His mother was Elizabeth Willard Parkman (31 March 1785 – 14 April 1853), whose father Samuel Parkman (August 22, 1751 – June 11, 1824) was the original source of capital upon which her husband built one of the wealthiest and largest business enterprises in Boston at that time.
Harvard University.
Shaw came from a famous and moneyed Boston family. With a Netto worth of $1,000,000 dollars in 1846, Shaw"s father (Robert Gould Shaw, 1776 – 1853) was one of the wealthiest men in Boston. George Parkman (February 19, 1790 – November 23, 1849), a wealthy Boston physician who was murdered in 1849 in a gruesome and highly publicized case, was Elizabeth"s brother.
Parkman"s 1849 book, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life is dedicated to Shaw.
Shaw"s older brother Francis George Shaw (October 23, 1809 – November 7, 1882) was an outspoken advocate of the abolition of slavery. The latter was a colonel in the Volunteer Army of the United States during the American Civil War, and commander of the all-black 54th Regiment.
Colonel Robert Gould Shaw was killed in action during the Second Battle of Fort Wagner in 1863. On November 30, 1860, Shaw married Pauline Agassiz (February 6, 1841 – February 10, 1917), daughter of Louis Agassiz and the step daughter of Elizabeth Cabot Cary.
They had five children: Pauline, Marian, Louis Agassiz Shaw, Senior
(September 18, 1861 – July 2, 1891), Quincy Adams (July 30, 1869 – May 8, 1960), and Robert Gould II (1873–1930). Shaw"s grandson, Louis Agassiz Shaw, Junior., is credited along with Philip Drinker for inventing the Drinker respirator, the first widely used iron lung. Shaw retained that position for only a few months before Alexander Emanuel Agassiz (another brother-in-law) took over.
In his Boston Daily Globe obituary, Shaw was named "the heaviest individual taxpayer in Massachusetts" and "the head of the family whose members in various ways have done much to promote the educational and commercial interests of Boston.".
