Martha Ballard facts for kids

Martha Moore Ballard (February 9, 1735 - June 9, 1812) was an American midwife and healer. Unusually for the time, Ballard kept a diary with thousands of entries over nearly three decades, which has provided historians with invaluable insight into frontier-women's lives. Ballard was made famous by the publication of A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in 1990.

Early life and family

Martha Moore was born in Oxford, Province of Massachusetts, on February 9, 1735, to the family of Elijah Moore and Dorothy Learned Moore. There is little known about her childhood and education before she began keeping her diary, but it is known that her family had medical links.These being her uncle Abijah Moore and brother-in-law Stephen Barton who were both physicians. In addition, her family is linked to Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross and granddaughter of Ballard's sister. She married Ephraim Ballard, a land surveyor, in 1754. The couple had nine children between 1756 and 1779, but lost three of them to a diphtheria epidemic in Oxford between June 17 and July 5, 1769.

She and her family experienced difficult times during 1803–1804, when her husband was imprisoned for debt and her son was indicted for fraud. Ballard's obituary was published on June 9, 1812 in the American Advocate and simply stated:

Died in Augusta, Mrs Martha, consort of Mr Ephraim Ballard, aged 77 years.

Midwifery and medical history

Ballard never received any formal medical training, but her methods of treating local maladies seem to have been a culmination of her experience as a colonial woman. She was, in many ways, an herbalist. She harvested herbs, creating teas, salves, syrups and vapors in order to treat anything from a cough to an aching limb. This type of medicine was practiced often by women as they were not allowed to attend medical school. Thus, books such as The Compleat Housewife: OR, Accomplish'd Gentlewoman's Companion accompanied many women in their daily medical tasks. Ballard never mentions any such books in her writing, implying she must have gained her medical knowledge through her life's experience as opposed to education.

Ballard delivered 816 babies over the 27 years that she wrote her diary and was present at more than 1,000 births; the mortality rates of infants and mothers that she visited were ordinary for the United States before the 1940s. In addition to her medical responsibilities, Ballard frequently carried out tasks such as trading, weaving, and social visits.

Diary

From when she was 50 (1785) until her death in 1812, Martha Ballard kept a diary that recorded her work and domestic life in Hallowell on the Kennebec River, District of Maine. The log of daily events, written with a quill pen and homemade ink, records numerous babies delivered and illnesses treated as she travelled by horse or canoe around the Massachusetts frontier in what is today the state of Maine. For 27 years, she wrote in the diary daily, often by candlelight when her family had gone to bed.

The diary consists of more than 1,400 pages, with entries that start with the weather and the time. Many of her early records are short and choppy, but her later entries are longer and detailed. Her writing illustrates struggles and tragedies within her own family and local crimes and scandals. One includes the comment that children in New England are allowed to choose their romantic interest if they were in the same economic class, rare for the time. Many of the people mentioned in the diary do not appear on official records, such as censuses or deeds and probate, and so the diary helps to provide insight into the lives of ordinary people who might otherwise have remained invisible. Because of the scale of the diary, scholars have been able to use digital tools to mine it for information.

The last birth that Ballard attended was on April 26, 1812. Ballard's final diary entry, from 1812, states: "made a prayer adapted to my case." After Ballard's death, the diary was kept by Dolly Lambard. The diary was then passed on to Dolly's daughters, Sarah Lambard and Hannah Lambard Walcott after Dolly's death in 1861. Sarah Lambard and Hannah Lambard gifted the diary to Ballard's great-great-granddaughter, Mary Hobart, one of the first female US physicians to graduate from the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1884, the same year that she received the diary.

In 1930, Hobart donated the diary to the Maine State Library in Augusta. Maine State Library promised Hobart a transcript of the diary, but the promise was never fulfilled. Charles Elventon Nash included parts of the diary in a proposed two-volume history of Augusta, which was kept in a descendant's home for almost 60 years before the descendant offered it to the Maine State Library. Edith Hary took the papers and published The History of Augusta: First Settlements and Early Days As A Town Including The Diary of Mrs. Martha Moore Ballard in 1961.In July 1982, E. Wheaton of the Maine State Archive created a microfilm copy of the diary. Robert R. McCausland and Cynthia MacAlman McCausland later spent ten years producing a verbatim transcription on the diary, which they made freely available online as well as for purchase in hard-copy.

A Midwife's Tale

For many years, Martha Ballard's diary was not considered to be of scholarly interest since it was generally dismissed as repetitive and ordinary. However, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich saw potential in the diary, realising how rare Ballard's first-hand account was after having researched a previous book on women in early New England. After eight years of research, Ulrich produced A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812. Each chapter in A Midwife's Tale represents one aspect of the life of a woman in the late 18th century. The overriding theme is the nature of women's work in the context and community. Ulrich stated that:

When I finally was able to connect Martha's work to her world, I could begin to create stories.

In "A Midwife’s Tale", Ulrich highlights ten key entries from Martha's diary. Ulrich places these entries in a historical context, elevating a seemingly-ordinary woman's life into a key figure of Kennebec.