The Ingalls Family

Jeremy Ingalls was an "only" child, but she stated once in an interview that she was "never lonely." She had many cousins as playmates who lived nearby in the harbor town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where she grew up. From her parents, Charles and May Dodge Ingalls, she also inherited a love of literature and the arts. Jeremy's maternal great grandmother, Maria Jane Dodge, published a collection of poems in 1889, Echoes from Cape Ann (Boston: Cupples & Hurd). Having that literary accomplishment and familiar book in her family library may have inspired young Jeremy to begin writing poetry of her own when she was a young girl. Both her parents and maternal grandparents enjoyed theatrical pageantry, musical performance, and reciting poetry out loud. In 1923, when Jeremy was only 12, she joined her family in a costumed history pageant to mark the Tercentenary Celebration of the founding of Gloucester.

Jeremy's father, Charles Augustine, worked more than fifty years with a banking institution, providing a comfortable life for his wife and daughter. He also encouraged Jeremy to learn piano, providing her with piano lessons and informal musical training as a child, as he was himself a self-taught musician from a family of Ingalls men who for generations played violin, flute, and piano. One such relative, Jeremiah Ingalls (1764-1838) composed and published a number of original hymns, which were "written in a folk tune style" which Jeremy admired and tried to emulate. As a college student, Jermey wrote both lyrics and music to several songs of her own, and collaborated with others, writing verse plays, ballads and brief radio oratorios

From both sides of her family, Jeremy Dodge Ingalls also claims Native American ancestry. In an unpublished Waubanaki Remembrance, she wrote that her "first conscious memory" was of a Waubanaki lullaby that her father sang to her when she was two years old, as they traveled in a birch bark canoe to visit some of her father's relatives on Indian Island, Maine. Much of what Jeremy learned about her ancestry came from her father's mother, Leah Dalrymple Stewart Ingalls (1843-1927), who was widowed when her youngest son Charles was only three years old. Ironically, Jeremy's Grandmother Leah lost her own father when she was also three. Jeremy, who was to enjoy a long and close relationship with her father, lost her beloved mother in 1955, while she was away from home, teaching college. Following the sudden news her mother's death, she wrote the following poem:

For Mother from Jeremy

Rest, brave and timid dark-haired one. I named
Your name in my first poems, called you queen
Of gallantry’s old kingdoms, dreamed you came
Across vast seas, as often feared you drowned
And I woke sobbing, but I heard you come:
“Hush, hush,” and sighed and found me wild and strange
But loved me. Said, “Hush, hush. These are not real,
These terrors. Hush, my own tempestuous child.”
Rest gently now, my mother, quiet one.
God give you simple joy, serene repose
I too shall come to you across the dark
And that be real which is no terror more
And no more strangeness when the walls of time
Yield as a sea-mist-and to mightier sun
Even than daylight and your anxious eyes
Begging me back from labyrinthine dreams.
Rest, brave and timid dark-haired one. My heart
Tired in the Labyrinths moves still in search
Till I shall find you safe at last from pain
and eyes serene in last unhurtful dawn.