Thomas Stearns Eliot was born on 26 September 1888 in the mid-west frontier town of St Louis, near the confluence of the broad Missouri and Mississippi rivers. His parents were of New England descent. On the paternal side, several of his ancestors had been Boston merchants; one, a Congregationalist, declined to leave his ministerial post after being elected President of Harvard University. They were the descendants of Andrew Eliot, who emigrated to America in 1669 from his home in the village of East Coker, near Yeovil, Somerset. The ashes of T. S. Eliot were buried, about three months after his death in January 1965, in the church of his ancestral parish, and there, in the north-west corner of St Michael's, East Coker, a plaque was unveiled to his memory the following September. "In my end is my beginning."