Beverly Vance, the Ohio senator's mother, received his sister Lindsay for the first time in 1979, when Beverly was 19. She and Donald B...
Beverly Vance, the Ohio senator's mother, received his sister Lindsay for the first time in 1979, when Beverly was 19. She and Donald Bowman welcomed JD five years later, in 1984.
However, when JD was a toddler, his father abandoned the family, leaving him under the care of his mother. Beverly suffered with substance misuse and addiction when JD was growing up, and she allegedly became harsh to her child at times. JD was eventually entrusted in the care of his grandparents, James and Bonnie Vance, both union Democrats, whom he credits with his upbringing.
JD wrote about his youth in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which was eventually made into a film with Amy Adams as Beverly and Glenn Close as Bonnie.
"You're not always going to agree with every vote that I take, and you're not going to agree with every single amendment that I offer in the United States Senate, but I will never forget the woman who raised me," he said in his victory speech, thanking his grandmother after being elected to the United States Senate in 2022.
On January 20, JD will be sworn in as President Donald Trump's vice president.
Here's all you need to know about JD Vance's parents, including how they influenced his childhood and what he's said about being raised by his grandparents.
Beverly has two children.
Beverly gave birth to JD's older sister, Lindsay, in 1979 before having JD, born James Donald Bowman, in 1984. According to JD's memoir Hillbilly Elegy, the siblings grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a community with a predominantly low-income population.
Following the publishing of his biography, many Middletown locals were outraged by the image of their town as a hillbilly town, which JD's cousin Bonnie Meiber recalled him describing in her personal article for the Journal News in November 2020.
"I don't blame Middletown for the dysfunction that existed in our family," Meiber told him. "Some of Middletown's defensiveness stems from pride of place. I am proud of Middletown. I do not disagree with that instinct. However, you must acknowledge that some families grow raised in poverty as a result of causes beyond Middletown's control. There's a lot of drug misuse.
Donald left the family when JD was a toddler.
JD's parents divorced when he was six years old, after his father had left the family a few years earlier. In Hillbilly Elegy, he described how his mother told him about the breakup by assuring him that he would never see his biological father again.
"It was the saddest I had ever felt," he stated in his memoir. "Of all the things I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures."
Beverly, a nurse, suffered with substance abuse.
Beverly worked as a nurse and had access to prescription drugs, which she began to abuse. Beverly struggled with substance misuse as JD grew up, generating significant dysfunction and anger at home, according to the senator's 2016 memoir.Beverly was arrested when JD was 12 years old, which made him feel both afraid and relieved.
"In that moment, I just felt relieved and thought to myself, 'Alright, I'm going to live another day,'" he told Megyn Kelly in 2017. "I simply wanted the incident to end, and then I broke down. I was just so unhappy and lonely because I was sitting in the back of this police cruiser, they had just arrested my mother, the relief of having survived another day had faded, and all I wanted was someone to come and take me away."
Beverly got married five times.
Beverly was in a series of relationships after parting from Donald, which resulted in JD having a rotating door of father figures. She eventually married her third husband, Bob Hamel, who adopted JD and renamed him James David Hamel, substituting her ex-husband's first name with her uncle's to keep the "JD" nickname."This seemed like a bit of a stretch even when I was six," JD writes in his memoir. "Any old D name would have done, so long as it wasn't Donald."
However, Beverly and Hamel later separated, leading JD's name to change again.
"One of the worst parts, honestly, was that Bob's departure would further complicate the tangled web of last names in our family," he said.
JD eventually adopted his maternal surname, Vance, once his grandparents became his carers.
JD was left in the care of his grandparents after Beverly reportedly assaulted him.
Beverly's substance usage troubles allegedly deteriorated, and she grew increasingly abusive to JD. In one terrifying event, he was driving with his mother when she allegedly accelerated to "what seemed like a hundred miles per hour and told me that she was going to crash the car and kill us both," he writes in his memoir.
She ultimately slowed down so she could reach into the backseat and beat him, he claimed, and he got out of the car and ran to a neighbor's house, where he contacted the cops.
JD was eventually placed in the care of his grandparents, whom he described as "without question or qualification, the best things that ever happened to me."
Donald returned to JD's life when he was a teenager.
When JD was a teenager, his father briefly returned to his life and rejected the now-VP candidate's musical preferences, which included Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Eric Clapton."When we first reconnected, he made it clear that he didn't care for my taste in classic rock, especially Led Zeppelin," according to his memoir. "He just advised that I listened to Christian rock instead."
JD became a fervent Catholic later in life, and was baptised in 2019 at the age of 35.
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