Biography

Wife of Benjamin Franklin. They were engaged when he went to England, but he was stuck there and never wrote. At her mother's prompting she married John Rogers, who used up her dowry and whom she suspected of bigamy. She managed to get a separation, but not a divorce, and he disappeared to the West Indies. Deborah and Benjamin Franklin decided to be common law married, and she simply moved into his house on September 1, 1730. They had a successful marriage and one surviving son, William Franklin. She was afraid to sail on the ocean, so she never accompanied Benjamin Franklin to his various posts and thus spent 15 years separated from him.