Author: Wells, Anna Maria
Biography:
WELLS, Anna Maria, formerly FOSTER (1795-1868: ancestry.com)
She was born in June 1795 in Gloucester MA, the second child of Benjamin and Mary (Ingersoll) Foster, but her father died soon after her birth, possibly even before it (one likely baptismal record for "Anna Mary Foster" dated Sept. 20 describes her mother as a widow named Polly), and her mother remarried. Her second husband was a prosperous Boston merchant, Joseph Locke, himself a widower who was then marrying his deceased wife's sister. (The couple had seven children together, one of them the poet Frances Sargent Osgood [1811-50], whose publications date from after 1835.) In 1821--not in 1829 as some sources say, the record is unequivocal--Anna Maria married Thomas Wells (q.v.), also an occasional poet, who worked for the Revenue Service. They had four or five children but only two sons outlived their mother. (Their son Samuel Adams Wells, born in 1824 and named for his great-grandfather, died in 1864.) After the death of her husband, she ran a seminary for young ladies and continued to contribute to magazines and gift books, specializing in children's literature. Newspaper obituaries following her death in Boston in 1868 paid tribute to her as "one of the earliest of our female poets." (Griswold; ancestry.com 19 Jan. 2021; findmypast.com 19 Jan. 2021; Massachusetts Ploughman [Boston] 26 Dec. 1868; Alta California [San Francisco] 22 Jan. 1869) HJ