Ancestors

James Washington Terry

A Virginian who came west young and was farming in Lincoln County, Missouri, on the rolling ground above St. Louis, by the age of twenty-two. The census of 1850 finds him at house 229, entered as James W. Terry, aged twenty-two and born in Virginia, with a wife of seventeen named Darthuly A., a one-year-old son David, and a six-year-old girl called Susan A. who is too old to be either of theirs and whose place in the house is not explained.

Ten years later he is in Bedford Township on page 46 of the 1860 enumeration, thirty years old, still giving Virginia, with Arthusa aged twenty-eight and four children: David T. eleven, Rebecca six, Ja W. five, and a daughter Sarah who is entered as under one year old. It is the last time anybody writes him down. He is in no census afterwards, in Missouri or anywhere else, and by the summer of 1870 his wife is head of the household in the same township with three children and her own mother taken in.

So he died in the 1860s, in a county where that decade was not a war fought at a front but one fought along the roads and in the farmyards. Missouri registered no deaths then, and no burial or probate for him is known, so the date and manner of his death are not known. His children carried his name into Arkansas a generation later.

If James Washington Terry is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "James Washington Terry", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-washington-terry-ef35fe.