Jerusha J. Rightnowar
Jerusha J. Rightnowar was born in Illinois about 1827, by the censuses. She married John Hicks in Jefferson County, Illinois, in September 1842. The marriage is entered twice in the county's books. One entry, in volume 2, gives JERUSHA J. RIGHTNOWAR and 8 September. The other, in volume 1, gives JERUSHA RITINOUR and 18 September. If her census age is right, she was about fifteen.
No record known names her parents. They were very probably George Rightnowar and his wife Jerusha, born Ruse. Rightnowar was a rare name in Jefferson County, and every Rightnowar who married there before 1850 fits one family: George R. in 1829, Elizabeth in 1833, John in 1837, Mary Ann in 1839, Henry in 1840, Jerusha J. in 1842, John in 1846 and Adam in 1849. The county history of 1883 says George's wife "raised ten children". Jerusha J. carried her mother's uncommon given name, and she passed it to a daughter of her own.
George Rightnowar was a Pennsylvanian. His son Adam was born near Elizabethtown, in Hardin County, Illinois, in 1824, so the family was in the far south of the state a few years before Jerusha J. was born. In 1841 George bought eighty acres in section 17 of what became McClellan Township, and his sons bought the rest of that square mile over the next eleven years. He died in November 1845, three years after her wedding. His widow Jerusia died in September 1857. Both are buried in the family burying ground on his land near Waltonville.
The Hickses and the Rightnowars were tied twice. Henry Rightnowar, very probably her brother, married Jane Hicks in 1840, two years before Jerusha married John Hicks. John bought land of his own in section 29 of the same township in 1853 and 1855.
Five children can be read off the censuses: Nancy I. about 1844, George M. D. in November 1845, Talitha A. about 1849, Jerusha N. about 1857 and Stephen D. about 1860. Jerusha N. was born about the year the elder Jerusia died.
The enumerators were careless with this family in the way they often were with names they had only heard spoken. Talitha is written Tabitha in one year and Talitha in another, Nancy is Nancy I. once and Nancy J. the next time, and two of the youngest are set down as Timpa and Betsa, which are not names anyone was christened. What holds across every version is the shape of the household and the unusual middle initials of the second child.
When she died is not known. Her son George M. D. Hicks married Margaret Ellen Aud, and Margaret was buried in 1925 in the Rightnowar Cemetery at Waltonville, the burying ground on George Rightnowar's land.
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Cite: Heirology, "Jerusha J. Rightnowar (b. 1827)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/jerusha-j-rightnowar-1827-d16c49.