Mary Savage Jones Anderson (1873-1958) was the granddaughter of George Noble Jones (1811-1876) and his second wife Mary Wallace Savage Jones (1812-1869) through their son George Fenwick Jones (1841-1876) and his wife, Anna Wylly Habersham (1849-1888). Born in Savannah, Georgia, she married Clarence Gordon Anderson Jr. in 1905. He was the son of Clarence Gordon Anderson Sr. (1846-1925) and Florida Laura Lamar (1848-1935).

Mary and Clarence lived in the Savannah area throughout their marriage. After the death of Clarence’s father, his mother Florida lived with them. Later in life they lived with Mary’s sister, Josephine Noble Jones Crisfield (1872-1953) in Chatham, George. Mary died in 1958 and Clarence in 1961.

The letters in this collection cover a period when Mary travelled in Italy, writing to her husband back in Savannah from on board the "S.S. Adriatic," from Spain, and from Italy. She traveled with her aunt Sarah Campbell Jones (1843-1925), who went by the name Lillie Noble Jones, and her niece Lillie Habersham Crisfield (later Dixon, 1896-1963), who was the daughter of her sister Josephine Jones Crisfield. Lillie Noble Jones had moved to Rome, Italy for her health in 1906. Wallace Savage Jones (1844-1902), Lillie’s brother, was the U.S. Consul General in Rome from 1893-1897, and died there in 1902. Lillie filed her will in 1918 and died in Rome, at 21 Via Po, in 1925.

Mary, her aunt Lillie, her sister Josephine, and her niece Lillie were members of the Jones family, whose ancestors had operated plantations with the labor of enslaved people in the antebellum South. Their ancestor Noble Jones (ca. 1770-1775) established Wormsloe Plantation near Savannah, Georgia in 1736. His son Noble Wimberly Jones (1723-1805) was physician and statesman who was prominent in the American Revolution and was a delegate to the Continental Congress, a cause of friction between him and his Loyalist father.

Noble Wimberly Jones’s great-grandson was Mary and Josephine’s grandfather George Noble Jones, who owned the El Destino and Chemonie cotton plantations in Florida. He hired Richard Upjohn to build the George Noble Jones Villa in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1839. The house, now known as Kingscote, served as Jones’s summer home, but his mother Sarah Campbell Jones (1784-1843) and one of his sisters (either Sarah Fenwick Jones, 1814-1869, or more likely Mary Gibbons Jones, 1816-1875), lived there year-round. This mansion was an early example of the Gothic Revival architectural style and one of the first Newport “cottages.” Bellevue Avenue, where the mansion stands, was an agricultural road in 1839, but would become a boulevard for America’s wealthiest families to build their summer homes. At the time of its construction, the mansion would have had views of the Atlantic Ocean and Newport Harbor, views now obscured by newer buildings and trees. The Jones family left Newport permanently at the beginning of the American Civil War, selling Kingscote to William Henry King in 1864. Kingscote is now owned and maintained by the Preservation Society of Newport County.