♀Margaret Lockhart

Margaret Williams (died before 1850) was the wife of George Williams (1784–1861), an Irish-born farmer of Wabash County, Illinois. She was the third great-grandmother of Nancy Jane Blanchard (1929–2006), through her daughter Sarah Williams (1816–1885).

Almost nothing is known of her. No record of her parents has been found, and it is not known whether Williams was her own family name or only her married one. Her first name rests on a single record. On 7 December 1835 George Williams and “Margaret his wife”, both “of the county of Wabash in the State of Illinois”, sold a lot in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to Samuel Holcomb; the deed was recorded in Somerset County in January 1839. It is the only record found that names her, and it settles her first name as Margaret. A compiled tree on FamilySearch calls George Williams’s wife Ann, but cites no record. The deed places her alive and married to George in December 1835, though it does not say she was Sarah’s mother. Sarah was born in 1816, nineteen years earlier, no other wife of George is recorded, and a Find a Grave memorial for Sarah names her mother as Margaret.

Sarah’s obituary of 1885 names her father but not her mother. When the census was taken in November 1850, George Williams was heading his own household in Wabash County with no wife in it, and she is taken to have died before then. A deed of 1851 shows that he also had a daughter Catherine, by then Catherine Danforth, to whom he gave forty acres “for the natural love and affection he has for her as his daughter”; the deed does not name Catherine’s mother. A Find a Grave memorial, which gives no dates, places her burial in the White-Williams Family Cemetery at Mount Carmel, Wabash County, the small family burial ground where George Williams also has a memorial. No photograph of any stone in that cemetery has been published, and no record giving the date of her birth or death has been found.