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"Ben Franklin"
Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography: Page 4
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affairs, from 1641 to 1717; many of the volumes are wanting as appears by the
numbering, but there still remain eight volumes in folio, and twenty-four in
quarto and in octavo. A dealer in old books met with them, and knowing me by my
sometimes buying of him, he brought them to me. It seems my uncle must have left
them here, when he went to America, which was about fifty years since. There are
many of his notes in the margins.
This obscure family of ours was early in the Reformation, and continued
Protestants through the reign of Queen Mary, when they were sometimes in danger
of trouble on account of their zeal against popery. They had got an English
Bible, and to conceal and secure it, it was fastened open with tapes under and
within the cover of a joint-stool. When my great-great-grandfather read it to
his family, he turned up the joint-stool upon his knees, turning over the leaves
then under the tapes. One of the children stood at the door to give notice if he
saw the apparitor coming, who was an officer of the spiritual court. In that
case the stool was turned down again upon its feet, when the Bible remained
concealed under it as before. This anecdote I had from my uncle Benjamin. The
family continued all of the Church of England till about the end of Charles the
Second's reign, when some of the ministers that had been outed for nonconformity
holding conventicles in Northamptonshire, Benjamin and Josiah adhered to them,
and so continued all their lives: the rest of the family remained with the
Episcopal Church.
Josiah, my father, married young, and carried his wife with three children into
New England, about 1682. The conventicles having been forbidden by law, and
frequently disturbed, induced some considerable men of his acquaintance to
remove to that country, and he was prevailed with to accompany them thither,
where they expected to enjoy their mode of religion with freedom. By the same
wife he had four children more born there, and by a second wife ten more, in all
seventeen; of which I remember thirteen sitting at one time at his table, who
all grew up to be men and women, and married; I was the youngest son, and the
youngest child but two, and was born in Boston, New England. My mother, the
second wife, was Abiah Folger, daughter of Peter Folger, one of the first
settlers of New England, of whom honorable mention is made by Cotton Mather in
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