Incidents in chapter 1

In Chapter 1, Keller offers a brief sketch of her family history and then moves into her own story. She recounts being born as a baby who could hear and see, until at 19 months an illness, which it was feared would kill her, left her deaf and blind.
In this first chapter, Keller recounts themes that will recur in the memoir: the love and safety provided by her mother, and the great divide Helen experienced between the time when she enjoyed life with all of her five senses and what she calls the "nightmare" of losing two of them.
Miss Sullivan, though not named, also is mentioned, the person Keller says "was to set my spirit free." This is a fitting, if fleeting, introduction to the woman who has the largest presence, after Helen, in this memoir. Keller also mentions her love of flowers, which she could smell and feel even after her illness, as well as her general love of nature. The chapter gives us a strong sense of her background and early life.

Some important incidents in Chapter One of “The Story of my Life” are:
Before writing her autobiography, Helen is beset by a sort of fear at delving into her childhood. She discovers that most of her childhood is now colored differently as she looks at it through the lenses of a grown woman.
Helen Keller was born on the 27th day of June 1880, in Tuscumbia, Northern Alabama. Her father descended from the Swiss, Casper Keller a settler in Maryland. One of her Swiss ancestors was a teacher of the deaf. Her father, Arthur H. Keller, was a captain in the army. Her mother, Kate Adams, was her father’s second wife. Helen was named after her grandmother, Helen Everett. However, at church, her father quite forgot the second name “Everett”, and instead gave her the name Helen Adams.
Helen walked at the age of one year.
One spring, at about nineteen months, Helen suffered from an “acute congestion of the stomach and brain”. The disease left her both blind and deaf.