By the time that he registered for the World War I draft, Frank W. Robertson (b. 1893) had relocated from North Garden, in Albemarle County, to White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. There he worked as an attendant in a resort hotel, as did many young Black men from Central Virginia.

His parents, John and Mary Robertson, a manual laborer and washwoman, owned a small farm. In the late 1910s, Frank moved to the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area, working first as a manual laborer and later as a grocery store clerk.