Glenn Herbert Gould was born at home in Toronto, on 25 September 1932, to Russell Herbert Gold (1901–1996) and Florence Emma Gold (née Greig; 1891–1975), Presbyterians of Scottish, English, and Norwegian ancestry. His maternal grandfather, John Charles Holman Greig, was a cousin of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, although John and his family spelled their name "Greig." Gould's family's surname was changed to Gould informally around 1939 to avoid being mistaken for Jewish, given the prevailing anti-Semitism of pre-war Toronto and the Jewish associations of the Gold surname. Gould had no Jewish ancestry, though he sometimes made jokes on the subject, such as "When people ask me if I'm Jewish, I always tell them that I was Jewish during the war." His childhood home has been named a historic site.