Initially, Cuzzin Heather and I met through our Pearson connection. Her great great great grandmother was Elizabeth (Pearson) Chamberlain, and my great great grandfather was George William Pearson. Their parents were Joseph Allen Pearson and Nancy Ann (Fields) Pearson, which makes Heather and I *checks notes* 4th cousins, once removed.
Together (and separately), we combed the records of Pulaski, Alexander, and occasionally Union County, Illinois. Anything one of us found on the Pearson line would be of help to the other. Frequently, we would help each other out even when it came to non-Pearson relations (or so we thought). I don't remember exactly how we discovered our double connection, but I believe it had to do with my great great great grandmother, Ann Elizabeth (Echols) Green Pearson, and went something like this:
I was researching Ann's first husband, Thomas Green. I wasn't getting very far with him - with a surname like Green, that's not surprising - so I enlisted Heather's assistance. Would she, I asked, help me look for a divorce record for Ann and Thomas? Naturally, she inquired as to the maiden name of his wife. "Ann Elizabeth Echols," I typed. And then I watched as those three little dots indicated Heather was typing a reply. "Echols?" she responded. "I have one of those!"
What my lovely Cuzzin Rachel didn’t include in the above becomes my segue into this week’s post. I am also descended from Mary Jane Pearson, slightly younger 1st cousin of Elizabeth, and the daughter of Joseph’s brother Benjamin.
Mary Jane appears to have come to Illinois with her father shortly after her step-mother’s death in Virginia. Once in Illinois, Benjamin married Ann Elizabeth Echols (see above), and Mary Jane married William Alexander Hughes a few weeks before Christmas, in a double wedding ceremony with John W. Pearson and Emma Kate Green (John and Mary Jane were siblings, and Emma Kate was Ann Elizabeth's daughter). Yes, John was marrying his new step-sister. Not that uncommon, at all. Is your head spinning yet? It gets even more entangled, because Mary Jane Person Hughes’ brand new mother-in-law was Martha Echols Hughes, cousin to Ann Elizabeth!
I believe that after these discoveries came the Christmas that Cuzzin Rachel made me a laminated diagram showing our relationship to one another - we have joked that we need to divide “4th cousin” in half. Going back one additional generation, Martha’s father (John) and Ann’s grandfather (Jesse) are brothers and very early settlers of Illinois, a third brother involved in the early politics of the Southern Illinois counties. We are reasonably certain that these brothers descend from a family in Georgia with some very well-documented history, but we haven't (yet) been able to attach Jesse or John to the appropriate parents.
The frequent intermarrying of southern Illinois families makes it quite possible that we may find we are related in more ways than these two! We'll be sure to keep you posted. In the meantime, click to read more about some of the key players in this story: Thomas Green and George William Pearson, Joseph and Benjamin Pearson, Nancy Ann Fields, and Ann Elizabeth Echols.
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