Ancestors

James Arthur Brown

1884-1929 · Meade County KY → Little Prairie Township, Pemiscot Co MO → Charleston, Mississippi Co MO → Wyatt, Mississippi Co MO → Cairo IL
Born 1884, Meade County, Kentucky
Died 1929
Father: James Horace Brown
Mother: Julia Catherine Greenwell
Children include George

James Arthur Brown was born 19 May 1884 in Meade County, Kentucky, the eldest surviving child of James Horace Brown and Julia Catherine Greenwell, farm people of the Catholic river precincts below Louisville. His parents sold their land in December 1891 and brought the family into the Missouri bootheel, and the 1900 census finds them in the timber country of Little Prairie Township, Pemiscot County, with James at sixteen already hiring out as a day laborer.

On 26 November 1907, at Charleston in Mississippi County, he married Bertie Fox, a Tywappity Township farmer's daughter two months past her eighteenth birthday. A Catholic priest, H. Hussmann, performed the marriage. The 1910 census shows the young family renting a farm in Tywappity: James twenty-five, Birdie twenty, and their first child Hazel, aged one, in the same enumeration district as Birdie's widowed mother. His 1918 draft card has him farming for himself on rural route 4 out of Charleston. Ten children are counted to the marriage across two decades.

In August 1929 his abdomen went wrong at Wyatt, where the family then lived. He was taken across the Mississippi to the St. Mary's hospital at Cairo, Illinois, and on 19 August, the day the surgeons operated, he died of general peritonitis from a ruptured intestine, cause unknown. He was forty-five. Birdie signed the certificate herself. Two days later he was buried in Calvary Cemetery at Charleston, where she would join him forty-five years on. His widowed mother lived on six miles from Wyatt until 1944, outliving him by fifteen years.

Sources

Illinois, Deaths and Stillbirths, 1916-1948 (ark 1:1:NQ33-KZK); Missouri county marriage records; United States WWI draft registration cards; the 1900 and 1910 federal censuses; Missouri death certificate 50399 (1966), his brother Andrew's

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Cite: Heirology, "James Arthur Brown (1884-1929)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-arthur-brown-1884-1929-2ba8d1.