Ancestors

Temperance Cross

Temperance Cross, called Tempa, was the wife of Michael Looney of Hawkins County, Tennessee. A Looney family history of about 1900 calls her "Miss Temperance Cross of Virginia." She married Michael in Botetourt County, Virginia, about 1776 or 1780, and went with him over the mountains to Stanley Valley in what became Hawkins County.

They raised a large family in a two-story log house on Big Creek. Their daughter Polly married Sherrod Williams in 1801. Another daughter, Margaret, married Dangerfield Rice, and Margaret's daughter Sally Rice was the mother of Joseph E. Brown, governor of Georgia during the Civil War.

In 1830 the census found Michael at the head of a household of two, a man and a woman, both aged seventy to eighty. The woman was almost certainly Tempa, which puts her birth between 1750 and 1760. A Tennessee DAR roster of 1961 gives the same span, with "prob. Maryland" as her birthplace and her death in Hawkins County between 1830 and 1840. She was buried in the Looney family plot near the house, beside her husband.

Her family has not been traced. An online tree makes her the daughter of William Cross and Alice Cole, who married in St John's Parish, Baltimore County, Maryland, in 1753, but it gives no evidence. In 1978 a query in the Maryland Genealogical Society Bulletin was still asking, "Who was father of Temperance CROSS b.abt.1751 m. Rev. soldier, Michael LOONEY."

If Temperance Cross is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Temperance Cross", https://heirology.com/ancestors/temperance-cross-a7b4d3.