William Sturgis was born 25 February 1782, the son of William Sturgis and Hannah Mills. He was a prominent Boston merchant and co-founder of Bryant and Sturgis, and made his fortune in the China Trade. He married Elizabeth Marston Davis and they had six children, among them two daughters, Ellen (1812-1848) and Caroline (1819-1888). Caroline Sturgis married William Aspinwall Tappan, son of Lewis Tappan, a noted abolitionist, and Susanna Aspinwall; they had two children, Ellen Sturgis Tappan and Mary Aspinwall Tappan. Caroline Sturgis Tappan and her sister, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, were minor Transcendentalist poets whose work was occasionally published in the Dial. They counted among their acquaintances William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and Henry David Thoreau. The sisters, especially Caroline, were also friendly with Margaret Fuller and regularly attended her celebrated "conversations," begun in 1839.

The Tappans lived in Boston and summered in the Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts. In 1936, Mary Aspinwall Tappan and her niece, Rosamond Sturgis Dixey Brooks (Caroline Sturgis Tappan's granddaughter), gave the family's summer estate, Tanglewood, to the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Please see Appendix for more information about the extended Sturgis-Tappan family.