This story has, however, been disputed on, as it wasn't told until 1870 by her grandson, and even he said that it needed confirmation. Nowadays, most scholars agree that she wasn't the maker of the first flag, though she was indeed a flag maker.
Betsy Ross was born in 1752, on January first, as noted in Wikipedia. She was born in Pennsylvania, to Samuel Griscom and Rebecca Griscom. Her name before she married was Elizabeth Griscom. In her youth she thought to have attended Quaker schools and that's where she learned needlework. In 1773, she married John Ross, an Anglican, and was expelled from the Friends Meeting because she married outside the meeting. She later joined the “Free Quakers,” because they were not too strict about the historical pacifism of their religion. She and her husband started an upholstery business together, counting on her skill at needlework.
John died three years after their marriage, in 1776, when gunpowder at the Philadelphia waterfront exploded. Betsy acquired the property, and remarried a year later with Joseph Ashburn. Ashburn was a sailor, and was captured by a British ship in 1781. He died in prison the following year. Elizabeth acquired his property too. She married again two years later, when John Claypoole, Joseph's cellmate, brought Joseph's farewells to her. Claypoole also died, in 1817 after a long disability, leaving her with more money and property. It is remarkable how all of her husbands' names started with "J."
Elizabeth died on January 30th, 1836. I am not sure were she was first buried, but in 1857, 21 years later, she was buried at the Free Quaker Burial Ground. Her remains were exhumed and reburied in the Mt. Moriah Cemetery. The city wanted her to be reburied to courtyard of the Betsy Ross House for the United States Bicentennial in 1975. However, the workers found no remains when they dug up the grave. They therefore took other bones scattered around the family plot, and brought those to the House instead. Therefore, tourists visiting her current grave might be visiting someone else's instead.
Turning back to the topic of the Flag of the United States, it is doubted that Betsy made the first version of it. Many people now think that it was Francis Hopkinson who designed it first. Hopkinson was a member of the Continental Congress, and was a co-designer to Pierre Eugene du Simitiere in the making of the Great Seal of the United States.
George Washington's interpretation of the flag's symbology, is that "We take the stars from Heaven, the red from our mother country, separating it by white stripes, thus showing that we have separated from her, and the white stripes shall go down to posterity representing Liberty."
The flag of the United States has been changed more than 26 times throughout the ages. The amount of stars changed at least 26 times, but their arrangement, as well as the number and arrangement of the stripes, has been modified several times. The oldest version known to historians is the “Betsy Ross” flag (which was probably not made by Ross), which portrayed the 13 stars arranged in a circle, pointing outward, not upward.
