Jesse Kendrick
Jesse Kendrick was born about 1785. In 1802 he married Mary Jane Parker, called Polly, the daughter of John Parker, a Baptist preacher. Their first child, Sarah, was born in Georgia in December 1803. The family moved with the frontier: their son Carroll was born in Maury County, Tennessee, in 1815, and by the 1820s they were in north Alabama, where Sarah married in 1822.
Jesse and Polly had nine children who lived to be named in his will: Sarah, who married Joseph Reaves; Nancy, who married a Downen; Rebecca, who married a Bevens; Allen; Harriet, who married a Ticer; Carroll; Jincy Matilda; Caroline; and Maime D. Kendrick. Allen and Carroll both became preachers of the Christian Church and edited religious papers in Kentucky.
The marriage did not last. Jesse and Polly were divorced in Tippah County, Mississippi, in 1841. By then Jesse had already gone north alone to Missouri.
He was one of the first settlers of Miller County, on the Osage River. He entered forty acres there in 1837 and received his certificate from the federal land office on 16 April 1839. The tract lay along the Shut-In Branch, in what is now the west part of the town of Tuscumbia. By the county's later history, he built the first house at the Tuscumbia site. In the 1840 census he lived alone in Equality Township. He served as a justice of the peace and held court at his house, and the neighbors called him Squire Kendrick. In 1838 he performed four marriages. He also kept a grocery and a dram shop, a bar where liquor was sold by the drink.
He held one enslaved man, Reuben, who came to Missouri with him. Jesse wrote his will on 7 October 1839, with John Brockman and W. H. McDonald as witnesses. When he died in 1843, Reuben was freed by its terms, with his gun and all the property he owned.
Reuben buried Jesse on the bank of the Shut-In and tended the grave for the rest of his life. Floods on the Osage later backed water up the creek, and the grave was lost. John L. West, the administrator, sold the forty acres on 2 August 1847 to John and Nancy Brumley for $85.50, though appraisers had valued it at $140.
Children
Sources
If Jesse Kendrick is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Jesse Kendrick (1785-1843)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/jesse-kendrick-1785-1843-416540.