Elizabeth Stedman Hopkins
Elizabeth Stedman Hopkins was born on 26 August 1870 in Perry County, Alabama. She was called Lizzie. Her parents were John Alexander Hopkins and Rosanna Emiline Canon, and her birth is entered in her father's family Bible. She was the seventh of thirteen children.
In November 1875, when she was five, the family left Alabama by wagon for Texas. They arrived on 22 December 1875 at a farm in Tyler County owned by her mother's father, Malcolm Canon. About 1877 or 1878 they moved to the Moscow community in Polk County. The 1880 census found them there. It lists "Elizabeth S Hopkins," aged nine and born in Alabama, with her parents and her brothers and sisters Malcom, John L., Susan S., William F. and Ella E.
Her father was a devout Methodist. Her sister Susan, interviewed in 1949, remembered that he had been wounded at Lookout Mountain in the Civil War and that their mother went to Atlanta to nurse him.
On 29 August 1889, three days after her nineteenth birthday, she married Vinson Allen Collins at Moscow. He was a twenty-two-year-old schoolteacher from Hardin County who had left home with his clothes in a flour sack. The 1959 family genealogy says that "Elizabeth encouraged him to complete his education." He went to the Sam Houston Normal Institute at Huntsville. "Lizzie ran a boardinghouse to support him while he went to school at Huntsville," it says. He graduated in 1893.
Her first child, a son, died as an infant in 1890. Carr Pritchett was born near Chester in Tyler County on 12 May 1892, and Halley Houston in December 1893. A daughter, Lois Qualena, was born on 21 February 1895 and died on 21 August, at six months. Her small stone reads "dau. of V. A. & Elizabeth Collins." Another daughter, Jessie May, was born in 1897. The genealogy says she taught her sons "to read and write before they went to school and kept them clean, well mannered and dressed neatly." Her father died at Chester in February 1897.
She died on 13 April 1900, at the age of twenty-nine. Her husband's 1962 book says she died at Grand Saline, Texas; the 1959 genealogy says at Chester. She was buried at Mount Hope Cemetery in Chester, where her father already lay and her mother would be buried in 1917. Her husband became a lawyer the next year and in 1902 married Nannie Kuykendall of Grand Saline.
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Cite: Heirology, "Elizabeth Stedman Hopkins (1870-1900)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/elizabeth-stedman-hopkins-1870-1900-d554c4.