Franklin's father, Josiah Franklin was a tallow chandler, a soap-maker and a candle-maker. Josiah was born at Ecton, Northamptonshire, England on December 23, 1657, the son of Thomas Franklin, a blacksmith-farmer, and Jane White. His mother, Abiah Folger, was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, on August 15, 1667, to Peter Folger, a miller and schoolteacher and his wife Mary Morrill, a former indentured servant.
Josiah Franklin had seventeen children with his two wives. He married his first wife, Anne Child, in about 1677 in Ecton and emigrated with her to Boston in 1683; they had three children before emigrating, and four after. After her death, Josiah was married to Abiah Folger on July 9, 1689 in the Old South Meeting House by Samuel Willard. Benjamin, their eighth child, was Josiah Franklin's fifteenth child and tenth and last son.
Josiah Franklin converted to Puritanism in the 1670s. Puritanism was a Protestant movement in England to "purify" Anglicanism from elements of the Roman Catholic religion, which they considered superstitious. Three things were important to the Puritans: that each congregation be self-governing; that ministers give sermons instead of performing rituals such as a Mass; and that each member study the Bible so that each could develop a personal understanding and relationship with God. Puritanism appealed to middle-class individuals such as Benjamin Franklin's father, who enjoyed the governance meetings, discussion, study, and personal independence.
The roots of American democracy can be seen in these Puritan values of self-government. These values, which were passed on to Benjamin Franklin and other founding fathers (such as John Adams), included the importance of the individual and active indignation against unjust authority. One of Josiah's core Puritan values was that personal worth is earned through hard work, which makes the industrious man the equal of kings (Ben Franklin would etch Proverbs 22:29, "Seest thou a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before Kings." onto his father's tombstone). Hard work and equality were two Puritan values that Ben Franklin preached throughout his own life and spread widely through Poor Richard's Almanac and his autobiography.
Ben Franklin's mother, Abiah Folger, was born into a Puritan family that was among the first Pilgrims to flee to Massachusetts for religious freedom, when King Charles I of England began persecuting Puritans. They sailed for Boston in 1635. Her father was "the sort of rebel destined to transform colonial America." As clerk of the court, he was jailed for disobeying the local magistrate in defense of middle-class shopkeepers and artisans in conflict with wealthy landowners. Ben Franklin followed in his grandfather's footsteps in his battles against the wealthy Penn family that owned the Pennsylvania Colony.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin
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Benjamin Franklin Part 3by MrChrisMcPhail23,279 views
thank you for the upload..
ESCALADEEXTonu 5 months ago