Wade Hampton Frost was greatly interested in his ancestry, and his antecedents certainly had more than casual meaning for him. He corresponded with relatives in South Carolina, in England, and elsewhere to piece together his family tree. In fact, the Frost family was a prominent one in South Carolina, and Frost was able to collect published accounts of his forebears as well as pedigrees. Figure 2.1 illustrates this interest. It is a family tree in Frost’s handwriting tracing his ancestry back through his paternal grandmother, Mary Deas Lesesne (1807–1866), who married Henry Rutledge Frost, a prominent physician in Charleston, South Carolina. Three prior generations carried this lineage back to John Deas (1735–1790). Frost’s wife, Susan, shared his interest, and she penciled notes on some of the documents he assembled.

Through correspondence with Horace C. Frost, a distant relative living in England, Frost was able to obtain a pedigree of the Frost family beginning with John Frost, who lived in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in Pulham, Norfolk County, England, and extending through nine generations to Thomas Frost, who emigrated from England to South Carolina in 1785. There were five early colonists named Frost who left England for the new world, most of them not closely related. Thomas Frost was the last to arrive. His lineage to Wade Hampton Frost is well documented, and it is of interest to us—as it certainly was to Frost—to consider who these early American Frost forebears were and what sort of men and women they were. They were well educated. They were productive citizens. They were leading members of their churches. They were steeped in a growing family tradition of service. Wade Hampton Frost’s great grandfather was a clergyman. His grandfather was a leading physician of his times and a professor of medicine specializing in pharmacology. His father was a much loved physician devoted to the care of his patients and also a founder of his local county medical society.

The first member of the Frost line in America was Thomas Frost, born in 1758 in England. He studied for the ministry at Caius College, Cambridge. Although he seemed not to take his studies seriously at the time, he nevertheless received his degree with honors.