A true story with an interesting twist!
It is October, 1796. The place is Lincoln, Tennessee. Admitted to the Union in July of that year as the 16th state, Tennessee has been a State for only three months. A farmer named John Drinkard has just died. As yet, I do not know his cause of death.
He was only 36, but life on the frontier was rough then. Only 13 years earlier, my fifth great uncle, James John Floyd, a prominent Kentucky Colonel and co-founder of Louisville, Kentucky, had been killed in an Indian raid. Kentucky was still a part of Virginia at the time.
Drinkard left behind a young wife, Obedience, nee Childress. She had three young children, a son named William was only five and twins named Francis and Mourning were apparently only a little over one year old. Born in Prince Edward County, Virginia to Reps Childress and Elizabeth Hardin, she had moved to Tennessee when she married John Drinkard. John himself had been born in Amelia Courthouse ten years before she was born in 1770.
Being a lone widow with three young children on the edge of civilization was a grim prospect, so Obedience went back to Virginia almost immediately. I cannot imagine the hardships of that journey. Today, it is about a ten hour drive, but it would have taken several days then.
Within less than a month of her Husband’s death, Obedience married John Dillon, a Virginia man she had likely known before her first marriage. Both were 26 at the time they married, so considering the lack of courtship – or one that lasted only a couple of weeks at most – it is highly likely they were previously acquainted.
A few months later – we do not know exactly how long – a son they named John Dillon was born. This is where it gets interesting. This John Dillon is my third Great Grandfather, husband of Arilla Sears and father of Elizabeth “Bettie” Ann Dillon. But Ancestry DNA points to John Drinkard as being my 4th Great Grandfather, not John Dillon. Timing makes it impossible to know without further information.
This will become a major focus of my future research.
Note: Bettie Ann Dillon was my mother’s maternal great-grandmother in my Mitochondrial DNA line – – mother to mother to mother.
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