Thursday, March 20, 2014

Stories from Bovina’s Cemeteries - The Two Mary Ann Coulters

On January 25, 1847, barely seven weeks after her marriage to Thomas Strangeway, Mary Ann Coulter, the eldest child Walter Coulter and Margaret Storie, died.  She was two months shy of her 20th birthday.  What illness took her we cannot now determine.  She was buried near her grandparents, Francis and Nancy (Glendenning) Coulter, in the Associate Presbyterian Church cemetery at County Route 6 and Reinertsen Hill Road.


Moving ahead about 20 months, in September 1848, Mary Ann’s mother gave birth to her last child, another daughter.  In memory of their eldest daughter, Walter and Margaret named this last child Mary Ann.  What certainly was a moving gesture on the part of the still grieving parents has caused some confusion for genealogists.  The second Mary Ann, unlike the elder sister she never met, did live past her teens but she too would die young and after a brief marriage, though longer than her sister’s.  Married to Caleb Monroe in 1873, she gave birth to two daughters before her death in 1877, when she was 29. [I have yet to determine whether or not this Monroe is related to the Monroes in Bovina.]

The first Mary Ann’s husband, Thomas Strangeway would re-marry and leave the area, dying in New York City in 1865.  The husband of the second Mary Ann also remarried, 15 years after the death of his first wife, and had three sons, M. Caleb, Andrew and Paul. He died around 1920. Where the second Mary Ann is buried, I have yet to determine, though Andes seems a likely place.

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