My dad’s mom, Mary (Reid) Agnew, grew up in Bedford Indiana. We went there on the way home Tuesday. It is a beautiful spot in southern Indiana with beautiful, rolling green hills and valleys. She grew up on some farmland somewhere around Bedford, with her sister Margaret and brother “Noyes”. Yes, that was his name, Noyes. Funny. We found the gravesite of:
her father’s mother’s parents.
Mary Reid’s father was Charles Reid & her mother was Cora Belle Owens.
Charles’ parents were: Alexander Reid and Nancy Jane Smith.
Nancy Smith’s parents were Peter Smith and Margaret Ford Smith. Peter was born in 1793 in Rowan, North Carolina (!) and he died in 1848 in Bedford, Indiana.
Margaret, his wife, was said to have been born in Tennessee and died in Bedford, Indiana. No idea on the rest of their life stories, BUT! The interesting thing is:
Their gravesite was a big huge monument! So they must’ve had money.
So it was Peter and Margaret’s graves that we found, in the form of a big monument. True to form, my camera ran out of battery JUST AS I GOT THERE, so we took a picture on Dad’s phone, which has an excellent camera. Now I have to figure out how to get the picture off the phone and into the computer. The monument was about 8 feet tall.
It is amazing to me just how much of my family history is southern Indiana. On both the Agnew side and my Grandma Reid side (who married my Grandpa John Agnew) we are in Southern Indiana since before the Civil War. In Peter Smith’s case, I have no idea when they arrived in Indiana. That’s a next-step to research. In James Agnew’s case, my great grandfather, all I know is he somehow arrived there in the 1860s (probably coming down the Ohio river from Cincinnati). He was a painter; my grandpa John Wesley Agnew was a Monon RR man. Peter Smith, I don’t know yet. Probably a land owner.
LASTLY, I FOUND A LOVELY PICTURE OF MARY REID AGNEW as a child at her older sister, Margaret’s wedding, AND a WONDERFUL photo of Mary & Margaret’s parents, Charles and Cora Reid, in a family history book done by Margaret Reid’s children. Margaret, my grandma Mary’s sister, married into the LEECH family. This book is a history of the LEECH family, and coincidently, contains their mother’s REID family.
Doctor Grandma 