however, and a fter three month s he returned to Albany.

Wanderings and voyages
Young Melville had already begun writing, but the remainder of his you t h became a quest for security. A comparable pursuit in the spiritual re al m was to characterize much of his writing. The crisis that started Her ma n on his wanderings came in 1837, when Gansevoort went bankrupt and th e f amily moved to nearby Lansingburgh (later Troy). In what was to b e a fina l attempt at orthodox employment, Herman studied surveying at La nsingburg h Academy to equip himself for a post with the Erie Canal proje ct. When t he job did not materialize, Gansevoort arranged for Herman t o ship out a s cabin boy on the “St. Lawrence,” a merchant ship sailing i n June 1839 f rom New York City for Liverpool. The summer voyage did no t dedicate Melvi lle to the sea, and on his return his family was depende nt still on the c harity of relatives. After a grinding search for work , he taught briefl y in a school that closed without paying him. His uncl e Thomas, who had l eft Pittsfield for Illinois, apparently had no help t o offer when the you ng man followed him west. In January 1841 Melville s ailed on the whaler “ Acushnet,” from New Bedford, Massachusetts, on a vo yage to the South Seas .

In June 1842 the “Acushnet” anchored in the Marquesas Islands in present - day French Polynesia. Melville’s adventures here, somewhat romanticize d , became the subject of his first novel, Typee (1846). In July Melvill e a nd a companion jumped ship and, according to Typee, spent about fou r mont hs as guest-captives of the reputedly cannibalistic Typee people . Actuall y, in August he was registered in the crew of the Australian wh aler “Luc y Ann.” Whatever its precise correspondence with fact, however , Typee wa s faithful to the imaginative impact of the experience on Melv ille. Despi te intimations of danger, Melville represented the exotic val ley of the T ypees as an idyllic sanctuary from a hustling, aggressive ci vilization.

Although Melville was down for a 120th share of the whaler’s proceeds, t h e voyage had been unproductive. He joined a mutiny that landed the muti ne ers in a Tahitian jail, from which he escaped without difficulty. On t hes e events and their sequel, Melville based his second book, Omoo (1847 ). L ighthearted in tone, with the mutiny shown as something of a farce , it de scribes Melville’s travels through the islands, accompanied by Lo ng Ghost , formerly the ship’s doctor, now turned drifter. The carefree r oving con firmed Melville’s bitterness against colonial and, especially , missionar y debasement of the native Tahitian peoples.

These travels, in fact, occupied less than a month. In November he sign e d as a harpooner on his last whaler, the “Charles & Henry,” out of Nant uc ket, Massachusetts. Six months later he disembarked at Lahaina, in th e Ha waiian Islands. Somehow he supported himself for more than three mon ths ; then in August 1843 he signed as an ordinary seaman on the frigat e “Uni ted States,” which in October 1844 discharged him in Boston.

The years of acclaim of Herman Melville
Melville rejoined a family whose prospects had much improved. Gansevoor t , who after James K. Polk’s victory in the 1844 presidential election s ha d been appointed secretary to the U.S. legation in London, was gaini ng po litical renown. Encouraged by his family’s enthusiastic reception o f hi s tales of the South Seas, Melville wrote them down. The years of ac clai m were about to begin for Melville.

Typee provoked immediate enthusiasm and outrage, and then a year later O m oo had an identical response. Gansevoort, dead of a brain disease, nev e r saw his brother’s career consolidated, but the bereavement left Melvi ll e head of the family and the more committed to writing to support it . Ano ther responsibility came with his marriage in August 1847 to Elizab eth Sh aw, daughter of the chief justice of Massachusetts. He tried unsuc cessful ly for a job in the U.S. Treasury Department, the first of many a bortiv e efforts to secure a government post.

In 1847 Melville began a third book, Mardi (1849), and became a regula r c ontributor of reviews and other pieces to a literary journal. To hi s ne w literary acquaintances in New York City he appeared the characte r of hi s own books—extravert, vigorous, “with his cigar and his Spanis h eyes,” a s one writer described him. Melville resented this somewhat pa tronizing s tereotype, and in her reminiscences his wife recalled him i n a differen t aspect, writing in a bitterly cold, fireless room in winte r. He enjoine d his publisher not to call him “the author of Typee and Om oo,” for his t hird book was to be different. When it appeared, public an d critics alik e found its wild, allegorical fantasy and medley of style s incomprehensib le. It began as another Polynesian adventure but quickl y set its hero i n pursuit of the mysterious Yillah, “all beauty and inno cence,” a symboli c quest that ends in anguish and disaster. Concealing h is disappointmen t at the book’s reception, Melville quickly wrote Redbur n (1849) and Whit e-Jacket (1850) in the manner expected of him. In Octob er 1849 Melville s ailed to England to resolve his London publisher’s dou bts about White-Jac ket. He also visited the Continent, kept a journal, a nd arrived back in A merica in February 1850. The critics acclaimed White -Jacket, and its powe rful criticism of abuses in the U.S. Navy won it st rong political support . But both novels, however much they seemed to rev ive the Melville of Typ ee, had passages of profoundly questioning melanc holy. It was not the sam e Melville who wrote them. He had been reading S hakespeare with “eyes whi ch are as tender as young sparrows,” particular ly noting sombre passage s in Measure for Measure and King Lear. This rea ding struck deeply sympat hetic responses in Melville, counterbalancing t he Transcendental doctrine s of Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose general optimi sm about human goodness h e had heard in lectures. A fresh imaginative in fluence was supplied by Na thaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, a novel de eply exploring good and evi l in the human being, which Melville read i n the spring of 1850. That sum mer, Melville bought a farm, which he chri stened “Arrowhead,” near Hawtho rne’s home at Pittsfield, and the two me n became neighbours physically a s well as in sympathies.

Melville had promised his publishers for the autumn of 1850 the novel th a t became Moby Dick. His delay in submitting it was caused less by his e ar ly-morning chores as a farmer than by his explorations into the unsusp ect ed vistas opened for him by Hawthorne. Their relationship reanimate d Melv ille’s creative energies. On his side, it was dependent, almost my sticall y intense—“an infinite fraternity of feeling,” he called it. To t he coole r, withdrawn Hawthorne, such depth of feeling so persistently an d openl y declared was uncongenial. The two men gradually drew apart. The y met fo r the last time, almost as strangers, in 1856, when Melville vis ited Live rpool, where Hawthorne was American consul.

Melville’s novel was published in London in October 1851 as The Whale a n d a month later in America as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (see Researcher ’ s Note). It brought its author neither acclaim nor reward. Basically i t s story is simple. Captain Ahab pursues the white whale, Moby Dick, whi c h finally kills him. At that level, it is an intense, superbly authent i c narrative of whaling. In the perverted grandeur of Captain Ahab an d i n the beauties and terrors of the voyage of the “Pequod,” however, Me lvil le dramatized his deeper concerns: the equivocal defeats and triumph s o f the human spirit and its fusion of creative and murderous urges. I n hi s private afflictions, Melville had found universal metaphors.

Increasingly a recluse to the point that some friends feared for his san i ty, Melville embarked almost at once on Pierre (1852). It was an intens el y personal work, revealing the sombre mythology of his private life fr ame d in terms of a story of an artist alienated from his society. In i t ca n be found the humiliated responses to poverty that his youth suppli ed hi m plentifully and the hypocrisy he found beneath his father’s claim s to p urity and faithfulness. His mother he had idolized; yet he found t he spir ituality of her love betrayed by sexual love. The novel, a slight ly veile d allegory of Melville’s own dark imaginings, was rooted in thes e relatio ns. When published, it was another critical and financial disas ter. Onl y 33 years old, Melville saw his career in ruins. Near breakdown , and hav ing to face in 1853 the disaster of a fire at his New York publ ishers tha t destroyed most of his books, Melville persevered with writin g.

Israel Potter, plotted before his introduction to Hawthorne and his wor k , was published in 1855, but its modest success, clarity of style, an d ap parent simplicity of subject did not indicate a decision by Melvill e to w rite down to public taste. His contributions to Putnam’s Monthly M agazine —“Bartleby the Scrivener” (1853), “The Encantadas” (1854), and “B enito Ce reno” (1855)—reflected the despair and the contempt for human hy pocrisy a nd materialism that possessed him increasingly.

In 1856 Melville set out on a tour of Europe and the Levant to renew h i s spirits. The most powerful passages of the journal he kept are in har mo ny with The Confidence-Man (1857), a despairing satire on an America c orr upted by the shabby dreams of commerce. This was the last of his nove ls t o be published in his lifetime. Three American lecture tours were fo llowe d by his final sea journey, in 1860, when he joined his brother Tho mas, c aptain of the clipper “Meteor,” for a voyage around Cape Horn. H e abandon ed the trip in San Francisco.

The years of withdrawal of Herman Melville
Melville abandoned the novel for poetry, but the prospects for publicati o n were not favourable. With two sons and daughters to support, Melvill e s ought government patronage. A consular post he sought in 1861 went el sewh ere. On the outbreak of the Civil War, he volunteered for the Navy , but w as again rejected. He had apparently returned full cycle to the i nsecurit y of his youth, but an inheritance from his father-in-law brough t some re lief and “Arrowhead,” increasingly a burden, was sold. By the e nd of 1863 , the family was living in New York City. The war was much o n his mind an d furnished the subject of his first volume of verse, Battl e-Pieces and A spects of the War (1866), published privately. Four month s after it appea red, an appointment as a customs inspector on the New Yo rk docks finall y brought him a secure income.

Despite poor health, Melville began a pattern of writing evenings, weeke n ds, and on vacations. In 1867 his son Malcolm shot himself, accidental l y the jury decided, though it appeared that he had quarrelled with hi s fa ther the night before his death. His second son, Stanwix, who had go ne t o sea in 1869, died in a San Francisco hospital in 1886 after a lon g illn ess. Throughout these griefs, and for the whole of his 19 years i n the cu stoms house, Melville’s creative pace was understandably slowed.

His second collection of verse, John Marr, and Other Sailors; With Som e S ea-Pieces, appeared in 1888, again privately published. By then he ha d be en in retirement for three years, assisted by legacies from friend s and r elatives. His new leisure he devoted, he wrote in 1889, to “certa in matte rs as yet incomplete.” Among them was Timoleon (1891), a final v erse coll ection. More significant was the return to prose that culminate d in his l ast work, the novel Billy Budd, which remained unpublished unt il 1924. Pr ovoked by a false charge, the sailor Billy Budd accidentall y kills the sa tanic master-at-arms. In a time of threatened mutiny he i s hanged, goin g willingly to his fate. Evil has not wholly triumphed, an d Billy’s memor y lives on as an emblem of good. Here there is, if no t a statement of bei ng reconciled fully to life, at least the peace of r esignation. The manus cript ends with the date April 19, 1891. Five month s later Melville died . His life was neither happy nor, by material stand ards, successful. By t he end of the 1840s he was among the most celebrat ed of American writers , yet his death evoked but a single obituary notic e.

In the internal tensions that put him in conflict with his age lay a str a ngely 20th-century awareness of the deceptiveness of realities and of t h e instability of personal identity. Yet his writings never lost sigh t o f reality. His symbols grew from such visible facts, made intensely p rese nt, as the dying whales, the mess of blubber, and the wood of the sh ip, i n Moby Dick. For Melville, as for Shakespeare, man was ape and esse nce, i nextricably compounded; and the world, like the “Pequod,” was subj ect t o “two antagonistic influences... one to mount direct to heaven, th e othe r to drive yawingly to some horizontal goal.” It was Melville’s tr iumph t hat he endured, recording his vision to the end. After the year s of negle ct, modern criticism has secured his reputation with that of t he great Am erican writers.