Belle da Costa Greene was born and raised in the neighborhood of
Georgetown,
Washington, D.C. as
Belle Marion Greener. Although her birth date is sometimes noted as December 13, 1883, her biographer Heidi Ardizzone gives Greene's birth date as November 26, 1879. Her maternal grandfather, James H. Fleet, was an
abolitionist and founding member of the Mount Zion
United Methodist congregation in Georgetown, whose church served as a station of the
Underground Railroad in
Antebellum Washington. He went on to work as an attorney, professor and racial justice activist and served as dean of the
Howard University School of Law. After Greene took the job with Morgan, she likely never spoke to her father again and listed him as deceased on passport applications throughout the 1910s, though he lived until 1922. She may have met him once in
Chicago around 1913, but no written records of this meeting are known. Historians have long believed that Richard Greener had lost most of his papers in the
1906 San Francisco earthquake. After her parents' separation, the light-skinned Belle, her mother, and her siblings
passed as white and changed their surname to Greene to distance themselves from their father. Her mother changed her maiden name to Van Vliet in an effort to assume Dutch ancestry. Belle also made a change to her name, swapping out Marion for "da Costa", and claiming a
Portuguese background to explain her darker complexion. The changes to her and her family's stated ancestry resulted in further fabrications, including one that led people to believe Greene had been raised in Virginia. The true nature of her background was further complicated by Greene's claim to be younger than she was, an action biographer Heidi Ardizzone describes as "a masquerade" in response to a youth-focused society in which "single women past a certain age were disdained". == Education ==