In 1850, she moved with her family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor of zoology and geology at Harvard University.

[1] It was in the United States, her father remarried Elizabeth Cabot Cary, co-founder of Radcliffe College.

They had five children: Pauline, Marian, Louis Agassiz Shaw, Sr., Quincy Adams, and Robert Gould II.

[3] At the time, thousands of mostly Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants had moved to Boston's North End, many of them poor, unskilled, and non-fluent in English.

[7] She is featured on two walks given by the Jamaica Plain Historical Society: The Monument Square tour which passes the plaque memorializing one of her first kindergartens and the Jamaica Pond tour which passes her home on the shores of the Pond.