Margaret Ritchie
Margaret Ritchie was born about 1807 at Brocks Gap, in the mountains of northwestern Rockingham County, Virginia. When she died, the county death register gave her age as fifty and named her parents as Philip and Margaret. The Ritchies were one of the old families of the Gap.
She married John Hulvey about 1830. Their children were born over nearly twenty years. In the census of 1850 Margaret was 42 and keeping house for John and nine of them: George, 18, Elizabeth, 14, Peter, 12, Mary I., 10, Ruhama, 8, Amanda, 6, Susan, 3, and Margaret, 2. Leannah, born in 1833, was away that year, and Annie was born on 10 June 1850. In 1849 John bought a farm of seventy-one acres in the county, and the family lived there.
Margaret Hulvey died on 6 May 1857, of dropsy, the swelling that came with failing heart or kidneys. Her youngest child was not yet seven. She is buried in the Hulvey family cemetery in Brocks Gap. Her daughter Susan, who died in February 1864 at seventeen, lies there too. In 2021 a granite stone was set up in the cemetery naming her as "Margaret Ritchie Hulvey, 1807 to May 6, 1857."
John married a second Ritchie, Melvina, the widow of George W. Custer. In August 1864, when her son Peter married Sarah Hottinger, the county register still named his mother as Margaret.
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Cite: Heirology, "Margaret Ritchie (1807-1857)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/margaret-ritchie-1807-1857-56a156.