Mary Young Pickersgill - Family

Family

Pickersgill's uncle, Colonel Benjamin Flower, fought during the American Revolutionary War, and was presented a sword by General George Washington for his masterful evacuation of Philadelphia during the British occupation of that city.

Of Pickersgill's five siblings, her oldest brother, William Young, was also a flag maker, and it is likely that his two daughters were Pickersgill's nieces that assisted in making the Star Spangled Banner flag. Her sister Hannah Young married Captain Jesse Fearson, a privateer during the War of 1812 who was captured by the British, imprisoned in Havana, Cuba, and later escaped.

Pickersgill's one surviving child, Caroline (1800-1884), married John Purdy (1795-1837). The couple apparently had no surviving children, because in a letter written late in her life to the daughter of George Armistead, Purdy called herself "widowed and childless." She had become somewhat destitute late in life, and in the same letter requested some financial assistance, but also provided some history about her mother and the making of the Star-Spangled Banner flag.

Read more about this topic:  Mary Young Pickersgill

Famous quotes containing the word family:

    Every family should extend First Amendment rights to all its members, but this freedom is particularly essential for our kids. Children must be able to say what they think, openly express their feelings, and ask for what they want and need if they are ever able to develop an integrated sense of self. They must be able to think their own thoughts, even if they differ from ours. They need to have the opportunity to ask us questions when they don’t understand what we mean.
    Stephanie Martson (20th century)

    With a new familiarity and a flesh-creeping “homeliness” entirely of this unreal, materialistic world, where all “sentiment” is coarsely manufactured and advertised in colossal sickly captions, disguised for the sweet tooth of a monstrous baby called “the Public,” the family as it is, broken up on all hands by the agency of feminist and economic propaganda, reconstitutes itself in the image of the state.
    Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)

    I swear ... to hold my teacher in this art equal to my own parents; to make him partner in my livelihood; when he is in need of money to share mine with him; to consider his family as my own brothers and to teach them this art, if they want to learn it, without fee or indenture.
    Hippocrates (c. 460–c. 370 B.C.)