no image
Privacy Level: Open (White)

Jane (Franklin) Mecom (1712 - 1794)

Jane Mecom formerly Franklin
Born in Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts Bay Colonymap
Ancestors ancestors
Wife of — married 27 Jul 1727 in Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts Bay Colonymap
Descendants descendants
Died at age 82 in Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, United Statesmap
Problems/Questions Profile manager: CC Lee private message [send private message]
Profile last modified | Created 28 Feb 2010
This page has been accessed 5,700 times.

Biography

Notables Project
Jane (Franklin) Mecom is Notable.

Jane Franklin Mecom was remarkable in one important respect: because she was her brother's sister, many of her letters were saved. She gives a voice to a largely voiceless element of late colonial New England, allowing an insight into their largely lost experiences of America's founding era. ....

Jane Franklin Mecom (1712–1794) was the youngest sister of Benjamin Franklin. She wrote to him all her life and many of their letters survive.

Nothing is known of Jane’s schooling, but it must have been limited at best. Six years younger than Benjamin (1706-1790), she was 11, when he ran away to Philadelphia. Although they saw each other only occasionally during the rest of their lives, their mutual affection transcended time and distance. Their surviving correspondence is more extensive than that between Franklin and almost any other private person.

On July 27, 1727, at the age of fifteen, Jane was married to Edward Mecom (1704-1765), a Boston saddler. He was a colorless individual, poor in heath and in pocket. His major contribution to the family was the fathering of 12 children: Josiah, born in 1729, Edward, (1731), Benjamin (1732), Ebenezer (1735), Sarah (1737), Peter (1739), John (1741), a second Josiah (1743), Jane (1745), James (1746), Mary (1748), and Abiah (1751).

Until the outbreak of the Revolution, Jane Mecom’s life was almost wholly that of a housewife in a tradesman’s family of low income, preoccupied with the births, marriages, and deaths of children and grandchildren, with the struggle to provide food and clothing, and with her sons’ efforts to find careers.

The family lived with or close to her parents, who owned a group of houses at Hanover and Union streets. Here she cared for her father and mother until they died, and here she continued to live for several years, taking in boarders to eke out her husband’s slender income.

Three of her 12 children died in infancy and others seem to have inherited, apparently from their father, physical and mental defects that brought their mother deep distress. Only 3 lived beyond their 33rd birthdays and 2 of these died insane. None of her sons was really successful in his trade, and her daughters were not much luckier in the men they married. Those who grew up to adulthood in many cases had children of their own, only to very soon after die and leave their children for Jane to raise. Her favorite granddaughter died in childbirth, leaving four great-grandchildren for Jane to take care of, in her 70's.

“Sorrows roll upon me like the waves of the sea,” she wrote after the death of a daughter in 1767, but “God is sovereign, and I submit.”

One son, Benjamin Mecom, disappeared during the Battle of Trenton. She struggled, and failed, to keep her children out of debtors' prison, the almshouse, and asylums. She took in boarders to earn money. In 1767, along with her daughters Jenny Mecom and Polly Mecom, she started a small shop to sell caps and bonnets that they created using materials sent from London by a friend of her brother Benjamin.

Ben Franklin wrote his autobiography. Jane wrote what she called her 'Book of Ages' the story of her life, just 14 pages long.....

When Benjamin Franklin died in 1790, he left his sister Jane the house in which she lived in his last Will, and she continued to live there until she died. The house was later demolished to make room for a memorial to Paul Revere.

Jane Franklin died on Wednesday May 7, 1794. The funeral was held in her home in Boston’s North End on May 10. “Mourners must have been few,” Lepore writes. “She had outlived almost everyone she’d ever loved.”

No one really knows where she is buried.

The entertaining biography of Jane's life written by Jill Lepore (see sources) contains detailed family trees Lepore’s book is called “Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin” (excerpt below). It’s the story of two 18th century lives. One we know a lot about; the other we don’t but maybe should. The book is based on decades of correspondence that Ben and Jane shared. He wrote more letters to her than he wrote to anyone else.

Sources

Wikipedia - Jane Franklin Mecom

Jill Lepore, Book of Ages: The Life and Times of Jane Franklin, Alfred A Knopf, 2013. Call 920.72 MEC

Not Active - http://b-womeninamericanhistory18.blogspot.com/2011/04/jane-frankli...

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/eam/summary/v004/4.1stern.html A Boston Woman in Revolutionary Times Neremy A. Stern

https://www.geni.com/people/Jane-Mecom/6000000003017900256

See Also






Is Jane your ancestor? Please don't go away!
 star icon Login to collaborate or comment, or
 star icon contact private message the profile manager, or
 star icon ask our community of genealogists a question.
Sponsored Search by Ancestry.com

DNA Connections
It may be possible to confirm family relationships with Jane by comparing test results with other carriers of her mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondrial DNA test-takers in the direct maternal line:

Have you taken a DNA test? If so, login to add it. If not, see our friends at Ancestry DNA.



Comments: 1

Leave a message for others who see this profile.
There are no comments yet.
Login to post a comment.
I really enjoyed Jill Lepore’s book on Jane.
posted by Anonymous Davis

F  >  Franklin  |  M  >  Mecom  >  Jane (Franklin) Mecom

Categories: Notables