People of the Founding Era

People of the Founding Era is a scholarly reference work that provides biographical information on over 75,000 people born between 1713 (the end of Queen Anne's War) and 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic War), drawn from the digitized papers of the Founding Fathers and other documentary editions of the Founding Era. It has two components. First, it provides fully searchable biographical statements that vary greatly in scope and extent. Second, it provides identically structured data for each person allowing for group, or prosopographical, study. The editors invite users to contribute information on new people records as well as corrections and new information on people already in the system.

Bache, Sarah Franklin

Sarah Franklin Bache (1743–1808) was a member of the large extended Franklin family centered in Philadelphia. Like her father Benjamin Franklin she was interested in politics, doing relief work during the Revolutionary War and acting as his hostess after her mother Deborah Read Franklin died in 1774. She was also the mother of eight children, three of whom are here: William Bache, Richard Bache, Jr., and Benjamin Franklin Bache. (Image: John Hoppner, Portrait of Sarah Franklin Bache, ca. 1793. Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

Howe, William, 5th Viscount

Howe is among more than 1,600 British-born people. He has extensive biography across seven different documentary editing projects outlining his military career as Commander in Chief of the British forces from 1775 to 1778. Less well known is the fact that he and sixty-three others in People of the Founding Era attended Eton College, one of more than 200 educational institutions. (Image: Color mezzotint by Charles Corbutt 1777, Anne S. K. Brown Military History Collection, Brown University. Image from Wikimedia Commons.)

Otis, Elizabeth Gray

Users of PFE can locate Elizabeth Gray Otis through a variety of searches including gender (woman), surname (Otis), birth year (1746), or more precisely by all three constraints. From her record, you can locate twelve of her extended family members, including her spouse Samuel Allyne Otis. Likewise, you can locate her record from her husband Samuel's record as well as connections to the Adams Family through her cousins (Image: Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Portrait by John Singleton Copley, c. 1764).

Cornplanter (Garganwahgah; John O'Bail)

The Seneca Indian can be retrieved by searching his alternative names or the surname O'Bail. From his record, users can locate the seventy other Native Americans whose occupation was Indian chief, four of whom lived to be seventy years or older. A search on Cornplanter reveals the other individuals with whom his life intersected during the American Revolution (Image: Collection of The New-York Historical Society, Portrait by Frederick Bartoli, 1796).