When was Hamilton born?

In the musical: the opening number tells the orphan's story in a rush — a Scotsman who left, a mother who died — without ever fixing a birth year.

The real story: Hamilton was born on Nevis in the British West Indies, on 11 January of either 1755 or 1757.

His mother, Rachel Faucette, was born in the islands, on Nevis, around 1729, the daughter of a French Huguenot physician and planter and a British mother. As a young woman she married Johann Michael Lavien, a merchant on the Danish island of St. Croix. The marriage was unhappy; around 1750 he had her jailed in the fort at Christiansted for adultery. After her release she left him and their son and went to St. Kitts.

His father, James Hamilton, was the fourth son of Alexander Hamilton, laird of the Grange in Ayrshire, Scotland. As a younger son with no inheritance, he went to the West Indies to try his luck as a merchant, and did poorly. He met Rachel on St. Kitts around 1750. They could not marry: when Lavien divorced her in 1759, Danish law barred her from remarrying. Their two sons, James and Alexander, were born on Nevis outside marriage. In 1765 James took the family to St. Croix, then left them. Rachel died in 1768.

The birth-year puzzle: Hamilton himself gave 1757. But a 1768 St. Croix probate record, made after his mother's death, lists his age in a way that points to 1755. Ron Chernow favors 1755; other historians, including the American National Biography, find 1757 stronger. Two years matter: they decide whether he arrived in New York as a precocious teenager or an ordinary one.

A postscript: Hamilton later named his Manhattan country house the Grange, after his grandfather's Scottish estate — the home of the father who had left him.

Fact-check verdict: the birth year is unresolved, and there is no proof that Hamilton deliberately changed his age. The musical's outline of his parents is accurate; the backstory is richer, and sadder.