♀Julia Esther Harvey

Julia Esther Harvey (31 August 1857 – 30 March 1951) was an Illinois woman, the wife of the Mount Carmel lawyer Robert Thomas Wilkinson, who lived almost her whole life of ninety-three years in Mount Carmel, Wabash County, apart from a spell in Oklahoma: in 1908 her brother’s obituary gave her as “Mrs. R. T. Wilkinson, of Ravia, Okla.”, and a family narrative says her husband was president of the First National Bank of Ravia, in what was then Indian Territory. She was the great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Mabel Wilkinson (1875–1954) and her granddaughter Mary Esther Schneck (1900–1968).

Early life

Julia was born on 31 August 1857 at Mount Carmel, the daughter of James Harvey (1821–1896), whom the family’s papers call Dr. James Harvey, and Eleanor Tougas Lovellette (1830–1898). She was one of seven children, born between 1850 and 1870, all of whom are named in a single newspaper obituary of 1908. Her middle name was her grandmother’s: her father’s mother was Hester Saylor, the wife of Beauchamp Harvey. Through her mother she descended from the Tougas dit Laviolette family, one of the French families that a county history of 1883 names among the first settlers of Wabash County, near Rochester, about 1800. The census of 1860 finds her, aged three, in her parents’ household at Mount Carmel with her brothers James and Beauchamp and her sister Mary, and that of 1870 finds her there still.

Marriage and family

On 22 October 1874 she married Robert Thomas Wilkinson (1850–1917) of Friendsville, in the same county; a county history published in 1883 records the marriage on that date. Their daughter Mabel was born at Friendsville on 26 November 1875, and two sons followed, Robert Clyde in 1878 and James Harvey in 1882. The census of 1900 records that Julia had borne four children, of whom three were then living, so a fourth child had already died; the family record names him Ross, and nothing more is known of him. In 1880 the household at Mount Carmel Precinct held Julia, Robert and the two older children, Mabel and Robert Clyde.

By 1900 the family lived in their own house in the second ward of Mount Carmel. Robert was an attorney at law, and the household included Julia’s unmarried younger sister Laura, a music teacher, and a young servant. In May 1893 Mabel had been maid of honor at the wedding of Julia’s youngest brother, Orian Ross Harvey, held at the Harvey family home on West Second Street.

Oklahoma

The family narrative records that Robert Wilkinson became president of the First National Bank of Ravia, in Indian Territory, and that a letter he wrote from Ravia in December 1906, on the bank’s stationery, to the widow of Dr. Jacob Schneck survives; in it he recalled that Dr. Schneck’s care had once saved his life. The move is confirmed independently by the obituary of Julia’s brother Orian Ross Harvey, who died of tuberculosis at Deming, New Mexico, in June 1908 and whose surviving sisters included “Mrs. R. T. Wilkinson, of Ravia, Okla.” The census of 1910 still finds Julia and Robert at Ravia, in Johnston County, Oklahoma. Their son James Harvey Wilkinson later settled in Texas and died at San Angelo in 1924.

Widowhood

Robert Wilkinson died in 1917, and Julia spent her remaining thirty-four years as a widow in the household of her daughter Mabel and son-in-law, the physician Sereno Watson Schneck. The census finds her there in 1920; in 1930, aged 73, at the Schnecks’ house at 431 Cherry Street, Mount Carmel, as mother-in-law; in 1940, aged 83, in the same house, where the family had also been in 1935; and in 1950, aged 93, still in her son-in-law’s household.

She died at Mount Carmel on 30 March 1951, aged 93, and was buried on 2 April 1951 in Rose Hill Cemetery, Mount Carmel, the Reverend J. F. Slagle officiating; a cemetery memorial places the grave in the Odd Fellows section.

Notes

The date of her marriage is not settled. The county history of 1883 and the Illinois county marriage record give 22 October 1874; an index of Presbyterian church records gives 9 December 1874; and her obituary of 1951 gives 31 October 1875. The census of 1900 records the couple as married 25 years, which fits 1874 or 1875. The tree keeps 22 October 1874.

Her birth date of 31 August 1857 agrees with her ages in the censuses of 1930, 1940 and 1950 and with her age at death. The census of 1900 gives her birth as August 1856, and a lineage application filed by her granddaughter with the Daughters of the American Revolution also gives 1856; the same application misspells her mother’s surname as “Trigas”. The census of 1920 describes her as the head’s mother rather than his mother-in-law, and gives her age as 65.