John Sebastian Marlow Ward was born in Belize, British Honduras, on 22 December 1885 and clearly the service of God was in his blood, for both his father and grandfather were priests within the Anglican Church

His grandfather, the Reverend Horatio James Ward, (called “Old Horatio” in Gone West) had been vicar of Morville in Shropshire and was also headmaster of Bridgnorth Grammar School. His father, the Reverend Herbert Marlow Ward was a staunch Anglo-Catholic, though unlike Cardinal Newman he never went over to Rome. e ha He had married Alice Carver in      and when their first son, John was born, they were in Belize City, the capital of what is now Belize in Central America, where his father was at that time a missionary attached to the Church of St. Mary, Belize City. Herbert Ward then became Rector of that church from 1886 to 1888, after which he returned to England and was appointed Rector of the Church of St. Andrew, Fulham, until 1893 when he became diocesan Inspector of Leicestershire and Rutland. He moved back to Fulham in 1895 then to Wath-on-Dearne in 1897. He remained there for twelve years and then moved to London, to St. Mary the Virgin Church in Soho.

Thus it was that John and his younger brother Reginald, grew up in and near London where the two boys attended the Merchant Taylor’s School. Although three years apart in age, the brothers were close; Reginald was rather plump, whilst Ward himself was always tall and relatively slim. Within the family John was always known as "Jack" and Reginald as "Rex", but in this article, we will continue to call John Ward, "John", the name by which he was known to the world.

John had extremely poor eyesight and wore thick glasses from about six years of age and when he first started wearing them he found them very strange. After leaving the optometrist’s wearing them for the first time his father proposed to send John home alone on the bus and gave him a half-penny for the bus-fare home. “Oh, father,” John apparently said, “the fare is ha’pence and you have only given me a farthing”. Not until his father had shown him what a farthing now looked like, did he begin to realise that his new glasses made everything look small.

As the family followed the Reverend Herbert Ward from post to post, John Ward’s childhood was a little unsettled, but nevertheless happy.   Later, he was to write of his father, `Truth to tell, the author learnt the foundations of his faith from a most excellent father, a clergyman of the Church of England, who saw to it that he understood what the church stood for without leaning too much to any extreme part." (The Psychic Powers of Christ- Prologue, p. 7).[1].

From the Merchant Taylor’s School John gained an Open Scholarship to Trinity Hall Cambridge and went up in 1905 to read History. He gained his BA in 1908, graduating with honours and majoring in History. He was granted an MA in February 1925, by which time he was also a Fellow of the Royal Economic Society (F.R.E.S.) and Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. (F.R.S.S.)

Three months after going down from Cambridge on 18 December 1908, he was married by his father in Weybridge Parish Church to Eleanor Caroline Lanchester, or 'Carrie' as he called her. She was his second cousin and several years older than he and they had one child, a daughter, born in October 1909 (Gone West, p. 24), whom they named Blanche[2].

From 1908 to 1914 Ward lived a simple family life as a teacher in English secondary schools and also lectured in Cambridge, but the latter year marked the end of his youth and the beginning of his real Quest. Two major life-shaping changes occurred during that year - his twenty-ninth. The first came early in the year, when his uncle Henry Jones Lanchester, (H.J.L.) died, and soon afterwards contacted Ward from the Afterlife. This was Ward’s first intimation that he was mediumistic and the resulting communications showed him that the rather vague teachings about life after death, which is all that his traditional Anglicanism provided, were very far from accurate[3]. The second incident came late in the year, shortly after the outbreak of World War I, when Ward was appointed headmaster of the Anglican Diocesan High School in Rangoon, Burma and it was whilst in the Far East that Ward began to understand the idea of reincarnation.

Together these two discoveries were sufficient to start him on a life-long quest that became his personal voyage of discovery .