As an old man, Divie Bethune McCartee (1820–1900) would write down his life story as a history of the foreign missions movement in America, beginning decades before his birth with the work of his grandparents in New York City. There, his grandfather had been an honorary member of the London Missionary Society, a founder of the New York Missionary Society, and a host to missionaries on their way to foreign fields. In that household, his mother had grown up surrounded by the print culture of foreign missions, learning about the world and anxious to go herself as a missionary, but instead making peace with her role as a vigorous supporter of benevolent causes at home in New York. When talking to a later generation of women missionaries, McCartee said that when he became a medical missionary to China and Japan, he went in her place.