Henry Morton Stanley was born at Denbigh in North Wales, the illegitimate son of John Rowlands and Elisabeth Parry - on the birth register of St. Hilary's Church he was entered as "John Rowlands, Bastard". Stanley's father died in a potato field in 1846; he was seventy-five. Abandoned by his mother, Stanley spent his early years in the custody of his two uncles and his maternal grandfather. After his grandfather died, he was consigned at the age of six to the St. Asaph Workhouse, where male adults "took part in every possible vice," as an investigative commission reported in 1847. However, Stanley received a fair education and he became a voracious reader. At fifteen, Stanley left St. Asaph's and stayed some years with his relatives. At seventeen, he ran away to sea and landed in New Orleans. There Stanley gave himself a new name. First he was known as "J. Rolling", but eventually he settled on Henry Morton Stanley after the cotton broker Henry Stanley, for whom he worked in New Orleans.
After the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, Stanley joined the Confererate Army, but later he enlisted in the Union Army. In 1864 he served as a clerk at the frigate Minnesota. During the following years, Stanley led a roving life in America, working mostly as a free-lance journalist. He also went to Turkey and Asia Minor as a newspaper correspondent. In 1867-1868 he was a special correspondent for the New York Herald.
In 1871 Stanley started his expedition to East Africa. To Katie Gough-Roberts, a young woman living in Denbigh, he sent a number of letters, and planned to marry her after the journey. However, she married an architect. Although he was deserted by his bearers, plagued by disease and warring tribes but he found Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika in Ujiji on November 10, 1871. Together they explored the northern end of Lake Tangayika - Richard Francis Burton claimed Lake Tangayika as the source of the River Nile. Livingstone had journeyed extensively in central and southern Africa from 1840 and fought to destroy the slave trade. Livingstone died in 1873 on the Shores of Lake Bagweulu. His body was shipped back to England and buried in Westminster Abbey - Stanley was one of the pall-bearers.