The Unborn and Living Dead
History is an act of remembering, forgetting, and imagining
The following piece is one in a series of letters to my prospective granddaughter.
March 20, 2025
Dear Baby,
You’re not born yet. But I invite you to consider how you would feel if 175 years after your death—I’m hoping this will be about 275 years from now—you would feel if someone managed to recreate the life you lived for a future unknown audience.
Greetings from Waltham, Massachusetts, which is now my base of operations on a four-day, 1,000-mile trip that has taken me across the state to take photographs I hope will be included in the book I’m working on. (I did this with my last book too: There’s hope for an old dog learning new tricks.) Part of the reason I settled in Waltham is so that I could pay a visit my mother-in-law, your great-grandmother, 90 years young. By my count, you’re the eighth of her great-grandchildren. I spent some time querying her about your ancestors.
Anyway, one of the forays I’ve made on this trip is to Augusta, now the capital of the great state of Maine, because for about 165 years the “District of Maine,” as it was known, belonged to the colony and state of Massachusetts. (It became a state on its own in 1820 as part of a deal in which Missouri came into the Union as a way of forestalling the Civil War.) I went to Augusta, and the adjoining town of Hallowell, because I have a chapter in the book on a once-obscure midwife named Martha Ballard.
The fact that Martha Ballard is not obscure—though given the tides of history she may soon be again—is thanks to historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, who reconstructed her life: the places she lived, her daily routines, her job, her relationship with her husband and children. Ballard left behind a long-running, though seemingly impenetrable, diary, and Ulrich did a lot of spade work in digging up records, doing background research, that kind of thing. As a matter of historical craft, A Midwife’s Tale is as dazzling as a Bach concerto or a Tom Brady performance at the Super Bowl: we witness an artist at the peak of her powers doing things that very few of her peers have the talent or patience to do. Ulrich’s 1990 book A Midwife’s Tale won the Pulitzer Prize for history, and is one of my favorite books of all time. I’ve read it four times and used to teach it in a biography class I offered.
A Midwife’s Tale consists of ten chapters—each consisting of a month and a year, August to May, redolent of a pregnancy—and each consisting of diary fragments followed by a reconstruction of incidents in Ballard’s life, among them a Scarlet Fever outbreak, her attendance at an autopsy, and her testimony in a rape case whose outcome so troubled her that she stopped going to church—a silent statement that speaks volumes.
I’ve been talking a lot about Ulrich here, but Martha Ballard herself, about whom I have a chapter’s worth of material to say, was a comparably impressive person. In addition to running her household that included nine children, she delivered over 800 babies with a mortality track record that would have been superb a century and a half later.
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich resurrected Martha Ballard in our culture at large: in the wake of her highly successful book, there was a documentary on Ballard, a bestselling novel based on her life, and as of this writing the city of Augusta is planning to erect a monument to her on the shore of the Kennebec River near her home. In my own small way, I’m trying to sustain this resurrection in my little book about women in Massachusetts between 1620 and 1820, and I was glad to have the excuse to make a pilgrimage up to Maine and pay tribute to this remarkable woman.
But I want to return to the question I posed earlier: how would you feel if, 175 years after your death, someone managed to recreate the life you lived? I realize this is an odd query, one that reflects your grandfather’s foibles. Actually, posing the question to you inevitably made me wonder how I would feel, which helped me realize how weird a question it is. At some level I would certainly be pleased, since I’ve spent most of my life seeking attention, albeit of a somewhat specific kind. Of course, it would matter what kind of attention it was. (Ulrich was deeply admiring of her subject, as I am of both.) I often think of the American novelist Herman Melville, who enjoyed early success and fame before dying in obscurity, his reputation soaring in the mid-twentieth century, when he was regarded as the greatest American writer. I suspect that would appeal to Melville’s well-developed sense of irony. Living fame isn’t much good to a dead man.
And I guess what I’ve learned from this little thought experiment is that in the end what matters—maybe the only thing that matters, notwithstanding how terribly finite it may be—is what you do when you’re alive. Legacies, however real, are incidental. Based on what I’ve read about Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, I believe that among her other activities (which include raising her own children and teaching at the University of New Hampshire and Harvard, both schools where I also taught, and crossed her path) honoring Martha Ballard gave Ulrich’s life a sense of purpose, just as giving birth to 814 babies, the youngest of whom has been dead for over a century, gave Ballard’s life a sense of purpose. Just as writing you right now here in the breakfast area of this hotel is giving my life a sense of purpose. I can at best be a sliver in your life. But perhaps in ways neither of us can fully foresee, I may help you understand your own sense of purpose. So it is, amid all the facts and research, that history is finally an act of faith in all its unpredictable forms.