Ethel Marion Smith was born to Jeanette (Waitt) and Robert Bradford Smith in Malden, Massachusetts on February 15, 1888. She earned a degree from Salem Normal School in 1908 and taught at high schools in Augusta, Maine and Everett and Barre, Massachusetts. In 1915 she accepted a teaching position with the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society, fulfilling her ambition to become a missionary. Initially stationed in the Ungkung mission in the Kwangtung (Guangdong) province of southeast China, she met a missionary physician, Henry Newman. The two married in 1916. Robert staffed hospitals while Ethel taught at girls' schools. The Newmans had four children: Robert, Henry, James, and William. Ethel continued to teach as she raised the children. In 1918 and 1919, Henry, Sr. worked in Siberia to aid with a typhus outbreak while Ethel and the children spent time in the United States. The family returned to mission in 1920, taking posts in China's Jiangsu province. They resettled in the United States permanently in 1925. Ethel Smith Newman died in January 1956, Henry Newman, Sr., in December 1962.