Percillia Cornelia White
Percillia Cornelia White was born about 1839 at Riverhead, at the head of Peconic Bay on eastern Long Island. Her first name was written Percillia, Percille, Pircille and Priscilla, and she was often called by her middle name, Cornelia.
In 1850 she was twelve and living at Riverhead in the house of Merritt Howell, 66, and his wife Eleanor, 63, with a boy, Elbert H. Howell, 6. She was not their daughter. A family researcher found that she was their ward. The same researcher, working with a descendant of the White family through DNA, named her parents as George Nelson White of Brookhaven, a laborer, and his wife Elizabeth "Betsey" White, a Riverhead woman born in 1812. No record from her own lifetime names them. In 1850 George and Betsey White were in Brookhaven with three younger children, Hannah, George and Henrietta.
About 1856 she married William Cornell Darling of Smithtown. They had eleven children between about 1856 and 1879. In 1860 she was 23 and had three children, Allen, Franklin and the baby Ida Augusta. The 1865 state census wrote her Percilla C. Darling. By 1870 seven children were at home.
In 1880 she was 43 and keeping house at Smithtown. Her husband, then 49, gave his work as sailor. Eight children were at home: Ella Jane, 19, Isadora, 17, Adelia, 12, Leonard, 10, Sherman, 8, Mary Alice, 6, Harry, 4, and the baby Lillian Grace.
In May 1893 her son Sherman married Elizabeth Johnson in New York City. The marriage record gives his parents as W. C. Darling and R. C. White. The R is probably a misreading of P, for Percillia. It is the record written in her lifetime that gives her maiden name.
In 1900 she and William were living alone in the second election district of Smithtown. By 1910 he was working in Virginia, and he died in New York City in 1911. In 1915, at 75, she was living in the town of Brookhaven in the household of her son Sherman G. Darling. With them were his wife Elizabeth and their children William C., Eva, Dora and Helen. That June the local paper reported that Sherman and his wife were "again entertaining his mother, who has been spending the winter with her daughter at Kings Park." Sherman had just bought a delivery auto for his fruit and vegetable trade.
The Smithtown town clerk recorded her death on 15 November 1916, giving her age as 68, which is about ten years short. The state census of 1915 had given her age as 75. She was buried in Landing Cemetery at Smithtown, the churchyard of the Methodist church at the Landing, where her daughter Ida and Ida's husband Warren Conklin were later buried. Her grave has no marker.
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Cite: Heirology, "Percillia Cornelia White (1839-1916)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/percillia-cornelia-white-1839-1916-b50cc7.