Ancestors

Tabitha Frances Mounts

Tabitha Frances Mounts was born on 18 November 1835. Her family placed her birth at Springfield, Illinois, and the census of 1860 gives her birthplace as Illinois. Her surname is written Mounts on her son's gravestone and Monce or Mounce elsewhere.

She married James Martin Cowan, and by 1860 they were living in Boston Mountain Township, Newton County, high in the Ozark mountains of northwest Arkansas. Tabitha was 24 that year. Her children by James were Sarah Catherine, born on 10 August 1857, Jesse, born on 17 January 1859, and Absalom Riley, born on 9 April 1862.

James did not come home from the Civil War. His family remembered him as a man who died in the war, which left Tabitha with three children under six.

After the war she married Thomas B. Patterson, a Tennessee-born farmer of Newton County, twenty-five years older than she was. He was a widower with a large family; his first wife, Hannah Melvina Wood, had died in the early 1860s. Tabitha had a son by him, Thomas Martin Patterson, born in 1875. In 1880 the census found the Pattersons across the county line at Boston, in Madison County, with Thomas M. and two older Patterson sons, Price and Moses. Her daughter Sarah Catherine Cowan married Charles Harden Patterson, a son of Thomas by his first wife, so that Tabitha's daughter became the wife of her stepson. Charles later studied medicine and practised as a doctor at Oark in Johnson County from 1896.

The summer of 1890 took most of a household from her. Thomas Patterson died on 12 June 1890 at Fallsville. Four days later, on 16 June, her daughter Sarah died there at 32, five days after giving birth to a son, William. The baby died on 5 August, and Sarah's youngest daughter, Ida Bell, not quite two, died on 23 August.

Tabitha lived on at Fallsville for twenty-four more years. She died in July 1914, aged 78, and was buried in Buckhorn Cemetery beside Thomas, inside an iron fence. Her stone reads "Tobitha, wife of Thomas Patterson," and below the dates, "She was an affectionate mother and faithful wife."

If Tabitha Frances Mounts is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Tabitha Frances Mounts (1835-1914)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/tabitha-frances-mounts-1835-1914-3672fa.