Daughter of Col. George E. Waring Jr., Effie Blunt Waring was born on Horace Greeley's farm. She studied painting with Abbott Thayer in Boston, and lived and painted in the family homestead, the Hypotenuse, in Newport, R.I. In 1904 she founded Aquidneck Cottage Industries, a charitable organization that taught local working-class women domestic skills and crafts, e.g., needlework and embroidery (Newport Mercury, 20 October 1933, 3).

George E. Waring Jr. was an author, agriculturalist, and sanitary engineer, and a close friend of Cable, Clemens, and James R. Osgood. In 1855 he managed Horace Greeley's farm at Chappaqua, N.Y. After the Civil War, where he commanded the Fourth Missouri Cavalry, he retired his commission to manage Ogden Farm, a model farm in Newport, R.I. Waring wrote both husbandry manuals and bucolic novels, several of which were published by Osgood. In the late 1870s, Waring designed toilets, and from there moved on to design entire sewer systems to alleviate the cholera epidemic at Memphis. In 1895 he established the first organized street cleaning department in New York City. In 1898 William McKinley sent Waring to Cuba to survey sanitary issues, but he contracted yellow fever and died at home in October 1898.

The first wife of Col. George E. Waring Jr., and mother of Effie, Virginia Waring died in 1891 in Newport, R.I. (Newport Mercury, 12 December 1891, 1).