had recently been struck by smallpox, which Edwards promptly contracted by inoculation, dying two weeks after settling in. Then Burr’s mother, Esther, came down with smallpox and died two weeks after her father. Dr. William Shippen took Burr and his orphaned sister into his Philadelphia home. When Grandmother Edwards came to reclaim the children, she contracted virulent dysentery and died shortly afterward. Thus, by October 1758, two-year-old Aaron Burr had already lost a mother, a father, a grandfather, a grandmother, and a great-grandfather.
