“Wedding” is the
theme for this week’s challenge. I tried
to think of the marriages I had learned about that had the most impact on me,
and I thought of my great-grandfather’s sister, Lucina.
Lucina Adamson, daughter of Aaron and Martha Jennings Thompson
Adamson, was born about 1842 in Illinois.
On the 17th of October 1861, Lucina married John M. Dewhirst
in Richland County, Illinois. Lucina was
nineteen years old and John was twenty-one years old at the time of their
marriage. Sadly, John died five months
later of typhoid, leaving Lucina a widow at the young age of nineteen or
twenty.
Lucina remarried on the 26th of October in 1863
in Clay County, Illinois, one year and seven months after her first husband,
John Dewhirst, had died. At the time of
this marriage Lucina was about twenty-one years old and her new husband, George
Washington Gibson, was twenty-four years old.
I have written before about this second marriage of Lucina’s. In the Clay County Marriage Records, it is
recorded that she married Washington Lewis in Clay County. I quickly realized that it was not Washington
Lewis that Lucina had married, but it took me years to find that it was
actually Washington Gibson who she had married, not Washington Lewis. The two Washington‘s were listed as living
next door to each other in the 1865 Clay County census. I am guessing that the
county clerk who recorded the marriage just mistakenly put down the wrong last
name.
Lucina and Washington Gibson’s marriage also ended sadly,
with Lucina’s death in 1866 when she was about twenty-four years old and had
been married to George for two years and five months.
It doesn’t appear that Lucina had children, at least not any
that had lived for long.
Lucina’s story has always struck me as tragic. It’s hard to imagine how she went through
nursing and losing her first husband so soon after they married. And then she married again and she died. Very sad.
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