Betsy Ross - the Woman Who Created the Fist American Flag

Although the majority of History Glorifies the accomplishments of men, those of the women are of equal standing and deserve to be recognized. Betsy Ross was born in the year 1752 on January first. She was the eighth of her mother’s seventeen children.

Her birth name was actually Elizabeth Griscom even though it is not the name that she is known for. Her great grandfather, a carpenter, immigrated from in England in 1980, making her a fourth generation Amercican. Her early life was permeated with the quaker belief system as that was the religion her family chose to keep. Marrying out of the faith was a crime punishable by removal and disowning from the family. Nonetheless, Elizabeth met and married a young Angelcan man named John Ross in 1772. They originally became acquainted by both apprenticing for an upholsterer in their town. The marriage did in fact promptly result in the new couple being found all alone without the aid of family or members of their religions. The only suitable option was to start their own upholstery business and work long hours to keep it up and going. In 1783, She wedded for the third and last time to a man named John Claypoole. Together, they conceived five children and continued to run the upholstery shop. A slightly chilling detail to their first meeting was that mr Claypoole had been an inmate to her husband during his stay in the british prison and was also the bearer of the news of his death and last goodbyes. Her third husband contracted a disability and died after thirty-four years.

Even with so many negative happenstances that met her throughout her life, she never gave up or backed down from the cold challenge of existence. The same year of her first husband's passing, she was visited by President George Wasshington, Robert Morris, and George Ross. Due to their request, she sewed the first American flag with only thirteen stars representing the first thirteen colonies. The Pennsylvania state Navy compensated her for continuing to manufacture American Flags. The plausibility of the connection between her visitors and herself formulated to be that her uncle was George Ross and she attended church with and was already a seamstress for George washington. 

The common belief that she did indeed create the first flag, It is not completely irrefutable. However there is no evidence that disproves her part in the history of the United States. An avid possibility for there being no found documentation of the event is that women did not possess the same rights to publicity and notoriety as the male population. Another reason in her favor is that many of her family members testified to the credibility of her act. Unlike popular American myths and folklore, there were witness bearers from a relatively first hand perspective to back her up. The main reason for the surprising quandary over the truth is that there are constitutional records evidencing her as the sewer of the first flag.