Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in West Reading, Pennsylvania.[1] She is named after the singer-songwriter James Taylor.[2] Her father, Scott Kingsley Swift, was a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch; her mother, Andrea Gardner Swift (ne Finlay), worked as a mutual fund marketing executive briefly.[3] Her younger brother, Austin, would become an actor.[4] Swift's maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay (ne Moehlenkamp), was an opera singer,[5] whose singing in church became one of Swift's earliest memories of music that shaped her career.[3] Swift is of Scottish, English, and German descent, with distant Italian and Irish ancestry.[6][7][8]