Ancestors

John Newman Nisbett

John Newman Nisbett was born on 25 October 1824 in Rutherford County, Tennessee, in the middle of the state near Murfreesboro. He was the fifth of the fourteen children of Joseph William Nisbett and Rosanna Newman, and he carried his mother's surname as his middle name. His son's death certificate of 1933 names him as John Nisbett, born in Tennessee.

His mother died in 1846. On 15 October 1849 John and his older brother Alexander left Rutherford County on horseback for Texas. Alexander kept a diary of the trip and its costs. They crossed the Tennessee, the Mississippi, the St. Francis, the White and the Brazos, and came down through Bowie, Titus, Upshur, Rusk, Nacogdoches, Cherokee, Houston, Walker, Leon and Grimes counties to Washington County, about 511 miles. They arrived on 2 December 1849 and settled up their shared expenses on 20 January 1850. Alexander stayed in the Brazos country, in Robertson County, and John went into the cattle business there and later in Bell and Milam counties.

His father died in Tennessee in November 1857. The county court there found that he left eleven living children, John among them, and John was named as a petitioner when the heirs asked to sell their father's two slaves for division.

He married three times, and each wife had been married before. His first wife, Catharine Fulcher, a widow, married him in 1857. Their children were Rosanna, who died young in 1864, and Joseph Alexander, born on 13 November 1859 in Robertson County. His second wife was a widow named Shields, and their children were Jefferson Davis, born in 1860, Christina Jane, and Kitty, born in 1863, who died in 1872. Kittie, who married a Rylee, is also named among his children. He served the Confederacy in the Civil War, with a Texas command, and was appointed a second lieutenant.

On 25 December 1871 he married Ann Elizabeth Bryant, called Annie, the widow of a Lowery and a granddaughter of Capt. Benjamin Franklin Bryant of Bryant Station. She was more than twenty years younger than he was. Their children were Jesse Bryant Nisbett, born in 1872 and named for her father, Emma Newsom, Elva Delene, Eliza Dee, born in Hood County in 1878, William Adolphus, Eura Alice, who married J. H. McDaniel, and John Ephrim. Lena E., who married a Miller, is also named among them.

About 1874 the family moved to Hood County, southwest of Fort Worth on the Brazos River. John died at Granbury on 14 May 1890, aged 65, and was buried in the Granbury Cemetery. The cemetery's own book wrote his name as "Nissett, John N." His widow married again that September and lived forty more years. When she applied for a Confederate widow's pension in 1927, she still had the letter appointing him second lieutenant.

A photograph of him survives: an old man with a long white beard reaching to his chest, his hair swept back, in a dark coat.

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Cite: Heirology, "John Newman Nisbett (1824-1890)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/john-newman-nisbett-1824-1890-8eb8e0.