Delia Julia Akeley was born in 1869, although over the years, whether due to Delia's own misrepresentation or that of others, her birth year has been given as 1875. She ran away from home in her late teens and made her way to Milwaukee, where she married Arthur Reiss, a barber, in 1889. She was just shy of her 20th birthday, but because of the erroneous attribution of her birth date, virtually every published account states that she was 14 when she married Reiss.
