Malcolm Gladwell Family History

Malcolm Timothy Gladwell was born on September 3rd, 1963 to Graham and Joyce Gladwell in Fareham, Hampshire.  Malcolm was born to a white father from England and to a mixed race mother from Jamaica.

In 1969. when Malcolm was six, Graham took an academic job in Canada and the family moved to a rural Mennonite community near Elmira in SW Ontario.  Malcolm found there a warm and protective environment.

At school, he excelled in athletics, being one of Canada’s fastest teenagers at 1,500 meters (he could still run 4:54 for the mile at the age of fifty-one).  But academically he was not outstanding and his grades at college were not good enough to go to graduate school.

Instead he went into journalism, moved to America, and was a reporter at the Washington Post where he worked for ten years and learned his craft.  The next stop in 1996 was the New Yorker where he said he wanted to “mine current academic research for insights, theories, direction, or inspiration.”

One piece written at the New Yorker became the basis of his book The Tipping Point which became a huge success on its publication in 2000.  Other best-sellers followed.

Malcolm’s English Forebears

Gladwell is an English surname, but not a common one.  There are an estimated 1,100 Gladwells in England and a further 850 elsewhere.

The name derives from a now lost medieval hamlet, probably in East Anglia, whose translation was “the clear (glaed) stream (waella).”  Two counties – Suffolk and Essex – accounted for almost half of all the Gladwells in the 1891 UK census.

Suffolk Origins.  Malcolm’s own paternal ancestry suggests that he can be traced back to a Joseph Gladwell who was born in Suffolk around 1660.

Malcolm’s Gladwells seem to have remained at various places in Suffolk until the mid 19th century.

They then drifted southward to Essex, London, and then to Sevenoaks in Kent.  Malcolm’s grandparents, Basil and Doris, were married there and Malcolm’s father Graham was born and grew up there.  Basil was a preacher and worked for an insurance company.

When Graham died in Canada in 2017, it was said that he was an expert in three things – the Bible (which he read every morning), mathematics, and gardening.  He loved to take long walks and saw in nature a reflection of God’s glory.

His Jamaican Line

Malcolm’s maternal line goes back to a Ford family in Jamaica as follows:

• from Joyce Gladwell nee Nation (b. 1931)
• to Daisy Nation nee Ford (b. 1899)

Daisy Ford.  According to family lore, Daisy Ford’s great grandfather William Ford was Irish and her great grandmother a black slave and Ford’s mistress.

“Daisy was from the northwestern end of Jamaica. Her great grandfather was William Ford. He was from Ireland and he arrived in Jamaica in 1784 having bought a coffee plantation.

Not long after his arrival, he bought a slave woman and took her as his concubine. He noticed her on the docks at Alligator Pond, a fishing village on the south coast. She was an Igbo tribeswoman from West Africa. They had a son whom they named John. He was, in the language of the day, a “mulatto.” He was colored – and all of the Fords from that point on fell into Jamaica’s colored class.”

Their son John was a free black, which put him higher on the social ladder in colonial Jamaica.  A lay preacher and a businessman, he had many more opportunities than darker Jamaicans and is reported to have owned land all over SW Jamaica,  He and his class were more likely to have been slave-owners than slaves.  Lighter skin counted for much in those color-conscious times.

Daisy Ford was born in 1899, the daughter of Oscar Ford who ran a small store in St. Elizabeth parish, Jamaica.  She married Donald Nation in the 1920’s.  In her early married life Daisy and her husband were schoolteachers in a tiny village named Harewood in central Jamaica.

Donald Nation, despite his modest surroundings, was an imposing man, quiet and dignified and a great lover of literature.  Every day he would read the newspaper closely, following the course of the events around the world.  Later he would be elected to the Jamaican House of Representatives.  Daisy meanwhile was the family driving force, pushing her twin daughters – Joyce and Faith – to get a good education.

Joyce Nation.  Thanks to Daisy, Joyce and Faith got scholarships to a local boarding school and later, with money borrowed from a local shopkeeper, were able to attend University College in London.

In 1955, not long afterwards, Joyce went to a twenty-first-birthday party for a young English mathematician named Graham Gladwell.  Joyce and Graham fell in love and they got married.  She stayed in England and her three children were born there.  Later in 1969 when Graham got a teaching assignment at Waterloo College in Ontario, they all moved to Canada.

Both Joyce and her twin sister Faith are spiritual writers.  Joyce’s book Brown Face, Big Master, written back in 1969, was about being brown (mixed race) and a Christian.  Joyce is also by training a psychotherapist.

Reader Feedback: Me, my sister Donna and brother Michael were born to a marital affair between the son of Donald Nation and Daisy Nation (nee Ford) who was Trevor Nation. What a life. Henry Donovon.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Family Tree

• Malcolm Gladwell’s Paternal Line in England

• Morris Gladwell (1840-1914) from Suffolk m. Hephzibar Cracknell (1837-1931) from Essex in Wandsworth, London in 1866
• – Arthur Basil Gladwell (1873-1944)

• Arthur Basil Gladwell from Brixton, London m. Mary Wells (1875-1929) in Edmonton, London in 1898; rem. Winifred Thurley in Essex in 1930
• – Basil Morris Gladwell (1901-1993), with Mary

• Basil Morris Gladwell from Wanstead, London m. Doris New (1902-1986) in Sevenoaks, Kent in 1930
• – Graham Gladwell (1934-2017)

• Graham Gladwell from Kent m. Joyce Nation (b. 1931) in London and moved to Canada in 1969
• – Celeste Gladwell, born in England
• – Marcia Gladwell, born in England
• – Malcolm Gladwell (b. 1963), born in England

• Malcolm Gladwell’s Maternal Line in Jamaica

• John Ford (1819-1903) m. Mary Lawrence (1829-1917) in St, Elizabeth, Jamaica
• – Oscar Ford (1848-1913)
• – Jane Ford (b. 1850)
• – Henry Ford (b. 1853) m. Eugenie Delissar
• – John Ford (1858-1936) m. Alice Maud Johnson
• – Jacob Ford (b. 1861)

• Oscar Ford m. Ann Forrester (1859-1931) in St. Elizabeth, Jamaica
• – Septimus Ford (1889-1972)
• – Reginia Ford (b. 1890)
• – Daisy Ford (1899-1979)
• – Rufus Ford (b. 1900)

• Daisy Ford m. Donald Nation from St. Catherine, Jamaica (b. 1902) in Jamaica around 1925
• – twin Joyce Nation (b. 1931), moved to London and then to Canada
• – twin Faith Nation (b. 1931), moved to London and returned to Jamaica, m. Ivan Linton

• Joyce Nation m. Graham Gladwell (1934-2017) in London in the 1950’s
• – Celeste Gladwell
• – Marcia Gladwell
• – Malcolm Gladwell (b. 1963)