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Martha Laurens Ramsay

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(1759-1811)

BIRTH

November 3, 1759

PLACE

Charleston

NAME

Martha Laurens

DEATH

June 10, 1811

PLACE

Charleston

FAMILY

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FATHER

Henry Laurens

(1724-1792)

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MOTHER

Eleanor Ball Laurens

(1731-1770)

HOMES

NICKNAMES

Patsy; Patty

RELIGIOUS VIEWS

CHRISTIAN

CONGREGATIONALIST

MEMBERSHIPS

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AWARDS

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Martha Laurens Ramsay (1759–1811) was a Charleston diarist and letter writer, the daughter of Henry Laurens and Eleanor Ball. She spent part of the Revolutionary War in Europe and returned to South Carolina in 1785. In 1787 she married physician and historian David Ramsay. Her writings explore religious conviction, marriage, illness, children and household responsibilities. After her death, her husband published selections from her diary and correspondence in a memoir.

EARLY LIFE

The exact date and place of Martha Laurens Ramsay’s birth have not been established in the source used for this entry. The surviving biographical summary provides only limited evidence about childhood, schooling, and the daily circumstances of the household, so those details are not reconstructed here without documentation. What can be stated securely is that this person belonged to the interconnected family world from which HistoryGPS traces participants, relatives, and later descendants of the Revolutionary generation.

Her letters, diary and religious writings are preserved in the published memoir of her life.

CAREER

DEATH

Martha Laurens Ramsay died in Charleston on June 10, 1811, aged fifty-one. Her writings record illness, family responsibilities, financial pressures, and religious reflection, but the consulted biographical summary does not provide a securely identified cause or a continuous account of her own final medical decline. Her husband, physician and historian David Ramsay, published selections from her diary and correspondence within weeks of her death. That publication preserves her voice and the spiritual framework in which she understood suffering, while it should not be used to invent a specific treatment or bedside exchange absent from the evidence reviewed here. She was buried in the churchyard of Charleston's Circular Congregational Church. The later violent death of David Ramsay was a different event and not the manner of Martha's death. Her final date, city, and burial are established; the immediate disease and details of her final hours remain uncertain.

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