Book of Ages (48 page)

In 2008, the Jane Franklin Mecom letters in Van Doren’s 1950 edition were also made available through a digital collection known as
North American Women’s Letters and Diaries,
published by Alexander Street Press. That same year, a digital edition of the
Papers of Benjamin Franklin,
sponsored by the Packard Humanities Institute, was made available online. Readers interested in taking a look at Jane’s letters can do so easily at
franklinpapers.org
but should be advised that early editors working at Yale’s Franklin Papers project made significant changes to Jane’s prose, correcting some of her
spelling and punctuation. The most faithful transcription of Jane’s correspondence is still to be found in Van Doren,
Letters.

Jared Sparks once destroyed a draft of George Washington’s first inaugural address. “Washington’s handwriting but not his composition,” Sparks wrote in the margin. He sliced up the manuscript and gave the cuttings to friends. This left John C. Fitzpatrick, a twentieth-century editor of Washington’s papers, in the awkward position of begging people who might have a scrap of Washington’s first inaugural address to mail it to the
Library of Congress. “The curious activities of Jared Sparks seem to have deprived us at this point of what might have proved the most valuable political document of Washington’s entire career,” Fitzpatrick wrote. “Unfortunately, it seems certain that only a small percentage of the entire document will ever be recovered, but it is to be hoped that any possessor of a sheet of paper about seven by eight inches, covered on both sides with Washington’s handwriting, which has neither beginning nor end but is numbered in the upper corners, in ink, by Washington, will communicate with the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.”
⁴¹

In that same spirit, it is hoped that anyone who knows about any of Jane Franklin Mecom’s papers would be so kind as to write to me at the History Department, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138.

The attempt to trace Jane’s descendants began with the executors of Franklin’s last will, in which Franklin made the following bequest: “To the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren of my sister Jane Mecom that may be living at the time of my decease, I give fifty pounds sterling, to be equally divided among them.”

After Franklin’s death in 1790, the executors of his estate wrote to Jane, inquiring about her descendants. Jane sent them a document titled “Descendants of Jane Mecom”:

The next year, Jane wrote requesting a slightly different arrangement for the New England branch of her family.
²
The records of the administration of Franklin’s estate contain considerable additional information about Jane Franklin Mecom’s descendants.
³
Those records also demonstrate that although Jane did not list her son Benjamin Mecom as among her living descendants, he was still alive. Franklin’s executors at first presumed, too, that Benjamin Mecom was dead: “Mrs Jane Mecom’s Son Benja. Said to be deceased.” But on June 29, 1791, the account books record that seventeen pounds, five shillings were disbursed as “Cash pd Elizabeth Mecom for Maintenance of B. Mecom.”
⁴
This sum appears to have been an annuity.
⁵
I have been unable to trace his fate.