Sarah Hall Boardman

Life

She was born on November 4, 1803, in Alstead, New Hampshire, the eldest of thirteen children. Her family moved to Massachusetts, and she grew up in Danvers and Salem. In 1820 she joined the First Baptist Church of Salem. Because of her family's financial circumstances, she was unable to continue her studies at a girls' school and largely educated herself while caring for her younger siblings. She is said to have enjoyed reading missionary accounts from an early age and to have dreamed of serving in foreign missions.

In July 1825 she married the Baptist minister George Dana Boardman, and a few weeks later the couple left the United States as missionaries. Traveling by way of Calcutta, India, they arrived in Burma in 1827. Based in Tavoy (present-day Dawei) in southern Burma, her husband traveled among Karen villages preaching the gospel until his health failed; he died of tuberculosis in February 1831. Sarah remained there and continued the work while raising her young son. This son, George Dana Boardman Jr., later became a Baptist minister in the United States.

On April 10, 1834, she married Adoniram Judson, the pioneer of the Burma mission, and worked alongside him for a little more than ten years. During that time she lost several children, and her health declined. In 1845, while sailing to the United States with her husband for medical treatment, she died off the island of Saint Helena in the Atlantic and was buried there.

Ministry and Accomplishments

• Work among the Karen: Together with her first husband, she established schools and churches among the Karen, an ethnic minority. After his death, from 1831 to 1834, she traveled to villages in the jungle, teaching and founding village schools.
• Translation: She translated the first part of John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress into Burmese; according to the American Baptist Historical Society, this translation remains in use today. She is also reported to have translated the New Testament, several evangelistic tracts, and Judson's life of Christ into Peguan (present-day Mon).
• Hymns and catechesis: She compiled a Burmese hymnal and also produced catechisms.

After Sarah's death, Judson asked the writer Emily Chubbuck to write her biography. Under the pen name "Fanny Forester," Chubbuck published Memoir of Sarah B. Judson; she later became Judson's third wife.

Influence on the Korean Church

Sources identified to date show no evidence that Sarah Hall Boardman engaged in any activity directly related to the Korean church or left any records concerning it. Her period of service, however, coincided with the Great Century of Missions, when North American churches were actively sending missionaries to Asia. Her life can therefore be understood as an example of nineteenth-century American Baptist foreign missions, which formed the background for missionary work in Asia, including Korea.

Assessment

In the history of Baptist missions, she is regarded as a woman missionary who remained in the field after her husband's death, carried on the work, and achieved notable results in translation and education. In the nineteenth century she was widely known as "Mrs. Judson," a model of the devout missionary wife. As a result, some have observed that her life has come down to us largely through the laudatory form of the memoir and that her own accomplishments have been overshadowed by the names of her husbands. There is also critical scholarship examining the relationship between colonialism and missions in American missionary work as a whole during the period when Britain was gaining control of Burma. This discussion, however, concerns the missions of the era generally and is not an assessment directed at Sarah personally.