A person who is entitled by law or by the terms of a will to inherit the estate of another. Classified under: Nouns denoting people. Synonyms: heir; heritor; inheritor. Hypernyms (heir is a kind of...): receiver; recipient (a person who gets something)
Ella Jane Fitzgerald was born on April 17, 1917, in Newport News, Virginia. Her parents were William and Temperance (Tempie); they divorced shortly after she was born. Ella and her mother moved to Yonkers, New York, where they eventually moved in with her mother s boyfriend, Joseph Da Silva.
While she seems to have survived during 1933 and 1934 in part from singing on the streets of Harlem, Fitzgerald made her most important amateur singing debut at age 17 on November 21, 1934, in one of the earliest of the famous Amateur Nights at the Apollo Theater.