ABSTRACT
Charles Homer Haskins, one of the founders of medieval studies in the United States, was born on 21 December 1870 to Rachel A. McClintock Haskins and George Washington Haskins in Meadville, Pennsylvania. His father was a schoolteacher descended from eighteenth-century English immigrants; Rachel Haskins was of Scotch-Irish descent. The Haskins family had settled in Meadville after living first in Massachusetts or Connecticut, and then in Ticonderoga, New York. Charles was the first of three children. He early evidenced intelligence and energy for scholarship. As a boy of five Charles learned Greek and Latin from his father. The elder Haskins, while serving as superintendent of the Meadville schools, had been earning his degree in classics at Allegheny College in Meadville during the first five years of Charles’s life. Shortly thereafter he became classics professor at Allegheny College, where he taught Greek and Latin from 1875 to 1886. Evidently the elder Haskins was possessed of both boundless energy and driving ambition, or at least a tremendous thirst for knowledge of a great variety, for he seems to have continued his studies, now taking on law and earning a degree that enabled him to practice as an attorney in addition to his university teaching during Charles’s boyhood.
