Du Quoin, Illinois & the Bicentennial Property

We have camped just north of Elkville, IL at the Du Quoin State Fairgrounds, Site C-197.

On the way here, we stopped at the library in Sparta to get copies of the various Davis properties of interest from a reprint of a 1907 Atlas of Jackson County.  It is combined with an 1878 history of Jackson County, so I also reviewed all the pertinent Davis citations, all of which I had previously found elsewhere.  It pointed out that the Aaron Davis property had left family hands at a very early date, so it won't take long to figure out exactly when that happened.

Regarding John Spear, the son of William Madison Spear and Sarah Davis, I looked through the probate records of his father-in-law, Uncle Billy Davis.  It establishes that his middle name was "Matterson" [sic: Madison] and that his youngest daughter was Mary Spear.  She appears in the 1860 Cenus as Caroline Spear.  She married John E. Vancil on 10 Mar 1880 (the record was mis-transcribed as Mary Spencer).   It seems they both died prior to the 1900 Census - he in 1891, her date unknown.  There are public records that establish that they had three children (an unsourced family tree suggests they had at least three others): Margaret "Maggie", who married Arthur Guy Wilson; Emily Marie, who married Arthur Grover Thompson; and Arthur Milton, who married Mary Kaufman.  It appears only the latter had children: Sylvester and Edith.  I will attempt to do some deed research for William Madison Spear while at the courthouse in Murphysboro.

I got a surprise e-mail from Carole Burroughs, which included a title abstract of the James/William Davis bicentennial property.  It turns out that the property left Davis hands and into the ownership of H. P. Burroughs.  Later, a male descendant of H. P. Burroughs married a female descendant of William Davis, so it came back into Davis hands.  So it will be easy enough to get the facts straight about all of that for the book.  That has saved me a huge amount of mind-numbing work, so I will likely have more time to do some other research while we are in the area.

She has also included some information about James' son Ralph (or "Rafe") Davis, who supposedly left at least a few descendants.  I am following up on those leads, to see what public records might support the information that I was provided.  More on that later, once I chase wherever that leads...