Doria Loyce Ragland was born on September 2, 1956, in
Cleveland,
Ohio to nurse Jeanette Arnold (1929–2000) and her second husband Alvin Azell Ragland (1929–2011), Ragland's maternal grandparents, James and Nettie Arnold, worked at the
Hotel St. Regis on
Euclid Avenue in Cleveland, he as a
bellhop and she as an
elevator operator, while her great-grandfather, Jeremiah Ragland, had his own tailor shop business in
Chattanooga, Tennessee in the 1920s where he worked as a presser. Her parents moved to
Los Angeles when she was a baby who is near Ragland's age; the two remained close after that marriage also ended in divorce. Ragland has two older maternal half-siblings, Joseph (known as "JJ"; 1949–2021) and Saundra Johnson (born 1952), and a younger paternal half-brother, Alvin Joffrey Ragland. Various contemporary records state that the Ragland family descended from Richard "Dick" Ragland, born into slavery c.1792 in
Chatham County,
North Carolina; his son Stephen Ragland (1848–1926) of
Jonesboro in
Georgia, lived long enough to experience the
abolition of slavery in 1865. The family's Ragland surname came from slave-owner William Ragland, a
Methodist planter and land speculator who had emigrated during the eighteenth century from
Cornwall, England to North America. Doria's daughter
Meghan Markle has claimed that a genealogy test revealed that she is 43%
Nigerian. ==Career and education==