It was highly unusual for a woman to keep a diary at the time when Ballard was keeping hers. Perhaps she felt a need for order in her life or felt a responsibility to accurately record births. She made the diary books herself, drawing lines on the pages to keep her handwriting straight. Her descendants kept the diaries until 1930, when Ballard's great-great-granddaughter, Mary Hobart, a physician, donated them to the Maine State Library in Augusta.
Mother of Nine
Born to Elijah and Doratha Moore in 1735, Martha Ballard lived the first several decades of her life in the small town of Oxford, Massachusetts, near the Connecticut border. At nineteen, she married twenty-nine-year-old Ephraim Ballard on December 19, 1754. Ephraim milled wood, as his family had done for four generations. He also acquired the skills of a land surveyor, learning how to set precise property boundaries measured from fixed points. The couple had nine children: Cyrus (born in 1756); Lucy (1758); Martha (1761); Jonathan (1763); Triphene (1765); Dorothy (1767); Hannah (1769); Dolly (1772); and Ephraim Jr. (1779). Between 1767 and 1770, a diphtheria epidemic swept through Oxford, killing 144 persons, 12 percent of the community's population.
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