Katherine Anne Porter to American frontiersman Daniel Boone and the writer O. Henry (whose real name was William Sydney Porter), her father's second cousin. In 1892, when Porter was two years old, her mother died two months after giving birth to her last child. Porter's father took his four surviving children (an older brother had died in infancy) to live with his mother, Catherine Ann Porter, in Kyle, Texas. The depth of her grandmother's influence can be inferred from Porter's later adoption of her name. Her grandmother died while taking eleven-year-old Callie to visit relatives in Marfa, Texas. After her grandmother's death, the
William Field Porter losses at sea, which his son said were behind his decision to migrate. Porter sold his shipyard in Liverpool and took two of his ships, "Porter", and [[Dorset (1838 ship)|"Dorset"]], provisioned with livestock and a range of personnel (including a doctor, tutors and servants), so that he could set up a relatively self-sufficient farming station in South Australia. He was accompanied by his wife, a son and daughter, William and Alice and an adult son Richard and his wife. Porter himself captained his namesake, "Porter" (a 252-ton ([[Builder's Old Measurement|bm]]) [[brig]]), which he had built in 1824 and which had