Maynard Shipley was born on 1 December 1872 in Baltimore, Maryland.  He was the fourth of six sons.  Elmon Shipley, the family’s patriarch, could trace his American ancestors back to seventeenth-century Maryland.  His mother, Sarah Armitage Jerome, came from a prominent Baltimore family.  In Miriam Allen de Ford’s biography of Shipley, she wrote Elmon was “about as bad a husband and father as can be imagined—a domestic tyrant, a philanderer, and a paragon of refined selfishness.”  Elmon made a good living and was religious for a time, but eventually moved into the wholesale liquor business, which had him out of church and becoming a free-thinker.  This last influenced Maynard greatly.  In 1887, Elmon deserted the family.