George Washington Paddock was born on December 10, 1823 at Vienna in Oneida County, New York. He married Sophronia Sheldon on May 11, 1841. Paddock entered the ministry with the Methodist Episcopal Church, and after five years of service with New York's East Genesee Conference was transferred in 1857 to the Kansas and Nebraska Conference. He visited Kansas Territory in the spring of 1857 in preparation for his transfer, and later that year embarked for the territory with his wife and young daughter Leonora. The Paddocks first lived at Kansas Territory's free-state settlement of Council City (later Burlingame), from which Paddock's ministry extended to various communities, including Lawrence, Baldwin City, Wyandot, Quindaro, and Kansas City. They later lived in Wyandot, and then in Leavenworth, where their daughter Ida Imogene was born in November 1861, and where their daughter Leonora died eight months later of scarlet fever. From Leavenworth, they moved to Lawrence, where they survived William Quantrill's attack on the town in August 1863, and where their son Ralph was born in 1865. The Paddocks later returned to New York State, where Reverend Paddock continued in the ministry. Sophronia Paddock died at Rochester, New York on July 7, 1905. Reverend Paddock died at Rochester on January 5, 1908.