Person:Martha Patton (13)

Notes

From The Beard Family History Wiki:

About 1825, Elijah [Beard] had married Martha Wilson Patton, the last of the nine children of John Patton and Mary Wilson of Bedford County. Martha's father John Patton was a Revolutionary War soldier, just as Elijah's father Samuel was, also. John Patton had come to Tennessee from North Carolina. Martha Patton was born in Wilson County, Tennessee 2 March 1800 [s/b 1806?] and her family brought her to Bedford County, just two counties south, when she was very young. On the 1830 census, Elijah was between thirty and forty, Martha was between twenty and thirty, and they had two little boys and a girl, all under five years old. The girl must have died before the next census, for she is not listed in it or in future censuses. In 1840, the family appeared on the rolls of neighboring Lincoln County with Elijah now forty to fifty, Martha thirty to forty, two boys ten to fifteen, two boys five to ten, and three little girls under five.

Elijah and Martha would eventually have a total of five sons and four daughters at their table. Eight of these children would grow up to be a vigorous tribe of descendants, providing many early settler families of Tennessee, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. When Elijah died in 1845, he left a large family fatherless but his wife, sons, and daughters managed to stick together and take care of each other through that challenge and then through Civil War and Reconstruction years. Because these many children married and successfully raised many children, Elijah and Martha's descendants would settle in many states of the union, and some are today living as far away as Australia! Several of the descendants have kept careful records of their family stories, and in this article we will include the overview of Elijah's children as well as his life story. Source: The Beard Family History Wiki