Saturday, March 2, 2013

Fearless Females: Angeline Elizabeth "Lizzie" Peach Moore, 1859-1924

Lisa Azlo over at The Accidental Genealogist came up with a blogging prompt for each day of March to celebrate National Women's History Month. While I can't promise to do every one of these "Fearless Females" prompts, I'm going to try to do as many as I can.

The prompt for March 2 is:  Post a photo of one of your female ancestors. Who is in the photo? When was it taken? Why did you select this photo?

This isn't one of my ancestors, it is Breathless' great-grandmother, Angeline (or Evangeline) Elizabeth Peach Moore, known as Lizzie.  I picked this photo because it's of the oldest female ancestor on either side that I haven't written about yet.

She was born on March 30, 1859, in Alabama, in Salem, in what was then Russell (now Lee) County.  She was the oldest of seven children of Jonathan A. Peach (1832-1908) and Angeline "Ann" Emily Johnson (1836-1921). 

At age 17, she married Thomas Jefferson Moore (1852-1904), on December 18, 1876, in Lee County, Alabama.  (Her sister, Emma Ann Peach, married Thomas' younger half-brother, John Matthew Moore, five years later.)

In 1880, Lizzie and Thomas were living with their oldest son, my husband's grandfather, Tandy Clayton Moore (1878-1964) near Auburn, Lee County, Alabama, where Thomas was a farmer.

In October 1883, Thomas and his family (a second son had been born), his father and stepmother, four of his five younger half-brothers and two of his three younger half-sisters, sold almost everything they owned and bought train tickets for Lewisville, Texas.

A family story says Lizzie was determined to have some peach trees at her new home, so the family brought a bundle of about 50 fall-dormant seedling peach trees with them on the train, packed in burlap bags with moist cotton seed hulls.  These seedlings would develop into one of the finest peach orchards in the Flower Mound area of Texas.

Thomas purchased 90 acres seven miles west of Lewisville (near today's Flower Mound) for $5 an acre, with a house, some outbuildings, and a well already on it. Six more children were born in Texas.  The family posed for a photograph outside their home sometime in late 1900 or early 1901.

Lizzie outlived three of her children.  Son Thomas Otis (1883-1892) was killed at age 8 in a baseball accident at school, and son John Milton (1881-1897) died from pneumonia at age 16.  Daughter Beulah Burtice Moore Street (1885-1904) also died of pneumonia, at age 18, when her baby son Burt was only two months old.  Eight days later, her husband Thomas died, also of pneumonia.

Lizzie continued to work the family farm with the four youngest children, still at home, who ranged in age from four to sixteen.  Oldest son Tandy Clayton came back from Oklahoma with his family to help for a while.

I'm not sure when or where these photos were taken.  Lizzie appears to be older, perhaps in her 60s, so the photo might be shortly before her death on September 4, 1924, at age 65.  She is buried next to her husband at the Shiloh Cemetery in Flower Mound, Texas.

On the 1920 census, Lizzie is living alone near her son Charles Hollis Moore (1888-1964) and his family, likely on the same piece of property.  I think the little boy with her in the photograph at the top of this post might be her grandson, Charles' son Charles Alvin "Spec" Moore (1921-2000), although it could have been one of her other grandsons who lived in the area.

[Some of the information in this profile came from Heroic Lives of Ordinary People, an unpublished family history by Thomas Clayton Moore, Breathless' first cousin.]

© Amanda Pape - 2013 - click here to e-mail me.

No comments:

Post a Comment