Ann Hasseltine was born on December 22, 1789, in Bradford, Massachusetts, the daughter of a church deacon. She worked as a teacher from her graduation until her marriage. As a teenager, according to her biographers, she was sociable and more devoted to local amusements than to faith, until, in 1806, a reading on woman’s calling confronted her with the futility of that life and awakened in her a desire for an existence devoted to something greater than herself.
In 1810 she met the young missionary Adoniram Judson, who proposed to her not only marriage, but an entire life in distant lands, with no guarantee of return. Ann took about two months to decide, torn between her attachment to her family and her fear of suffering; upon accepting, she wrote in her diary that she did not care where she would serve, as long as she was useful to God’s kingdom.
They married on February 5, 1812, and sailed for India a few days later. During the long crossing, the couple studied the subject of baptism and concluded that believer’s immersion was the biblical pattern, breaking with the board that had sent them and joining the Baptists; they were baptized in Calcutta.
Barred from remaining under British rule in India, they moved on to Burma, arriving in Rangoon in 1813. Ann learned the local language, opened a space to teach girls, and wrote a catechism summarizing the Christian faith for the first Burmese listeners.
The joy of motherhood came together with grief: her son Roger was born in 1815 and died before his first birthday. Even so, Ann continued studying languages, and in 1819 she translated the Gospel of Matthew into Thai, the first Protestant portion of Scripture in that language, along with a catechism printed in Thai characters.
In 1822, health problems forced her to return temporarily to the United States; it was during this period that she wrote an account of the first decade of the Baptist mission in Burma, published in 1823. Once recovered, she returned to Asia the following year.
In 1824, war between the United Kingdom and Burma changed everything: Adoniram was arrested as a suspected spy and taken to the prison at Ava. Ann began living in a hut near its walls, bringing food, clothing, and pleas to the authorities, almost always without response; in her own accounts, she described reaching moments of deep despair in the face of hunger, illness, and uncertainty over her husband’s fate.
It was during this period that she helped hide, inside a pillow, the manuscript of the New Testament translation her husband had been preparing for years; when the prisoners were transferred and the pillow discarded, a family servant retrieved it and kept it buried until his release. Adoniram would only be freed in 1826, at the end of the war.
Already exhausted by months of tension and a life of hardship, Ann died on October 24, 1826, in Amherst, at the age of 36; biographers disagree on the exact illness that took her life, attributed variously to a fever contracted in the region or to other complications linked to the physical toll of the preceding years. Her youngest daughter, Maria, would survive her mother by only a few months. Her letters, published in the United States, helped establish the image of the woman missionary as a calling in her own right, not merely a supporting role to her husband.
