ABSTRACT
Mary Ann Todd was born in Lexington, Kentucky, on December 12, 1818. Her parents, Robert Smith Todd and Eliza Parker Todd, already had two daughters when Mary became the unspecial third daughter in a growing family. Soon after Mary was weaned, her mother became pregnant with a first son, and there followed in eighteen- and twentytwo- month intervals another daughter, Ann, and a son, George Rodgers Clark Todd, who was born in 1825. After her younger sister’s birth, the middle name Ann was dropped from Mary’s name. Immediately after George’s birth, Eliza Parker Todd fell ill of puerperal sepsis—the bacterial fever that nineteenth-century women called “the childbed fevers.” Mary was an impressionable six when her mother died.
