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 Archer Porter Tait William Archer Porter Tait William Archer Porter Tait FRSE FRMS MICE (1866–1929) was a 19th/20th century Scottish civil engineer and part of the Guthrie Tait dynasty. He was Vice President of the Institute of Civil Engineers in 1929. He was born on 25 March 1866 at 6 Greenhill Gardens in south-east Edinburgh, the second son of Peter Guthrie Tait and his wife, Margaret Porter. He was named after his maternal uncle, William Archer Porter. He was educated at Edinburgh Academy. From 1881 he studied Engineering at Edinburgh University under Prof Fleeming Jenkin graduating BSc in 1885. He was then apprenticed