![]() In a letter written at the time, she summarized her own life in a few brisk sentences, referring to herself in the third person: "As the writer was a practising physician," she later explained, "it seemed only fitting that the Ballard diary, so crowded with medical interest, should descend to her." In 1930, Hobart gave the diary to the Maine State Library in Augusta. She was thirty-three and a recent graduate of medical school when her great-aunts Sarah and Hannah gave her the diary. Mary Hobart was ten years old when her great-grandmother Dolly Lambard died. ![]() James North no doubt consulted the diary at Sarah Lambard's house on Chapel Street in Augusta, extracting the few passages he included in his History. At Dolly's death in 1861, the diary descended to her daughters, Sarah Lambard and Hannah Lambard Walcott. ![]() The diary had remained in Augusta for more than sixty years, probably in the family of Dolly Lambard, who seems to have assumed custody of her mother's papers along with the rented cow. When her great-great-grandaughter Mary Hobart inherited it in 1884, it was "a hopeless pile of loose unconsecutive pages"-but it was all there. That Martha Ballard kept her diary is one small miracle that her descendants saved it is another. ![]() Epilogue - A Midwife's Tale by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich ![]()
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