Wilson's parents gave him the nickname 'Tommy', which he used until he was 16. Before he was two, the family moved to Augusta, Georgia.Wilson's earliest memory was of playing in his yard and standing near the front gate of the Augusta parsonage at the age of three, when he heard a passerby announce in disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected and that a war was coming. By 1861, both of Wilson's parents had come to fully identify with the Southern United States and they supported the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Wilson's father was one of the founders of the Southern Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUS) after it split from the Northern Presbyterians in 1861. In 1883, Wilson met and fell in love with Ellen Louise Axson, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from Savannah, Georgia. In 1914, Eleanor married William Gibbs McAdoo, who served as the Secretary of the Treasury under Wilson and later represented California in the United States Senate.