Margaret "Hester"
(Minerd) Jackson
(1864-1946)
Margaret
"Hester"
(Minerd) Jackson was born on July 15, 1864 in Farmington, Fayette County,
PA, the daughter of Samuel and Rebecca
(Smalley) Minerd.
When the federal census was taken in 1880, Hester made her home with her parents in West Newton, Westmoreland County, PA. She and her sister unmarried Emma are shown as laborers in a local paper mill, with Emma listed as having a "finger cut off," apparently related to her work in the mill.
In 1886, as an unmarried 22-year-old, Hester and her parents and siblings ventured westward, leaving their longtime homes and becoming pioneer settlers of Pittsburg, Crawford County, KS.
In 1910, when she was age 46, Hester married Pittsburg merchant Henry C. Jackson ( ? - ? ). The Jacksons had no children.
Hester was employed in a dry goods store in Pittsburg. Her brother brother Walker had owned 80 acres in the heart of Pittsburg, at what is now Fourth and Broadway. According to a family memoir, he "sold this land to a merchant by the name of Israel, who built a dry goods store on part of it, and in the later years, the three Minerd girls, Laveria, Margaret and Emma, worked in the dry goods store."
|
| Broadway looking north in Pittsburg, at the turn of the 20th century |
The
Jacksons lived at 722 East
Seventh Street and at 508 North Fairview Avenue in Pittsburg. She was a member of the Nazarene Church.
Hester and her sister Emma adopted a small girl, Kathryn (Minerd) Schewaski, "which the two of them raised," recalled a nephew After Henry's death, Hester also took care of a foster son, Robert Eugene Townsend, who served as a staff sergeant in the U.S. Army during World War II.
By
1930, when she was age 65, Hester was widowed, and continued to live in
Pittsburg on North Fairview. Living under her roof that year were her
79-year-old unmarried brother John Henry
Minerd, nine-year-old grand nephew Donald Ethen Minerd and 12-year-old
boarder Robert Eugene Townsend.
She became legal guardian to her grand-nephew, Donald Ethen Minerd, when the boy's mother died.
Hester died in 1946, and is buried beside her parents at the Mt. Olive Cemetery in Pittsburg.
Copyright © 2000, 2007 Mark A. Miner