Fitzgerald was born on April 25, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia.[2] She was the daughter of William Fitzgerald and Temperance “Tempie” Henry.[3] Her parents were unmarried but lived together in the East End section of Newport News[4] for at least two and a half years after she was born. In the early 1920s, Fitzgerald’s mother and her new partner, a Portuguese immigrant named Joseph Da Silva,[3] moved to Yonkers, in Westchester County, New York.[3] Her half-sister, Frances Da Silva, was born in 1923.[5] By 1925, Fitzgerald and her family had moved to nearby School Street, a poor Italian area.[5] She began her formal education at the age of six and was an outstanding student, moving through a variety of schools before attending Benjamin Franklin Junior High School in 1929.[6]
Starting in third grade, Fitzgerald loved dancing and admired Earl Snakehips Tucker. She performed for her peers on the way to school and at lunchtime.[7] She and her family were Methodists and were active in the Bethany African Methodist Episcopal Church, where she attended worship services, Bible study, and Sunday school.[7] The church provided Fitzgerald with her earliest experiences in music.[8]
Fitzgerald listened to jazz recordings by Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby, and The Boswell Sisters. She loved the Boswell Sisters’ lead singer Connee Boswell, later saying, “My mother brought home one of her records, and I fell in love with it…I tried so hard to sound just like her.”[9]
In 1932, when Fitzgerald was fifteen, her mother died from injuries sustained in a car accident.[10] Her stepfather took care of her until April 1933 when she moved to Harlem to live with her aunt.[11] This seemingly swift change in her circumstances, reinforced by what Fitzgerald biographer Stuart Nicholson describes as rumors of “ill-treatment” by her stepfather, leaves him to speculate that Da Silva might have abused her.[11]
Fitzgerald began skipping school, and her grades suffered. She worked as a lookout at a bordello and with a Mafia-affiliated numbers runner.[12] She never talked publicly about this time in her life.[13] When the authorities caught up with her, she was placed in the Colored Orphan Asylum in Riverdale in the Bronx.[14] When the orphanage proved too crowded, she was moved to the New York Training School for Girls, a state reformatory school in Hudson, New York.[15]From Wikipedia
