James D. Watson was born in Chicago on April 6, 1928, as the only son of Jean (née Mitchell) and James D. Watson, a businessman descended mostly from colonial English immigrants to America. His mother's father, Lauchlin Mitchell, a tailor, was from Glasgow, Scotland, and her mother, Lizzie Gleason, was the child of parents from County Tipperary, Ireland. Raised Catholic, he later described himself as "an escapee from the Catholic religion." Watson said, "The luckiest thing that ever happened to me was that my father didn't believe in God."