Constructing an accurate account of Bacheller's life has been hindered in large part by Bacheller's two desultory autobiographies, Coming Up the Road: Memories of a North Country Boyhood (1928) and From Stores of Memory (1938), which include few specific dates. The one available biography on Bacheller, a 1952 doctoral dissertation, relies heavily on these autobiographies, as do most of the hagiographic accounts of his life written by those who knew him. Only in the 1990s has scholarly work been carried out on Bacheller's early life that has employed sources other than the autobiographies in order to confirm or correct Bacheller's accounts.
Born on 26 September 1859, Addison Irving Bacheller--named by his mother, who revered writers Joseph Addison and Washington Irving--came from old New England stock. The family of his father, Sanford Paul Bacheller, emigrated from Vermont in the 1830s to the St. Lawrence River valley area of Upstate New York, and his mother, Achsah Ann Buckland Bacheller, was from Massachusetts and a descendant of Mayflower settlers John Alden and Priscilla Mullins. Irving was the sixth of seven children, with two older sisters, Elvira and Sarah, and four brothers, Loren, Burton, Arthur, and Wilbur; all his siblings, except Elvira and Wilbur, died at relatively young ages.
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