John H. Brown
John H. Brown was born in Kentucky about 1837. On 5 December 1859 he gave bond in Meade County, on the Ohio River below Louisville, to marry Matilda C. Greenwell, and his surety was Thomas S. Greenwell, the bride's brother. The clerk's register notes the license was issued on the groom being of full age and on the consent of the bride's father. They were married at the Catholic church in the presence of Francis Greenwell. The county's books carry the wedding twice and disagree by ten days, one entry putting it on 7 December and the certificate on the 17th, and the bride is written Matilda C. in one place and Caroline in another.
He farmed on the waters of Spring Creek, inside Rawleigh Colston's old 25,000 acre survey, on land he and his brother James C. Brown had bought jointly from James J. Mills by deed of 12 February 1859, ten months before either of them married. The two brothers married two sisters and then spent a decade signing deeds together, selling off the tract in pieces to Thomas Brown, to Henry H. Blackstone, to Columbus Brown in 1869 and to Isaac Moore in 1871, their wives joining each conveyance and each being examined apart from her husband as the law directed. In March 1865, at the height of the Kentucky oil fever, he and Matilda leased the farm for fifteen years to three men prospecting for petroleum. In February 1868 he bought a further tract from Ferdinand L. Moreman for nine hundred and seventy two dollars.
The 1870 census found him at thirty four heading dwelling 110 in the Concordia precinct, eight doors from the Greenwell household his eldest son would one day marry into, with Caroline and seven children. An eighth, a son who carried his name, was born after that page was written. He was dead by February 1876, when his wife's brother Andrew J. Greenwell filed a petition in equity against the widow and heirs to force a conveyance of twenty five acres he had bought and never got a deed for. The court adjudged Greenwell entitled in September 1876, appointed a commissioner who died before he could execute the deed, appointed another, and closed the matter on 16 March 1877. That deed is the only document that lists the family whole. His death, its cause, its exact date and his burial are not known.
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Cite: Heirology, "John H. Brown (b. 1837)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-h-brown-1837-0d7aaf.