♀Alice A. Wilkinson

Alice A. Wilkinson (about 1843 – 10 May 1919) was a daughter of the Friendsville merchant and county judge William Robert Wilkinson, and the wife of W. H. Besley, who worked with her brother in the mercantile business at Mount Carmel, Illinois. She was the great-grand-aunt of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the sister of Robert Thomas Wilkinson (1850–1917), who was the great-grandfather of Nancy Jane.

Early life

She was born about 1843 in Wabash County, Illinois, the daughter of William Robert Wilkinson (1816–1886) and Sarah Williams (1816–1885). In the census of 1850, taken when she was seven, she was the eldest child in her father’s household in the Wabash Election Precinct, where her father was a merchant; he kept the post office at Friendsville. A county history published in 1883 says the couple had eight children, five of them then living. In 1860 the household at Friendsville included her mother’s father, George Williams, aged 74 and born in Ireland. In 1870 she was still living with her parents at Friendsville.

Marriage and later life

She married W. H. Besley. When her brother Robert moved to Mount Carmel in the autumn of 1879, he spent two and a half years in the mercantile business with Besley before going into partnership with J. Fred Stein. By 1883 the county history named her as Besley’s wife, the first of the five living children it listed.

Her mother died in 1885 and her father in 1886. When Robert died in September 1917, his obituary named “Mrs. Alice Besley of Decatur” as one of his two surviving sisters. She died on 10 May 1919 in Alexander County, Illinois; the state death record gives her name as Alice Wilkinson Besley. No children are recorded for the marriage.

Notes

Name and birth year

The census of 1850 gives her age as 7, and the census of 1860, which enters the eldest daughter of the household as “Harris A.”, gives 17; both point to about 1843. The household of 1860 holds only one daughter of that age, and the 1883 county history and later family records know no Harris, so the two entries are one girl. The census of 1870 gives her age as 25, which would put her birth about 1845.