1850’s: How the Family Grew

Julia was the first child in the family to marry.  She married Thomas Fowler in the summer of 1849.  They set up house right next to Sarah and Daniel.  The first Higgins grandchild, Harrison Fowler, was born the following year.  Sarah was probably present as Harrison entered the world, helping her daughter deliver the baby.   Julia presented them with three more grandchildren, Mary Jane, Thomas Jackson and Sarah Ann.  Thomas Jackson and Sarah Ann both died as babies, Thomas right before his first birthday and Sarah right after her first birthday.  Tragedy struck again when Julia Ann suddenly died at the age of 25, buried in the Blackburn Cemetery close to her two babies.[1]

In 1854, John Wesley at the age of twenty-four married to eighteen-year-old Lucinda Barnett.[2]  Their first daughter, Sarah named after her grandmother, was born in 1855.  She only lived for one year, dying the same year her Aunt Julia died.  Little Sarah’s death was the fourth family death in three years. John and Lucinda had eleven children during their twenty-six year marriage; at least four of their children lived to adulthood.  They raised their growing family in Brooklyn on a farm close to Daniel and Sarah.  Lucinda died in 1879, a year before her mother-in-law Sarah died.[3] 

Twenty-two year old Christopher was the third child to marry.  He married eighteen-year-old Margaret Ann Mason in the summer of 1857.  Their first daughter, Q Isabel Higgins, born the following summer, died at thirteen months of cholera,[4] another grandbaby buried in the Blackburn cemetery.  Christopher and Mary eventually had six daughters and one son.  Christopher moved his family to Nevada sometime between 1860 and 1866, where their last five children were born.  He was the only son to move away from Illinois.

Jackson married in 1858, a year after Christopher.  Twenty-six year old, Jackson married twenty-one year old Sarah Burnett.  They lived on a farm right next to Daniel and Sarah.  Christopher lived next to Jackson.  John Fowler, his brother-in-law lived on the other side of Daniel and Sarah.   John Wesley and his family lived a couple of farms away, next to Lucinda’s parents.  Jackson and Sarah’s first son William Harrison was born in 1859.[5]

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[1] Museum, Schuyler County,  254

[2] 1860 Federal Census  Brooklyn, Schuyler, Illinois, John Higgins”, ancestry.com, (accessed May 1, 2013)

[3] Illinois, Find A Grave Index, 1809-2012 ”Lucinda Higgins” http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi: (accessed 25 January 2013)

[4] US Federal Census Mortality Schedules, 1850-1885 “Isabel Higgins” ancestry.com (accessed May 19, 2013)

[5] 1860 Federal Census Brooklyn, Schuyler, IL