A few articles ago (“Slept Here“) I posted a photo of Lydia Lucinda Wight’s gravestone. She is the person who recalled that Black Hawk slept in her family’s log cabin in 1830. I got a comment from somone who posted under the name “Gravestones and Monuments,” which seems to be a maker of gravestones in the UK. S/he said, “I love to see old gravestones and read their inscriptions.” I was going to reply, but then read the inscription more carefully myself.
It reads: Lucinda, wife of Roscius M. Southworth, Died June 26, 1838, Aged 22 yrs.
1838! That can’t be right. The Lucinda I knew about lived a lot longer than that.
It’s a good thing I also took a photo (shown above) of the other side of the gravestone, even though it isn’t as good a photo as the first one I posted.
It looks like the Lucinda in the first photo was Roscius’s first wife. A couple of years after she died, at age 22, he married another Lucinda, this time the one who as a young girl had encountered Black Hawk. Her name is given on the gravestone as Lucinda L. She was born in 1819 and died in 1898. I had thought her full name was Lydia Lucinda, but now I’m wondering if it was the other way around. In any case, she seems to have gone by Lucinda rather than Lydia. I guess that saved Roscius the potential embarrassment of ever calling his 2nd wife by the name of his first.
Allen is on the way to a lot of places I liked to ride to, so I should have an opportunity to get a better photo of the side that memorializes the Lucinda I was looking for. I think that’s the south facing side, too, so there should be an opportunity to get it in good light.
BTW, I’ve transcribed her reminiscences that were recorded in the 1879 Hillsdale County history and have put them at wiki.spokesrider.com. They are also at another wiki at www.hawkroost.com, but I’m moving everything that was at hawkroost.com to spokesrider.com. It’s all such a mess right now that I hate to even mention it, but Lucinda’s story is too good to pass up. (BTW, her memory was imperfect when she told her story. She got some of the details wrong, and she greatly exaggerated the number of people in Black Hawk’s party. More on that another time.)
See how much you can learn from reading inscriptons? It is interesting that maybe he married two women with the same name. BTW, I do work for a manufacturer of gravestones in the UK, but I am fascinated by genealogy and I like reading about the experience of others in tracking it.