Francis Parkman was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 16, 1823. His family moved to Falmouth, Maine, when he was ten years old. For the next ten years he was educated in the public schools. He left school to work for a man named John Hubbard who was building a wooden ship in Eastport, Maine
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When he was seventeen years old, Parkman went to sea on board the Louisa. He served under Captain Robert Gray in the West Indies and North America. On August 6, 1846, Parkman married his first wife, Ann Eliza Stone; they had two children together before her early death in 1852.
On May 21 of the following year, Parkman married his second wife, Mary Wells Lawrence; they had ten children together before her death in 1888. After his marriage to Lawrence ended in divorce in 1896, Parkman became close friends with Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his family. He also became friends with Robert Louis Stevenson and Sir Henry Morton Stanley when they visited Eastport in the summer of 1894.