Question

a note on Kate adams in The story of my life

Answer 1

Kate Adams Keller, twenty years younger than her husband, was his second wife.  She was a tall woman, with blue eyes, and had two daughters (Helen and Mildred) with Captain Keller.  She also had a son, Phillips Brooks Keller. 

Helen, who was Kate's oldest child, suggested the name for her little brother (who was eleven years younger).   He was named for Helen's friend, Rev. Phillips Brooks, a noted Boston clergyman (who stood 6' 8" and wrote the lyrics for a familiar Christmas carol - "O Little Town of Bethlehem").

A beautiful young woman, Kate doted on her first-born child, Helen. We learn more about Helen’s mother from Dorothy Herrmann’s biography, Helen Keller: A Life (published, in 1998, by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.):

A tall, statuesque blonde with periwinkle blue eyes and a porcelain complexion, Kate was twenty years younger than her husband, Captain Arthur Henley Keller, with whom she had little in common. A friend once bluntly described Captain Keller as "a gentleman farmer who loved to direct rather than work" and "a man of limited ideas and ability."

But these lacks seem to have been offset by the fact that he was a raconteur as well as a good-natured, hospitable neighbor who was respected in the community. He was also a hunter, who, as Helen admitted later, "next to his family, loved his dog and his gun."

Above all, Captain Keller was a loyal Southerner who had proudly served as a captain in the Confederate Army...

Captain Keller had two grown sons from his first marriage, to Sarah E. Rosser of Memphis, who had died in 1877 at age thirty-eight. Kate got along fairly well with the younger boy, William Simpson, who was a teenager, but she had difficulty coping with James, who was in his early twenties and bitterly resented her. Only nine years older than him, she sensed that he was furious with his father for marrying her only a year after his mother's death.

Before her marriage to the captain, Kate had been a Memphis belle who had been pampered and protected by her father, Charles W. Adams, who was a brigadier general in the Confederate Army. But Kate, unlike her husband, was not a dyed-in-the-wool Southerner.

Although she seldom mentioned them in the provincial postbellum society of Tuscumbia, she had illustrious northern roots. Her father had been born in Massachusetts and was related to the famous Adams family of New England. Later he moved to Arkansas and fought on the side of the South when the Civil War broke out.