Birdie Fox
Birdie Mary Fox was born 25 September 1889 in Missouri, the eldest child of George Fox, a Tywappity Township farmer, and Nancy Ann Carlisle, a Kentucky-born mother who was widowed young and would head her own household for decades. The 1900 census shows Birdie at eleven on the family farm south of Charleston, with her sister Ruby and brothers William Edgar and George.
On 26 November 1907, two months past eighteen, she married James Arthur Brown of Charleston, a Kentucky-born farmer five years her senior; a Catholic priest married them. The 1910 census finds the couple renting a farm in Tywappity with their first child, Hazel, a year old, in the same enumeration district as Birdie's widowed mother. Ten children are counted to the marriage. In August 1929 James died on an operating table across the river at Cairo, and Birdie signed the certificate as informant. The next April's census shows her at the head of the farm household in Ohio Township, seven children at home, in the cotton country between Wyatt and Charleston.
On 20 November 1933 she remarried, to Patrick Henry O'Neil. The 1940 census writes her as Bertie O'Neal, again with no husband on the page and four sons still at home; what became of Patrick is not known. She lived at Wyatt for the rest of her life, and died of a cerebral thrombosis on 15 February 1975 at the Host House Nursing Home in Charleston, aged eighty-five. She was buried beside James in Calvary Cemetery, under a stone that reads Birdie Fox Brown O'Neil, and beneath that, In Memory, Mother.
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Birdie Fox (1889-1975)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/birdie-fox-1889-1975-14aea8.