♂George Wilkinson

George Wilkinson (8 August 1858 – 8 December 1921) was the youngest child in the Friendsville household of the merchant and county judge William Robert Wilkinson, and later a resident of Mount Carmel, Illinois, where he died. He was the great-grand-uncle of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), the brother of Robert Thomas Wilkinson (1850–1917), her great-grandfather.

Early life

He was born on 8 August 1858 in Wabash County, Illinois, the son of William Robert Wilkinson (1816–1886) and Sarah Williams (1816–1885), in the year after his father was commissioned county judge. A county history published in 1883 says the couple had eight children, five of them then living; George is the last of the five it names. He was one year old at the census of 1860, the youngest in the household at Friendsville, which included his mother’s father, George Williams, aged 74 and born in Ireland. In 1870 he was eleven and still there. An index to the 1880 census lists three children in the household at Friendsville, Jennie, George and Sadie, which fits him with his sisters Jane and Sarah.

Marriage and later life

An Illinois county marriage index gives his marriage to Elizabeth Kavanaugh, written Lizzie in the index, at Friendsville on 29 December 1881. No children are recorded for the couple.

When his brother Robert died in September 1917, the obituary named him as the surviving brother, “of Mount Carmel”, where Robert had settled in 1879. George died at Mount Carmel, Wabash County, Illinois, on 8 December 1921, according to the state death record. A Find a Grave index gives his burial at Friendsville, where his parents were buried.