Alfred Moore was born on May 21, 1755, in New Hanover County, North Carolina, the son of Maurice Moore and Anne Granger Moore. He belonged to a powerful colonial family sometimes called “the Family,” a network of Moores and related households that held large tracts of land and exercised substantial legal and political influence in the Cape Fear region. His grandfather, also Maurice Moore, had helped establish Brunswick Town, and other relatives served as judges, legislators, and officials. The family’s prosperity rested on plantation agriculture, commerce, land speculation, and enslaved labor. Moore spent part of his childhood in the lower Cape Fear country but received much of his formal education outside North Carolina. His parents sent him to Boston, where he studied in an environment very different from the plantation society of his birthplace. Standard biographies identify no college degree, but his education prepared him for the law and exposed him to the commercial and intellectual life of a major colonial town. He later read law under his father, an experienced judge. This apprenticeship introduced him to English legal authorities, courtroom procedure, property disputes, and the county networks through which colonial government operated. Family loss arrived early. Maurice Moore died before Alfred had fully established himself, leaving the younger man to inherit both social advantages and adult responsibilities. Alfred was admitted to the bar and began practicing in North Carolina while still in his teens or early twenties. He also inherited property, including enslaved people, and became connected to the political interests of the Cape Fear elite. The approach of revolution placed Moore’s legal training and family loyalties within a rapidly changing political landscape. Many members of the extended Moore family divided over imperial policy, demonstrating that elite kinship did not dictate a single allegiance. Alfred sided with the Patriot cause. Before he became known as an officer, attorney general, or Supreme Court justice, he had been shaped by a privileged but demanding family inheritance, education in Boston, legal apprenticeship under his father, early bereavement, and immersion in the plantation and courthouse culture of southeastern North Carolina.