 Booth's parents, the noted British Shakespearean actor Junius Brutus Booth and his mistress Mary Ann Holmes, moved to the United States from England in June 1821. They purchased a 150-acre (61 ha) farm near Bel Air in Harford County, Maryland, where John Wilkes Booth was born in a four-room log house on May 10, 1838, the ninth of ten children. He was named after the English radical politician John Wilkes, a distant relative. Junius' wife, Adelaide Delannoy Booth, was granted a divorce in 1851 on grounds of adultery, and Holmes legally wed Julius on May 10, 1851, the youth's 13th birthday.
