William Franklin - Marriage and Family

Marriage and Family

As a young man, William became engaged to Elizabeth Graeme, daughter of prominent Philadelphia physician Dr. Thomas Graeme and granddaughter of Pennsylvania's 14th Governor, Sir William Keith. Neither family approved of the match, but when William went to London to study law about 1759, he left with the understanding that Elizabeth would wait for him.

While in London, Franklin sired an illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin, who was born 22 February 1762. His mother has never been identified, and he was placed in foster care.

Later that year, Franklin married Elizabeth Downes on 4 September 1762 at St George's, Hanover Square in London. She was born in the English colony of Barbadoes to the sugar planter John Downes and his wife Elizabeth (née Parsons). She met Franklin while visiting England with her father in 1760. They moved to the New Jersey colony in 1763.

While Benjamin Franklin was in England a few years later on an extended mission, he learned about Temple and took an interest in the boy. When Franklin returned to Pennsylvania in 1775, he brought Temple, his only patrilineal grandson, with him to live in his household. He used him as an aide when a young man. In the late eighteenth century, Temple Franklin returned to London, living briefly with his father who was in exile there, and later settled in Paris. He died in Paris in 1823 and was buried in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery.

William Franklin's wife Elizabeth died in 1777, while he was imprisoned as a Loyalist during the American Revolutionary War. She was interred beneath the altar of St. Paul's Chapel in lower Manhattan, where she had resided after the British evacuated Perth Amboy. The memorial plaque on the wall at St. Paul's was commissioned by William Franklin from London, where he went into exile following the war. He was a widower for more than ten years.