Frances Dallam Peter
American writer

Frances Dallam Peter (January 28, 1843 – August 5, 1864) was a writer from Lexington, Kentucky who documented the United States Civil War in her diary. The diary, published under the title, A Union Woman in Civil War Kentucky: The Diary of Frances Peter, describes the period between January 1862 to April 1864 in Lexington.
Early life and family
Frances Dallam Peter was born in Lexington, Kentucky on January 28, 1843, as the fourth of eleven children of Robert Peter and Frances Paca Dallam Peter. Peter's childhood nicknamed was Frank.
Her mother, Frances Paca Dallam Peter, was related to William Paca who Governor Maryland and signed the United States Declaration of Independence. Her father, Robert Peter, a chemist, geologist, and physician, was a native of Cornwall, England. Robert Peter entered the United States in 1817 and relocated to Lexington in 1832 to attend Transylvania College. He obtained a medical degree from Transylvania in 1834. The next year Robert Peter and Frances Paca Dallam married and set up a household in Lexington. Robert held several positions at Transylvania including the chair of the pharmacy and chemistry departments, and dean of the faculty, librarian of the medical school, and editor of the medical school journal.
“Frances Dallam Peter” enters the record as american writer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Frances, Dallam and Peter can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q23619796. VIAF identifies the subject as 33788267. The Library of Congress control number is n99025232. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1843, 1864, 1862 and 1817.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frances Dallam Peter” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.