Biography

George Alexander Kelly was born outside of Perth, Kansas, on April 28, 1905. He was the only child of a Presbyterian minister, Theodore Vincent Kelly, and Elfreda Merriam Kelly—who was, according to Fay Fransella quoting Kelly in a biographical sketch for the International Handbook of Personal Construct Psychology, "the daughter of a Nova Scotian captain of a sailing ship who was driven off the North Atlantic Trade routes by the arrival of steamships." His grandfather had gone then to trade in the Caribbean, settling in Barbados where Kelly's mother was born. Fransella noted that it was "interesting that the 'spirit of adventure' symbolized by this maternal grandfather," later "seeped into the spirit of Kelly's later psychological theorizing."