Like Mary Boleyn, no one would know about Jane Franklin Mecom if not for her famous sibling. Born into poverty the youngest of 17 siblings, married at 15 to a man who may have been mentally ill and spent time in debtor's prison, she outlived all but one (or possibly two) of her eight children who survived to adulthood, as well as most of her grandchildren and many of her great-grandchildren. We know who she is because she wrote frequently to her brother Ben, and the letters which survive form the foundation of Book of Ages.
The book in question is Jane's own, the self-made pamphlet in which she recorded her children's births and deaths in an untutored hand. That, and some of her letters to her brother, are the only traces she left and like Alison Weir'sbiography of Mary Boleyn, Jill Lepore uses Book of Ages as a guide to the biographer's craft as she pieces together Jane's life through scant records. Those records show a hard life of poverty and death, with two of her sons spending time in protective custody due to mental instability and most of her children and grandchildren living short lives of ill health (Lepore speculates that several had tuberculosis which spread easily through the large family living in a tiny house-cum-workshop). The records are also incomplete, with a few of her descendants not having definite dates of death - including her son Benjamin who was reported to have died during the Revolutionary War but reappears a decade later making and selling the family soap.
Despite her hardships and rudimentary education, Jane was an avid reader, at least of her brother's works and of books he sent her. She loved to gossip (and her letters to her sister-in-law Deborah are chatty chronicles of family and friends, full of questions about Ben and Deborah's grandchildren), was deeply religious (unlike Ben), and while her brother was in Europe helped build his image as the Country Bumpkin/Untutored Genius by sending him homemade soap to distribute to those he wanted to influence. She had opinions, and in another time may have been able to act on them.
Lepore also shows how unlikely Ben's success was. He was the only sibling to get beyond a subsistence living, let alone into wealth, and yet he didn't give much support to his poverty-stricken sister, despite how close they were. Maybe he didn't want to support her husband as well, but Edward Mecom died in 1765. Would it have harmed his self-made image to give his sister more help, or was she too deep in the Puritan mold to feel she deserved it? It's something I can't reconcile as a modern person coming from a tradition that considers charity a cardinal virtue. Maybe the answer is in the letters that have been lost.
