Three Sisters in Paradise: 52 Ancestors 2022 Prompt “Sisters”

The Brief Lives of Three Sisters: Daughters of Elijah and Nancy Smith

Mary Smith: 1843-1843

Susan L. Smith: 1855-1857

Esther C. Smith: 1862-1862

 

The brief lives of three of my husband’s great-grandaunts are a sad reminder of how difficult childbirth and raising children could be in the mid-nineteenth century. Elijah Smith and his wife Nancy Vanlandingham Weir Smith had at least eleven children between 1840 and 1863. Yet only six, including my husband’s great-grandfather Willis Smith, survived infancy. To add further pain, Elijah and Nancy lost another son, Elias, in the Civil War at only age twenty. Life in rural Kentucky was harsh.

Mary Smith was Elijah and Nancy’s first daughter, born August 15, 1843. She died just two days later on August 17, 1843. Her headstone in the Weir Family Cemetery in Paradise, Kentucky, made of dark grey stone, is the easiest to read: “Mary, Infant Daughter, EE & Nancy Smith” and then the dates of her birth and death.

Susan’s headstone is made of white marble, which of course is now severely eroded from acid rain over the last century. There was some sort of symbol at the top, then her name and middle initial, and the dates of her life. She was a Christmas season baby, born December 22, 1855, and died just four months after her first birthday on April 8, 1857. What a heartbreak for her parents!

The final little sister was Esther C. Smith, born June 16, 1862. Her older brother Elias had just been killed fighting for the Confederacy at the Battle of Shiloh on April 29, so poor Elijah and Nancy probably saw this little girl as a potential source of comfort after such a horrible loss. Instead, Esther died just four and a half months after her birth on November 5, 1862. Her white marble headstone, while mostly unreadable in the Findagrave photo, is decorated with a dove symbol—appropriate for a little girl buried in Paradise.

There is so little left to remind us that these three little girls even existed. All I can find are those three headstones in the Weir family cemetery in Paradise, Kentucky. What did the name of this community mean to its residents? Was it a beautiful place that reminded them of paradise? Or was it a difficult place that held only the promise of paradise after death?

Now, sadly, the town of Paradise is gone, destroyed by a company strip-mining for coal, and from down-wind pollution from the TVA coal-fired power plant built nearby. The Weir cemetery is surrounded by devastated land as this aerial photo shows. A sad end for Willis Smith’s three little sisters.

Sources: 

Findagrave photos.