Helen Keller father Arthur Henley Keller
Early childhood and illness
Keller was born on June 27, 1880, in Tuscumbia, Alabama, the daughter of Arthur Henley Keller (1836–1896), and Catherine Everett (Adams) Keller (1856–1921), known as "Kate". Her family lived on a homestead, Ivy Green, that Helen's paternal grandfather had built decades earlier. She had four siblings: two full siblings, Mildred Campbell (Keller) Tyson and Phillip Brooks Keller; and two older half-brothers from her father's first marriage, James McDonald Keller and William Simpson Keller.Keller's father worked for many years as an editor of the Tuscumbia North Alabamian. He had served as a captain in the Confederate Army.
The family were part of the slaveholding elite before the war, but lost status later. Her mother was the daughter of Charles W. Adams, a Confederate general.Keller's paternal lineage was traced to Casper Keller, a native of Switzerland. One of Helen's Swiss ancestors was the first teacher for the deaf in Zurich. Keller reflected on this fact in her first autobiography, asserting that "there is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his".At 19 months old, Keller contracted an unknown illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain". Contemporary doctors believe it might have been meningitis, caused by the bacterium Neisseria meningitidis (meningococcus), or possibly Haemophilus influenzae. (This could have caused the same symptoms, but is a less likely cause due to its 97% juvenile mortality rate at that time.) The illness left Keller both deaf and blind. She lived, as she recalled in her autobiography, "at sea in a dense fog".At that time, Keller was able to communicate somewhat with Martha Washington, who was two years older and the daughter of the family cook, and understood the girl's signs;: 11  by the age of seven, Keller had more than 60 home signs to communicate with her family, and could distinguish people by the vibration of their footsteps.In 1886, Keller's mother, inspired by an account in Charles Dickens' American Notes of the successful education of Laura Bridgman, a deaf and blind woman, dispatched the young Keller and her father to consult physician J. Julian Chisolm, an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist in Baltimore, for advice. Chisholm referred the Kellers to Alexander Graham Bell, who was working with deaf children at the time. Bell advised them to contact the Perkins Institute for the Blind, the school where Bridgman had been educated. It was then located in South Boston. Michael Anagnos, the school's director, asked Anne Sullivan, a 20-year-old alumna of the school who was visually impaired, to become Keller's instructor. It was the beginning of a nearly 50-year-long relationship: Sullivan developed as Keller's governess and later her companion.Sullivan arrived at Keller's house on March 5, 1887, a day Keller would forever remember as "my soul's birthday". Sullivan immediately began to teach Helen to communicate by spelling words into her hand, beginning with "d-o-l-l" for the doll that she had brought Keller as a present. Keller initially struggled with lessons since she could not comprehend that every object had a word identifying it. When Sullivan was trying to teach Keller the word for "mug", Keller became so frustrated she broke the mug. Keller remembered how she soon began imitating Sullivan's hand gestures: "I did not know that I was spelling a word or even that words existed. I was simply making my fingers go in monkey-like imitation."The next month Keller made a breakthrough, when she realized that the motions her teacher was making on the palm of her hand, while running cool water over her other hand, symbolized the idea of "water". Writing in her autobiography, The Story of My Life, Keller recalled the moment:
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