Reverend Albert Horton Ball was born in Amherst, New Hampshire, on March 10th, 1843. He graduated from Amherst College in 1866, and continued his education at Madison University at Hamilton, New York, where he studied Divinity and Theology, graduating in 1869. He married Helen M. Savage in 1870. He died on December 3, 1937.
Albert Ball's son, Allan Perley Ball, was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, on December 17, 1871. He graduated from Amherst in 1892, and received a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1903. He began as a tutor in Latin at the City College of New York in 1901, and was made a professor of classical languages there by 1926. He married Vergie Allen in 1916. His book The Satire of Seneca was published in 1902, and The Essays of Seneca, which he edited, was published in 1908. Allan Ball died on October 9, 1971.
The other son of Reverend Albert Horton Ball, Walter Savage Ball, was born in Windsor, Vermont, on September 20, 1876. He graduated in 1897 from Amherst and received his master's degree in 1902. He worked at the North Adams (Mass.) Transcript, Springfield (Mass.) Republican, Sun, Providence Journal, and Evening Bulletin variously as a reporter, staff writer, editor, and chief editor until his retirement in 1931. His novel, Carmella Commands received the Harpers Prize in 1929; he published other works, mainly serial fiction, throughout his lifetime. He married to Marion Kimball Hadley in 1923 and died on May 1, 1937.
From the guide to the Ball Family Papers, ca. 1869-1931, (Amherst College Archives and Special Collections)
