Abiah Folger

Abiah Folger Franklin (August 15, 1667 – May 18, 1752) was the mother of Benjamin Franklin, a Founding Father of the United States.

Biography Abiah Folger was born on Madaket Road in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on August 15, 1667, to Peter Folger, a miller and schoolteacher, and his wife, Mary Morrell Folger, a former indentured servant.

At age 21 and unmarried, Abiah moved from Nantucket to Boston to live with an older sister and her husband, who were members of the Puritan South Church. Abiah and Josiah's children included John (born 1690), Peter (1692), Mary (1694), James (1696), Sarah (1699), Ebenezer (1701), a son who died young (1703), Benjamin (1706), Lydia (1708), and Jane (1712). She disapproved of her son's membership in Freemasonry. Benjamin Franklin described his mother as “a discreet and virtuous woman” with “an excellent constitution."

Influence on Benjamin Historian Nick Bunker has described Abiah's influence on her son Benjamin. Bunker reports that "it was his mother who educated his feelings. By the time [Benjamin] was born, Abiah Franklin had raised so many children that she knew what she was doing when she had another... we cannot give a full account of the way she raised the boy, but we can at least be confident of this. It appears she did everything a parent should, giving him the right combination of attachment and liberty, now and then a touch of discipline, but mostly the time and the space for him to play creatively," Matthew Garrett wrote that "the Autobiography is perhaps the finest example within the modern narrative tradition of a text that habitually compresses major characters - those, that is, who play integral and significant roles within the plot - into minor players. Throughout the Autobiography, Franklin produces this narrative in order to produce himself.... But even by the standards Franklin sets in the rest of the Autobiography, his mother's diminution within the narrative discourse is extreme."

Media portrayals A fictionalized version of Abiah appeared in the fourth episode of Voyagers!, titled "Agents of Satan," where the central characters prevented her from being hanged during the Salem witch trials.

Abiah was portrayed in a 2018 episode of the TV series Timeless. The episode was titled "The Salem Witch Hunt."