Lewis M. Clapp
Lewis M. Clapp was born in Alabama about 1849, the eldest son of Tillman R. Clapp and Delia Riggins. The census of 1850 found him at a year old in his parents' house in Marshall County, in northern Alabama on the Tennessee River, entered as Lewis N., with a baby sister, Sarah. In 1860 he was ten, entered as Lewis M., in the same county with his parents and five younger brothers and sisters, William A., Mary, Margaret and Martha among them. Two old people born in North Carolina in the 1770s, Nancy and Sarah Riggins, lived with the family, kin of his mother.
After the Civil War the Clapps went north to Graves County, in the far west of Kentucky, where the census of 1870 found his parents farming near Farmington. Lewis, twenty-one, was no longer in their house. By his family's account he married in Graves County a first time, and his wife died. By the late 1870s he was in Oregon County, Missouri, in the Ozark hills on the Arkansas line, where his brothers William and Tilman also came.
About 1878 he married Sarah Jane Barton, a girl of seventeen born at Alton. Their daughter Mary Elizabeth was born in October 1878, and in June 1880 the census taker found the three of them in Oak Grove Township, Louis M. Clapp, thirty, farmer, born in Alabama, with Sarah J., twenty, and Mary E., one. His brother William, twenty-six, was keeping a separate house in the county with his wife Mary Caroline Robinson and their baby son. A second daughter, Delia, named for Lewis's mother, was born in May 1882. His brother Tilman died at twenty-four in September 1884 and was buried at Cave Spring Cemetery near Alton.
Lewis died in 1886, about thirty-seven, and was buried at Cave Spring too. His brother William lost his own wife the same year. In September 1886 William married Lewis's widow, and Mary and Delia grew up in their uncle's house as his daughters, which is how the census of 1900 entered them.
Parents
Delia Riggins (b. 1824)
Children
Sources
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Cite: Heirology, "Lewis M. Clapp (1849-1886)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/lewis-m-clapp-1849-1886-fe9aa0.