Martha J. Chevalier
Martha J. Chevalier, called Mattie, was born on 24 September 1870 at Melvern in Osage County, Kansas. Her father, Peter Chevalier, was a farmer from France. Her mother, Mary Catherine, had been born in Indiana in 1837, and a family account written for Mary's grave calls her full Cherokee. Mattie was the youngest of five children, after Francis, Albert, Ernest and Julia.
In June 1880 she was nine and living on her father's farm in Melvern Township with her parents, her three brothers and her sister. Her brothers were already working the farm. In March 1885 the Kansas census found the same household still together in Osage County, with Mattie fourteen.
Her parents parted in the next ten years. Her father stayed in Osage County. Her mother went south to Payne County in the Oklahoma Territory, opened to settlers in the land run of 1889, and farmed land at Ingalls. Mattie and her brother Albert settled in Payne County too.
On 2 December 1891 Mattie married Thomas Jones, a farmer from Illinois about fifteen years older than she was. Their daughter Pearl Frances was born at Glencoe in Payne County on 13 January 1893. In June 1900 the three of them were in Pawnee Township, Payne County, and Albert and his family lived in the same township.
Her sister Julia married a neighbor, Lige Samples, in the fall of 1892, and bad blood grew between Samples and their brother Ernest. In June 1893 Ernest was appointed postmaster at Ingalls in the Oklahoma Territory. On the morning of Thursday 22 June he went to the Samples place, and Lige Samples shot him dead there. Pearl was five months old. In May 1894 a jury at Stillwater found Samples guilty of manslaughter in the first degree, and he was sentenced to four years. The governor of the Oklahoma Territory pardoned him in April 1897.
By 1910 the family had moved north to Fairview Township in Cowley County, Kansas, near Winfield. Pearl married Everett Coleman Coombs there in 1913, and Mattie's granddaughter Iris Pearl was born at Winfield in 1918.
Mattie died on 8 January 1927, aged 56. Thomas died five months later, on 5 June. They are buried together in Akron Cemetery in Fairview Township. Their stone reads JONES, with MATTIE 1870-1927 on one side and THOMAS 1855-1927 on the other. Pearl was buried in the same cemetery in 1944, and on her death certificate her mother's name was written as Mattie Chevelion.
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Cite: Heirology, "Martha J. Chevalier (1870-1927)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/martha-j-chevalier-1870-1927-9a9557.