Mary Gardiner Brainard

Mary Gardiner Brainard was born in New London, Connecticut.^[1] She was daughter of William Fowler Brainard (1784-1844), a New London lawyer, whose uncle was the poet John Gardiner Calkins Brainard, and his second wife Sarah Ann Prentis.^[2][3]

Her poem "Not Knowing" first appeared in The Congregationalist, March 1869, and was set to music as a hymn by Philip Paul Bliss in the 1870s.^[4]