The family of Legaré (once spelled L’Egarée) is of the old stock of French Huguenots who furnished the best blood of Carolina. Madame Legaré, an honored ancestress of our subject, being a firm Huguenot, immediately after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes sent to America her only child, Solomon, then seventeen years old; parting with him, as she believed, forever in this life, that he might be saved from peril, and not be tempted to abandon his faith. This boy--called by his descendants “The Huguenot”--went first to Canada, and in 1685 to Charleston, South Carolina. He became the ancestor of a numerous posterity, of which, during the Revolution, thirteen bearing the name were patriot soldiers, active in the cause of American liberty. On the death of her husband, Madame Legaré left her native France and came to America. Here she found her son married, and the father of nine children. She had given him up for religion’s sake; God restored him to her arms, able to minister to her declining years. Her grandson, the great-grandfather of Hugh and Mary Legaré, died in 1774, at the age of seventy-nine. Yet, when the Colonies entered into a compact for mutual defense, he resolutely refused to be put on the list of the “aged and noncombatant,” saying he was able to “shoulder his musket with any man,” besides managing a charger equal to any trooper; he “would not be insulted by being laid aside.” Thus our heroine had a great-grandfather and two grandfathers, besides other relatives, in the patriot army of the Revolution, where youths of sixteen and eighteen often fought beside their grandsires. The father of Miss Legaré married a lady whose grandfather, Alexander Swinton, of a Scottish family, was sent from England, about 1728, as surveyor-general of the province of South Carolina. He lost a large estate by the villainy of executors and guardians; but after his death, Hugh Swinton, his son, was taken to Scotland by his uncle, and educated as became a young gentleman of birth and fortune, being married to a descendant of that John Hayne who fled from the persecution of the Puritans by Charles II. and his bishops, and fixed his home in Carolina. Thus, on both sides, a heritage of honor and religious faith is derived from her ancestors by the lady who fills a place in our humble annals.