Go Betsy!

 

A skilled seamstress, Elizabeth “Betsy” Ross was noted for her beauty and her patriotism.  Twenty-three at the start of the Revolution, she would lose two husbands during the War, the second a mariner who died in a British jail.  It is little wonder that she was an ardent patriot.  She sewed not only flags, but tents, uniforms and blankets for the American forces.  She was the mother of six daughters, one by her second husband, and the remainder with her third.  Her descendants kept alive the family tradition that she sewed the first American flag.  There is no contemporary evidence for that, although she did know General Washington, and if she did not sew the first flag, it is clear that she was among the first seamstresses to sew American flags.  She outlived her third husband by nineteen years, dying at age 84 in Philadelphia in a free America.