Marriage and family
As a young man, William became engaged to Elizabeth Graeme, daughter of prominent Philadelphia physician Dr. Thomas Graeme and step-granddaughter of Pennsylvania's 14th Governor, Sir William Keith. Neither family approved of the match, but when William went to London to study law about 1759, he left with the understanding that Elizabeth would wait for him.
William studied law at the Middle Temple, chiefly under Richard Jackson "The Omniscient". While in London, William fathered an illegitimate son, William Temple Franklin, who was born 22 February 1760. His mother has never been identified, and Temple was placed in foster care.
Later that year, William married Elizabeth Downes on 4 September 1762 at St George's, Hanover Square, in London. She was born in the English colony of Barbados to the sugar planter John Downes and his wife, Elizabeth (née Parsons). She met William while visiting England with her father in 1760. They moved to the New Jersey colony in 1763. Elizabeth died in 1777 while William was imprisoned as a Loyalist during the American Revolutionary War. She was interred beneath the altar of St. Paul's Chapel in lower Manhattan, where she had resided after the British evacuated Perth Amboy. The memorial plaque on the wall at St. Paul's was commissioned by William Franklin from London, where he went into exile following the war. He was a widower for more than ten years.
On 14 August 1788, William married Mary Johnson d'Evelin, a wealthy Irish widow with children. William's son, Temple, after a failed business career in the U.S., lived with his father and stepmother for a time, and followed in his grandfather and father's footsteps and had an illegitimate daughter, Ellen (15 May 1798 London – 1875 Nice, France), with Ellen Johnson d'Evelin, the sister-in-law of his stepmother, Mary. William took responsibility for his granddaughter Ellen. Temple moved to Paris, where he lived the remainder of his life and never saw his father again. After Mary died in 1811, William continued to live with Ellen, age 13 at the time, and when he died in 1813 he left most of his small estate to her.
