Their educations were typical for common men and women of the time, and yet vastly different. Jane would live here for most of her life, while Benjamin would leave to pursue his apprenticeship. The birthplace of Jane and Benjamin Franklin. This, however, did not define the course of his life. Benjamin’s married life also began with little fanfare as he entered a common-law marriage with his landlady’s daughter Deborah - who was already married to a deserting husband - at twenty-four, after fathering an illegitimate child with another women. She became Jane Mecom at fifteen, married to an unremarkable and increasingly troublesome saddler of twenty-two, Edward Mecom, who simply moved himself into the Franklin home and began attempting, unsuccessfully, to find himself a job. Jane Franklin spent very little of her life with her now-famous last name. Nothing remained of them except her memories, and four sheets of foolscap, stitched together. had no portraits of her children, and no gravestones. It is this tiny work that Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore places at the center of her fantastic biography Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin ( public library), which she describes as “a book of remembrance”: We know her only through the letters responded to by her brother, and a small book - a “Book of Ages” - which lists no more than the dates of births, marriages, and deaths for her children, her husband, and herself. The story of Jane Franklin is the story of a woman living on the fringes of recorded history. Both were members of an undistinguished lineage of Francklynnes, then Francklins, and eventually Franklins, none of whom established themselves as much more than the name suggested - blacksmiths, tinkerers, experimenters-until Benjamin made their name one of the most famous in America. Jane was the youngest daughter of the Franklin family, and Benjamin the youngest son. “I Read as much as I Dare,” Jane Franklin once wrote to her older brother Benjamin.

Book of ages by jill lepore