Maria Louisa Bustill
American quaker school teacher
Maria Louisa Bustill Robeson (November 8, 1853 – January 20, 1904) was an American Quaker schoolteacher; the wife of the Reverend William Drew Robeson of Witherspoon Street Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey and the mother of Paul Robeson and his siblings.
Early life and education
Maria Louisa Bustill (sometimes called Louisa as a child) was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, of Igbo, Lenni-Lenape Native American, and Anglo-American descent. Her parents were Charles Hicks Bustill and Emily Robinson, prominent black Quakers.
In the 1870s, Louisa attended Lincoln University, a historically black university in Oxford, Pennsylvania. She was already a teacher when she met William Drew Robeson. Both she and her sister Gertrude married men who were Lincoln graduates, but her family thought Louisa had "married down" by choosing Robeson.
Marriage and family
Bustill's ancestors had been free since the mid-1700s, when her great-grandfather Cyrus Bustill was freed after several years of service to a new owner in Burlington, New Jersey. He moved into Philadelphia where he built a business as a baker. Cyrus Bustill became one of the founders in Philadelphia of the Free African Society in 1787. Other family had genealogical records going back to the early days of the Pennsylvania colony.
The public source identifies “Maria Louisa Bustill” as american quaker school teacher. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Maria, Louisa and Bustill.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maria Louisa Bustill” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.