Ancestors

Rachel Dunegan

Rachel was born in November 1833 in Tennessee, in Dickson County by her family's account. Her surname comes down only through her children. When they died, five of them gave it to the clerks who filled in their death certificates and Social Security papers, and no two spelt it alike: Dunigan, Dunnigan, Dunnegan, Dunagin. Every one of them said her birthplace was unknown. No record made in her own lifetime that names her parents is known. In 1850 a Rachel Dunegan, twelve, born in Tennessee, was living in Wayne County, Missouri, the county where Jasper grew up, in the large household of Samuel Dunegan, a Virginian, with a Sina, eleven. Rachel named a daughter Sena Savanna in 1872. She was very likely of that family, though the census does not say how its members were related.

She married Jasper Risenhoover of Wayne County, Missouri, before the Civil War, and the young couple went south into the hill counties of northern Arkansas. Her first child, Sarah Ann, was born there on 15 January 1861, in Izard County. In March 1862 Jasper enlisted in a Confederate Missouri regiment in Fulton County, Arkansas, giving his home as Marion County, and he was away in Mississippi until the surrender of Vicksburg in July 1863. William Henry was born in 1864.

After the war the family lived in Ozark County, Missouri, and from about 1873 in Oregon County, where Rachel spent the last forty-five years of her life. Her daughters Mary Jane and Nancy Viola were born in Ozark County and Sena Savanna in Oregon County in February 1872, by their death certificates. The census of June 1880 found her at forty-two, as entered, in Oak Grove Township with Jasper and ten children at home, the eldest eighteen and the youngest one. Anna, Mary Jane, William Henry, Josie, James Monroe, John Newton, Jim, Sena, Jap, George Washington and Nancy are the eleven whose names and years are known.

The census of 1900 found her at sixty-six in Goebel Township with Jasper and their son John and his wife. In 1910 she and Jasper, both seventy-eight, were living with their son Jap in Johnson Township, among his four young children. She died in November 1918, about her eighty-fifth birthday, and was buried at Cave Spring Cemetery near Alton, where her daughter Anna would be laid in 1922 and Nancy in 1940. Jasper outlived her by seventeen years.

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Cite: Heirology, "Rachel Dunegan (1833-1918)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/rachel-dunegan-1833-1918-f9b196.