A Guide to JD Vance's Family: The Vice Presidential Candidate's Wife, Kids, Mamaw and More

If you knew anything about JD Vance before Donald Trump picked him to be his running mate in the 2024 presidential election, it's that he was raised by his tough-as-nails Mamaw.

Which, as the junior senator from Ohio first detailed in his 2016 memoir Hillbilly Elegy, was what he called his impressively foul-mouthed maternal grandmother, Bonnie Eloise Blanton Vance. She took him and his older half-sister Lindsay in when their mom Beverly couldn't provide a stable home. 

“Mamaw was in so many ways a woman of contradictions," the 40-year-old said at the Republican National Convention in July while formally accepting his party's nomination for vice president. "She loved the Lord, ladies and gentleman. She was a woman of very deep Christian faith. But she also loved the F-word. I’m not kidding. She could make a sailor blush."

Hillbilly Elegy—which in addition to telling his family's story is a treatise on why rural, working-class communities like the one his Mamaw hailed from have been feeling left behind—put Vance on the map as an in-demand commentator on socioeconomic issues and political grievances during the 2016 presidential election.

And the book itself sprang from a discussion group on "social decline in white America" that he and his then-girlfriend (now wife) Usha Chilukuri organized in 2013 when they were students at Yale Law School.

"I'm one of those guys who really benefits from having sort of a powerful female voice over his left shoulder saying, "Don’t do that, do that,'" Vance said on Megyn Kelly's podcast in 2020. Growing up, that was Mamaw's voice, but now, he added, "it's Usha."

In his book he also credited his wife for encouraging him "to seek opportunities that I didn't know existed."

And now, after only a few years in politics—having just been elected to the U.S. Senate in November 2022—the father of three could end up one rung away from the presidency.

Here's a guide to the Vance family:

JD Vance's revered maternal grandmother whom he calls Mamaw—"Pronounced 'ma'am-aw,'" he clarified in his 2016 best-seller Hillbilly Elegy—was born Bonnie Eloise Blanton on April 16, 1933, in Keck, Ky. She grew up in nearby Jackson with parents Hattie (née Hounshell) and Blaine Blanton, five brothers and two sisters.

Bonnie and James Vance (aka "Papaw") met as kids growing up. Bonnie was 13 and James 16 when she first got pregnant, according to Hillbilly Elegy, upon which they hightailed it out of town to Dayton, Ohio, before settling in Middletown, part of the Cincinnati metropolitan area. (The baby Bonnie gave birth to at 14 survived less than a week, Vance wrote.)

Mamaw and Papaw shared son Jim Vance and daughters Beverly and Lori. Vance also noted that his grandmother suffered at least eight miscarriages between the births of his uncle and mom. 

Mamaw was tough, proud, legendarily profane and fiercely protective, as Vance described her, and was quick to aim a gun in defense of her family (and he detailed some rumors of his grandma firing on occasion, too).

She was Christian but "mistrusted a lot of the parts of institutional Christianity as she saw it," Vance told NPR in 2016. “She saw that people were primarily asking for money and weren't actually that interested in the faith.

Throughout his life, "She really just got me," Vance told NBC News in 2017. "She understood when I needed somebody to ride me. She knew when I needed love and comfort. She knew when she needed to just be sympathetic. She was really smart."

Mamaw died on April 24, 2005, at the age of 72 after battling pneumonia, according to an obituary provided by her family. According to her grandson's book, when they started to go through her things the family found 19 loaded guns stashed around her house.

They concluded that, since she wasn't as spry in her later years, she had so many firearms to make sure "that no matter where she was," Vance said during his Republican National Convention address, "she was within arm's length of whatever she needed to protect her family."

When Glenn Close played Mamaw in Ron Howard's 2020 film adaptation of Hillbilly Elegy, costarring Amy Adams as Beverly, she wore Bonnie's actual glasses.

"Parts of Mamaw are impossible to capture, but I think Glenn did as well as a person can do," Vance told his cousin and former Dayton Daily News reporter Bonnie Meiber (whose mom is his aunt Lori) in 2020. "It's Glenn's take on Mamaw, but she comes pretty close to getting her essence. For people who are curious about what she was like, this is a decent glimpse into who she was."

Vance detailed his complicated relationship with his mother in Hillbilly Elegy. Beverly, who was a trained nurse, struggled with drug and alcohol addiction and could be abusive, he explained, and she had a series of boyfriends. She moved him and his half-sister Lindsay around frequently and, more often than not, the siblings stayed with Mamaw and Papaw.

According to his book, on one occasion Vance lied to a judge about his mom's behavior after she had been arrested for domestic violence, so that he wouldn't be taken away from her and placed in foster care. Talking to NPR's Fresh Air in 2016, he called Beverly a "really wonderful person who tried very hard but also carried around the demons of her youth a little too much."

He also said that, despite his mother's volatility, he had faith that his grandma would protect him, adding, "I knew that she wouldn't let anything too bad happen to me."

At the end of the Hillbilly Elegy film, which came out in November 2020, the credits note that Beverly had been sober for six years. Her niece Bonnie reported that she'd seen her aunt, who'd become a regular at AA meetings, get her five-year sober coin that January.

"I've quit lots of times and always thought that was the last time and I don't know why it really was the last time," Beverly told Bonnie. "I wish I knew what it was, because if I knew what it was I would bottle it and sell it. I don’t know what happens to you to make you finally decide that enough is enough."

Beverly, who joined Vance onstage at the RNC in July, told the New York Times in September that her son's book was "heartbreaking in some parts. But it helped us grow as a family, and it opened up a line of communication that we never really had."

Now working at a substance abuse treatment center, Beverly said she'd been sober for almost 10 years. And, while she said she preferred not to pay attention to the more fraught headlines about the presidential race, she supported her son.

"You see this hometown boy who's doing so good, you would think no matter what your politics, you would just want to get behind him and root him on," she said. And since she was "ignoring the bad," she explained, "I also have to ignore the good. I can live in my own little bubble and be comfortable."

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance recalled his mother picking him up from kindergarten one day and telling him his dad "didn’t want me anymore."

"It was the saddest I had ever felt," he wrote. "Of all the things I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures."

The vice presidential candidate was born James Donald Bowman to Beverly and her second husband, Donald Bowman. They split up when their son was a toddler and Donald allowed for a 6-year-old Vance to be adopted by Beverly's third husband, Bob Hamel, according to Hillbilly Elegy.

Beverly subsequently changed her son's name to James David Hamel in order to get her ex out of the picture but preserve his nickname, which was already J.D. (he dropped the periods later).

"This seemed a bit of a stretch even when I was six," Vance wrote in his book. "Any old D name would have done, so long as it wasn't Donald."

When Beverly and Bob split up, Vance remained a Hamel (including during his time in the Marine Corps) while his mother took the last name of "whatever husband she was married to," he wrote. When he got married, he and wife Usha took the name Vance, "giving me, finally, the same name as the family to which I belonged."

Donald died at 64 in November 2023. An obituary noted he was survived by his wife of 35 years and five children, including Vance.

P.S. JD dropped the periods in his moniker in 2021, when he got into politics, according to the Associated Press, which confirmed through a spokesman for his Senate campaign that his initials sans punctuation were his preferred styling.

Vance's half-sister Lindsay, who's five years older, is Beverly's daughter from her first marriage and like her brother was raised primarily by Mamaw and Papaw. (And he wrote in his book that he didn't know about the half part when he was a kid.)

“The kid has never done wrong in my eyes," Lindsay told her cousin Bonnie for the Dayton Daily News in 2020. "[JD] has a part of my soul that nobody will ever have and I'll protect him until the day I die. Whenever things were falling apart, my first thought was always him.”

Lindsay and husband Kevin Ratliff share three children.

Usha Chilukuri was born on Jan. 6, 1986, to dad Krish, a mechanical engineer and university lecturer, and mom Lakshmi, a biologist and college provost. She was raised in San Diego, Calif., where her parents settled after emigrating from India. Usha studied history at Yale and earned a Master of Philosophy at Clare College, Cambridge (as in England).

She met Vance, who graduated from Ohio State University in 2009 with a double major in political science and philosophy, at Yale Law School. 

"We were in all our classes together, so I saw him several hours a day and we were just friends," Usha told NBC News in May 2017. "Then we were assigned to work together on a brief, so were friends, and I liked that he was very diligent. He would show up for these 9 a.m. appointments that I set for us to start working on the brief together."

Vance added with a smile that she "made it very clear that if I didn't show up I would be in trouble." He recalled how "completely forward and comfortable with herself she was."

The couple wed in an interfaith Christian-Hindu ceremony in Kentucky in 2014.

After law school Usha clerked for multiple federal judges, including then-future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and had just been offered a Supreme Court clerkship when she found out she was pregnant in 2016. After giving birth to her first child, Ewan, in early June 2017, she went to work for Chief Justice John Roberts at the end of the following month.

"Usha definitely brings me back to earth a little bit," Vance said on the Megyn Kelly Show podcast in 2020, "and if I maybe get a little bit too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she is way more accomplished than I am."

From 2019 until 2024, once her husband was tapped to be former President Donald Trump's running mate, Usha was a corporate litigator with multistate but San Francisco-based law firm Munger, Tolles & Olson.

In June, before Vance joined the ticket, Usha said on Fox & Friends, “I'm not raring to change anything about our lives right now, but I believe in JD and I really love him, and so we'll just sort of see what happens with our life."

When they sat down with NBC News in May 2017, Usha was 37 weeks pregnant with their first child. The couple had found out as soon as possible that they were having a boy, "because JD, there was no way he could wait," Usha said.

"I think he's going to be a great father," she added. "He's actually a very gentle person. I think that comes across in the way that he tells his story, but we have two dogs, and the way that he treats them, they're like his babies. And so I've seen him with vulnerable creatures for many years now."

Ewan Blane Vance was born June 4, 2017.

They had accepted that the year was going to be "pretty chaotic," Vance told NBC News. "I think of that as a classically hillbilly thing, like you don't plan the baby around your life, you plan your life around the baby. And we'll figure it out."

Their second son, Vivek Vance, was born in February 2020.

Dad marked his son's fourth birthday earlier this year by reading Dr. Seuss' Oh, The Places You'll Go from the Senate floor, knowing the moment would be recorded for posterity.

The Vances welcomed their daughter in December 2021, her dad writing on Instagram (in a since-deleted post, as he's scrubbed his account of everything prior to Aug. 1), "We were blessed with an early Christmas present this year. Everyone please meet Mirabel Rose Vance, our first girl. Mama and baby both doing great, and we're feeling very grateful this Christmas season."

Though Vance has since gone to Washington, his family is based in Cincinnati, where in 2018, according to the New York Times, they purchased a 5,000-square-foot Victorian Gothic home dating back to 1858 for $1.4 million.

When she resigned from her law firm in July, Usha told SFGATE in a statement she planned to "focus on caring for our family."

While speaking at the RNC, Vance said his "most important American dream was becoming a good husband and a good dad. I wanted to give my kids the things that I didn’t have when I was growing up. And that’s the accomplishment that I'm proudest of."

Addressing the kids through the camera, he added, "If you’re watching, Daddy loves you very much, but get your butts in bed, it's 10 o'clock."

(Originally published Oct. 20, 2024, at 6 a.m. PT)