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Mrs. Josephine Yates, youngest daughter of Alexander and Parthenia Reeve-Silone, was born in 1859, in Mattituck, Suffolk county, New York, where her parents, grandparents and great-grandparents were long and favorable known as individuals of sterling worth, morally, intellectually and physically speaking. On the maternal side Mrs. Yates is a niece of the Rev. J. B. Reeve, D. D., of Philadelphia, a sketch of whose life appears in "Men of Mark."

Mrs. Silone, a woman of whose noble, self-sacrificing life of piety from early youth to her latest hours volumes might be written, began the work of educating her daughter Josephine in her quiet Christian home, consecrating her to the Lord in infancy, and earnestly praying that above all else the life of her child might be a useful one. Possessed herself of a fair education, she well knew the value of intellectual development, and spared no pains to surround her daughter with all possible means of improvement; the latter, now grown to womanhood, delights to relate that the earliest event of which she has any distinct remembrance is of that sainted mother's taking her upon her knee and teaching her to read from the Bible, by requiring her to call the words after her as she pointed them out.

Josephine was sent to school at an early age and had already been so well advanced by her mother in reading,