Collection of digital images, documents, and other records depicting the life and work of Marie Jones Francis. Francis, the “midwife of Sanford,” lived at 621 East Sixth Street in Sanford, Florida. Francis converted the house to also serve as a maternity ward, where she delivered over 40,000 babies during her 32 year career. She became a midwife in the same vein as her mother, Carrie Jones, and together they ran the Jones-Francis Maternity Hall in Georgetown. Francis left behind a successful hotel and restaurant she owned in Sarasota in 1942 to return to Sanford and become a midwife. World War II caused a shortage in doctors and nurses, so Florida’s Children’s Bureau sent Francis to Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University to acquire her practical nursing license in 1945. She specialized in premature babies and returned to Sanford to aid her mother at Fernald-Laughton Memorial Hospital before they opened the ward in their home. “When her health starting failing,” she recollects in a newspaper article, “I took over.”

Francis served her community in several ways. She delivered babies for both white and black families from Seminole County, primarily patrons who either preferred natural births or could not afford deliveries at a hospital. In the 1950s, it cost $70 to stay nine days where soon-to-be mothers were taken care of, including three home-cooked meals; mothers were also taught basics in infant care. Francis was assisted by her sister, Annie Walker, who did the cooking. If a mother could not afford the costs, Francis would not turn her away. “There’s a lot of charity here but I wouldn’t feel good taking money and knowing the mother can’t eat when she leaves here,” Francis mentions in a newspaper article.

The house and ward also served as a school, where Francis taught nurses the art of midwives. Nurses would come from across the state to learn how to delivery infants naturally. A heavy burden on a single working mother, Francis had three daughters, Cassandra Francis Clayton, Daphne Francis Humphrey, and Barbara Francis Torre, Clayton and Humphrey became school teachers and Torre became a purchaser at Seminole Memorial Hospital. The “Midwife of Sanford,” Marie Francis and her family contributed to Sanford’s development and well-being for the better half of the twentieth century.

To view the collection on the interactive map, click here.