Ancestors

Margaret Downing

Margaret Downing was a daughter of James Downing, a scout of the Indian wars on the upper Ohio, and she grew up in the river country of Brooke County, Virginia. She married Benjamin Cuppy about 1799, and her first son, born in Brooke County in 1800, was named James Downing Cuppy for her father. Two more sons carried the Downing name, Abraham Downing and John Downing Cuppy, and another was named Adam, for her brother.

In 1806 she came out to the Sandy valley in Ohio with her father's party, and lived there six years. On 9 June 1812 she and her husband sold their Stark County quarter section to John Bair of Adams County, Pennsylvania, for six hundred dollars. She signed by mark, and the associate judge at Canton examined her apart from her husband, as the law required, to be sure she released the land of her own free will. They moved west into Richland County, to a new clearing near the Orange road in what is now Ashland County.

They were there less than a season. In September 1812, after the killings at the Ruffner and Zimmer cabins, the families of that clearing fled. The war party that killed James Copus burned the Cuppy cabin the next morning. Her daughter Anna was born on 23 October 1812, a month later, while the families were refugees around the blockhouse at Jerome's place on the Jerome Fork, where most of them stayed until the spring of 1814.

Her father died before the winter of 1822, and on 2 December of that year she signed the division of his estate with her brothers and sisters. She and Benjamin were in Montgomery County, Ohio, by then or soon after, and in September 1825 they sold their share of the Virginia land. Most of the family went on to Tippecanoe County, Indiana, about 1825. She died there, or on the way, before February 1836, when her husband took out a licence to marry again.

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Cite: Heirology, "Margaret Downing (b. 1777)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/margaret-downing-1777-530c59.