Ancestors

Richard Brown

Richard Brown was born in Kentucky about 1812. On 1 April 1834 he gave bond in Meade County to marry Celia Mills, and the clerk wrote her into the bond with her father's name attached: "Miss Celia Mills Daughter of Jas Mills." Raphael Greenwell stood on the bond with him. Richard signed it by mark, and he signed everything else that way for the next forty years.

He farmed in the Concordia precinct, the river neighborhood in the north of the county, on and about the waters of Spring Creek inside Rawleigh Colston's old 25,000 acre survey. The 1850 census put him at thirty eight with Celia the same age and six children at home. Ten in all are recorded across three censuses, from James in 1835 to Martha J. in 1856. His wife's father had died in 1838, and when the Meade Circuit Court finally divided James Mills's land in 1857 Richard and Celia signed the commissioner's deeds among the heirs, one married couple in a list of fifteen. His brother Joshua had married a Mills daughter too, and the two Brown men sued the Heavin and Shively heirs together in 1860.

Celia was gone by 1870, when the census found him at fifty seven in dwelling 11 of Concordia with four of the children still at home. He kept turning up in the county's ordinary business: on the road crew for the Concordia to Union Star road in 1861, as surety on a marriage bond in 1871, and in October 1876 released from his post as surveyor of the Big Spring and Grahamton road. In May 1875 he sat as a subscribing witness while Benedict Greenwell made his will, and in July he swore to it in open court. Two of the daughters that will names had married two of his sons. He has not been identified in the 1880 census, and his death, his burial and any settlement of his estate are not known.

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Cite: Heirology, "Richard Brown (b. 1812)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/richard-brown-1812-f918b8.