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Margaret Elizabeth Breckinridge was born on 24 Mar 1832 in Philadelphia, Philadelphia Pennsylvania. Her father was Reverend John B. Breckinridge, DD, (1797-1841) and a granddaughter of John Breckinridge (1760-1806), a United States Senator (1801-1805) and Attorney General of the United States (1805-1806) in the Cabinet of President Thomas Jefferson. Her mother, Margaret Miller, was the daughter of Reverend Samuel Miller (1769-1850), teacher at Princeton Theological Seminary in New Jersey.
Margaret's mother died when she was six years old. Margaret and her sister, Mary, went to live with their maternal grandparents at Princeton. Their father died three years later.
In 1850, Margaret, age 18, (shown as N Brekenridge in the record), was living with her widowed grandmother, Sarah Sergeant Miller, in Princeton, Mercer, New Jersey, United States. [1]
Name | Sex | Age | Occupation | Birth Place |
---|---|---|---|---|
Sarah Miller | F | 72 | New Jersey | |
Mary Miller | F | 40 | New York | |
N Breckenridge | F | 18 | Pennsylvania | |
John Miller | M | 31 | New York | |
Margaret B Miller | F | 29 | New Jersey | |
Margaret Miller | F | 3 | Maryland | |
Allemby Miller | M | 1 | Maryland | |
Bridget Riley | F | 25 | Ireland | |
Elisa M Kinley | F | 25 | Ireland |
Prior to the Civil War, she was a Sunday-school teacher.
Margaret organized a Soldiers' Aid Society in Princeton to donate food and clothing to the Union soldiers. She really wanted to serve as a nurse. In the second year of the Civil War (1862), she visited hospitals in Baltimore, Maryland, then near the home of her cousin in Lexington, Kentucky. She nursed wounded and ill soldiers during month-long trips on the Mississippi River hospital ships, transporting them from Vicksburg, Mississippi to Saint Louis, Missouri.
As one author wrote, "with her slight form, her bright face, and her musical voice, she seemed a ministering angel to the sick and suffering soldiers, while her sweet womanly purity and her tender devotion to their wants made her almost an object of worship among them." She would make tea and toast, dress "ghastly wounds for the sufferers," and sing hymns and talk "of spiritual things with the sick and dying."
Two years later, she returned to her native Philadelphia to better learn nursing for surgical cases. There, she practiced the washing and dressing of wounds, and on June 2, 1864, she contracted the bacterial skin infection, erysipelas, . The following day, her former brother-in-law, Colonel Peter Porter, was killed in action in Virginia, and she went to Baltimore, Maryland, to comfort family members. After a week there, she proceeded to Niagara, New York, exhausted. She was ill for the following five weeks with typhoid fever, and passed away on 27 Jul 1864 at age 32. The death record shows that occurred in Princeton, Mercer, New Jersey. She is buried in Oakwood Cemetery in Niagara Falls, Niagara, New York near her mother's grave. [2][3]
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B > Breckenridge > Margaret Elizabeth Breckenridge
Categories: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | Princeton, New Jersey | Oakwood Cemetery, Niagara Falls, New York | Nurses, United States Civil War