Betsy Ross' descendants give flagmaker her due

PHILADELPHIA – When her mom died last summer, Aileen Edge and her husband, Dave, made the long, sad drive down from Washington state to settle affairs. Claire Canby Keleher lived outside of San Francisco.

Beyond her grief, Aileen had quite a task ahead. Her mom was a lover of the family legacy, which means, when you are a descendant of Betsy Ross and her third husband, John Claypoole, you have lots of stories, lots of letters and papers, and lots of gathered-in stuff going way, way back.

Yet nothing quite prepared the Edges for the richness of Ross-related artifacts and documents that had accumulated in the family over nearly 200 years, much of it finding a home with Claire Canby Keleher. It will now reside, in her mom's memory, at the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia.

Last month, the Edges packed their precious historical patrimony and drove across the country, reaching Philadelphia on a recent Wednesday where they delivered a small, battered paper diary, kept by John Claypoole during the 1780s, to the museum.

Claypoole met Betsy Ross' second husband, Joseph Ashburn, when both were prisoners of war held in Britain's Old Mill Prison. When Ashburn died in the English prison, Claypoole was there, describing their ordeal in his diary. Upon his release at war's end, Claypoole traveled to Philadelphia to inform the seamstress of her widowhood. They were subsequently married in 1783.

In addition to the diary, the Edges donated an ancient Claypoole family Bible, with notations begun by John Claypoole's mother in the 1740s, and a variety of 18th-century historic documents related to Philadelphia's Quaker world to which Betsy Ross intermittently belonged. (The Betsy Ross House holds the Ross family Bible.)

The Edges were not the only Ross-Claypoole descendants gathered at the museum that day. Stephen and Cecelia Balderston and their children and grandchildren were also there. The Balderstons, from Colora, Md., who with other extended family members had donated John Claypoole's sea chest to the museum in 2019, had heard of the Edges, knew they were cousins, but had never met them.

Museum chief historian Philip Mead told the 25 or so people that that day marked "the first time in who knows how long, certainly multiple generations, we're able to reunite the book, the memorandum book manuscript that John Claypoole kept, while a prisoner of war, with his sea chest."

"That is just one of the most thrilling things that can happen in a museum — really reconstructing these stories using the objects that we can display," Mead said, speaking to the gathered Ross descendants. "And it's actually probably unique, in my experience, to have it come from a family reunion. … Those people from the 18th century are gone. But their objects are here, and you're here."

Neither the Balderstons nor the Edges are much concerned with the vagaries of the Betsy Ross story. They know she was a skilled seamstress who stitched a thousand flags, although maybe not the very first one. Yes, her house is on Arch Street, although she may have not actually lived in the building now called the Betsy Ross House.

Mead points out that surveys of college students consistently rank Betsy Ross as "one of the Top 10 founders" of the nation. But, he says, regardless of the mythology, Ross was a rather remarkable woman.

She was a trained upholsterer and a businesswoman who made her own living for many years.