Paris..........the city of lights..............he was born in Paris.....to hide his identity..........Paul C...........grew up in Virginia Beach, VA............so he had me by a woman........in California to hide my identity............................


James Smithson was born in c. 1765 to Hugh Percy, 1st Duke of Northumberland and Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie.^[4] His mother was the widow of James Macie, a wealthy man from Weston, Bath.^[5] An illegitimate child, Smithson was born in secret in Paris, resulting in his birth name being the Francophone Jacques-Louis Macie (later altered to James Louis Macie). In 1801 when he was about 36, after the death of his again-widowed mother, he changed his last name to Smithson, the original surname of his biological father.^[6][4][7] (Baronet Hugh Smithson had changed his surname to Percy when he married Lady Elizabeth Seymour, already a baroness and indirect heiress of the Percy family, one of the leading landowning families of England).
James was educated and eventually naturalised in England.^[5] He enrolled at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1782 and graduated in 1786, later being promoted to MA.^[8][9] The poet George Keate was a first cousin once removed, on his mother's side.
Smithson was nomadic in his lifestyle, travelling throughout Europe.^[4] As a student, in 1784, he participated in a geological expedition with Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond, William Thornton and Paolo Andreani of Scotland and the Hebrides.^[10] He was in Paris during the French Revolution.^[4] In August 1807 Smithson became a prisoner of war while in Tönning during the Napoleonic Wars. He arranged a transfer to Hamburg, where he was again imprisoned, now by the French. The following year, Smithson wrote to Sir Joseph Banks and asked him to use his influence to gain release; Banks succeeded and Smithson returned to England.^[11] He never married or had children.^[4]
In 1766, his mother had inherited from the Hungerford family of Studley, where her brother had lived up until his death.^[12] His controversial legal step-father John Marshe Dickinson (aka Dickenson) of Dunstable died in 1771.^[13]Smithson's wealth stemmed from the splitting of his mother's estate with his half-brother, Col. Henry Louis Dickenson.^[12]