Julia Caroline Ripley was born in Charleston, South Carolina, on February 13, 1825. Her mother, Zulma De Lacy Thomas, shared a mingled Huguenot and Catholic descent. Her maternal grandparents were natives of France, who fled to South Carolina from San Domingo (i.e. Haiti) at the time of the successful slave insurrection in that island, near the close of the 18th century. Her father, William Young Ripley, was born in Middlebury, Vermont, the son of one of Vermont's pioneers, and it is through him that she was descended from some of the first New England immigrants, including William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Colony, and William Ripley, who arrived in Hingham, Massachusetts in 1638.