[4] Her ancestry consisted of Welsh, English, Scottish, French, and distant Dutch heritage; her paternal grandfather was an immigrant from Bedminster, Bristol in England, and many of her recent forebears had lived in Canada.

The parents were dysfunctional and unhappy[7] and sometimes prone to violent fights;[6] they moved Dorothy around various schools,[3] and paid only occasional attention to the children, before divorcing in 1927.

[4] The children were then sent on a train by themselves, unsupervised (Dorothy was eight years old, Isabelle only three), to live with their paternal grandparents in the Los Angeles suburb of Alhambra, California.

[11] After Dorothy was caught trick-or-treating one Halloween, an activity the grandparents forbade, she was confined to her room for an entire year except for attending school, and reportedly not even allowed to eat in the kitchen or play in the yard.

[7][10] Dorothy left home at the young age of fourteen in the depths of the Great Depression, working as a housekeeper, cook, and nanny for a San Gabriel, California family, being paid $3 a week.

"[6] Hillary Rodham Clinton later attributed her interest in children's welfare to her mother's life as well as her belief that caring adults outside of family can fill a child's emotional voids.

[6] While applying for a job as a clerk typist at a textile company, she met a traveling salesman named Hugh Ellsworth Rodham,[4] eight years her senior, in 1937.

[16] The second child, a son named Hugh, was born in 1950 and during that year, the growing Rodham family moved into a two-story, three-bedroom house in suburban Park Ridge, Illinois.

Dorothy was a full-time homemaker, not only raising the three children but taking pride in her decorating sense, as she provided the house with cozy furniture, antiques, stained-glass windows, and attractive curtains from her husband's business.

[13] During the 1970s, once her children were grown up, Rodham took courses at Oakton Community College in a variety of subjects, receiving high grades and earning an associate's degree in liberal arts.

[7] She spent more time at the White House and accompanied Hillary and Chelsea on visits to France, India, and China; she also enjoyed life in Washington, D.C.[11] At the 1996 Democratic National Convention, when Bill Clinton was nominated for re-election, she appeared in a video message, saying "Everybody knows there is only one person in the world who can really tell the truth about a man, and that's his mother-in-law.

[20] Once living alone became too much for her,[19] in 2006, she moved into the Clintons' large Whitehaven house in the Kalorama neighborhood of Washington, D.C.[7][20][21] There she would often sit and discuss the day when her daughter came home from work.