Arms of Hamilton of Grange Arms: Gules, a lion rampant, argent, betwixt three cinquefoils, ermine [3] Arms, crest, and motto Arms of the Lairds of Grange in Ayrshire, Scotland, including Hamilton's paternal grandfather [2] Alexander Hamilton was born and spent part of his childhood in Charlestown , the capital of the island of Nevis in the Leeward Islands then part of the British West Indies.
Hamilton and his older brother James Jr. She was listed as white on tax rolls. In later life, he tended to give his age only in round figures. Historians accepted as his birth year until about , when additional documentation of his early life in the Caribbean was published, initially in Danish.
A probate paper from St. Croix in , drafted after the death of Hamilton's mother, listed him as 13 years old, which has caused some historians since the s to favor a birth year of The current structure was rebuilt from the ruins of the house where Alexander Hamilton was born and lived as a young child. Historians have speculated on possible reasons for two different years of birth to have appeared in historical documents. If is correct, Hamilton might have been trying to appear younger than his college classmates, or perhaps wished to avoid standing out as older.
Richard Brookhiser noted that "a man is more likely to know his own birthday than a probate court. Croix in the Virgin Islands, then ruled by Denmark. Croix, where she supported them by keeping a small store in Christiansted. Many items were auctioned off, but a friend purchased the family's books and returned them to Hamilton. He and James Jr. Croix; also, James Hamilton never disclaimed paternity, and even in later years, signed his letters to Hamilton with "Your very Affectionate Father.
He remained an avid reader and later developed an interest in writing. He began to desire a life outside the island where he lived. He wrote a letter to his father that was a detailed account of a hurricane which had devastated Christiansted on August 30, The biographer Ron Chernow found the letter astounding for two reasons; first, that "for all its bombastic excesses, it does seem wondrous [that a] self-educated clerk could write with such verve and gusto," and second, that a teenage boy produced an apocalyptic "fire-and-brimstone sermon" viewing the hurricane as a "divine rebuke to human vanity and pomposity.
