The Rouse family originated in Holland and moved to the United States in the nineteenth century. They were very early settlers of the Santa Cruz mountains, where Phillip Ellsworth Rouse was born in 1899. Phil lived all of his life in Northern California, where he owned and operated a fruit ranch. (He snuck off tried to an enlist for World War I, but he was too young and got caught.) Phil married Anna Benson in 1922. Their only daughter, Marjorie Lillian Allen, was born in 1924 in San Jose, California. Marjorie married Loren Allen in 1957 and had a daughter, Emily Allen, in 1964, the same year the family moved to Santa Barbara.