Almost a Eureka! Moment

Serendipity was at work this past Monday, when I visited the Sparta Public Library to view a copy of the 1907 Atlas for Jackson County, Illinois.  It happened to be the closest library to Jackson County that was open on Monday, otherwise I would have gone to a library in Jackson County.  They have only a single call number for their roomful of genealogical history books: GEN HIS.  That meant that in order for me to find what I wanted, I literally had to look at each and every volume.  In doing so, I happened upon an abstract of early Kaskaskia newspaper notices.  One such notice reads as follows:

"Vol. 5, #33, Tues, June 19, 1821
Mr. John Gathers, 19 [sic], and Mrs. Patsy Davis were married in Brownsville, Jackson County, on May 21.  The ceremony was attended by the children and grandchildren of the bride."

It is hard to imagine a 19 year old marrying a grandmother in 1821 Illinois, so that is likely erroneous information (possibly 79?).

I got to wondering how many Davis widows living in Jackson County in 1821 were old enough to have married children, and thus grandchildren?  The answer: very, very few.  After all, 1821 was still a very early time in Illinois (just three years after statehood), and the vast majority of pioneers did not yet have grown sons who had married.  After all, the average pioneer family was fairly young.

The one possibility that to me seems very likely is that she may have been the widow of Mathis Davis.  When he sold land in Livingston County, KY, the deed was acknowledge by this wife, Martha (Patsy being a common nickname for Martha).  

If Mathis was the father of James, Aaron and Amos, as I have speculated, then he was likely near 80 years old in 1820.  So his widow would probably have been of a similar age, and in 1820 they were living just a few miles south of Brownsville, where this wedding took place.

If there were any record of the groom, John Gathers, it would help immensely in determining if all of my speculating is correct.  But that name does not show up in a search of Census records from 1818 to 1830.  The one possibility is that the name was not transcribed accurately, which would greatly complicate any efforts at finding him.  Could it have actually been Gaston, which is the name of a close neighbor?

The next step would be to determine how to get a copy of the actual newspaper notice, in order to determine if there is a transcription error.  I will see if there is a research library that might be willing to find that information for me, but I suspect it appeared in the Illinois Intelligencer, which was published in Kaskaskia from 1818-1832.  There are copies on microfilm at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, VA, so if we happen to pass near there when they are open, I will get a copy of the actual notice.

In my mind, if there is record of her groom living in the vicinity of either James Davis or Aaron Davis, the odds would be very high that she was the widow of Mathis Davis, and that Mathis was the father of James, Aaron and Amos Davis.