© Kathy Duncan, 2022
Revisiting my John Lewis line after taking a break is still paying off. In poking around Ancestry, I found a tree for Emily (Lewis) Hanks, where the user had attached the 1850 census record of Emily Lewis, daughter of my ancestor, John Lewis and his second wife, Jane.
The Emily Lewis I am searching for is the youngest daughter of John Lewis who died in McNairy County, Tennessee, in March 1842, and the only surviving child of his second wife Jane. Emily was born in Tennessee in about 1837/1838. By 1850, her widowed mother had married Holliday McGuire, and they were still living in McNairy County, Tennessee. By 1860, Emily was no longer in the McGuire household. I had not been able to determine if she died young or married.
At first blush, Emily (Lewis) Hanks did not seem a likely candidate for the Emily Lewis I have been seeking for several years. She and her husband, Franklin B. Hanks, had gone to Jackson County, Illinois before 1870. That seemed far removed from the other Lewis children, who had either moved almost in mass to Texas or remained in Tennessee and Alabama. Fortunately, I decided to really look at everything I could find connected to Emily (Lewis) Hanks. Finally, I googled up a reference to her husband Franklin B. Hanks in the History of Jackson County, Illinois by Robert Allyn, published in 1878, and available in the Internet Archive. At the time the book was published, both Franklin B. Hanks and his wife Emily were still living and can be presumed to be the source of the information provided in Franklin B. Hanks' biography.
The biography reveals that Franklin B. Hanks was born in Maury County, Tennessee in 1834. His parents, Thomas and Nancy Hanks, moved the family to McNairy County, Tennessee, in 1849. The sentence that cinched the connection between the two Emilys was this one: "In June, 1854, he married Miss Emily Lewis, the youngest daughter of John Lewis, one of the old and prominent inhabitants of McNary [sic] County." Of course, it would have been so nice if the biography included the location of their marriage and the name of her mother, but the information provided is golden.
The biography goes on to say that Emily and Franklin Hooks moved to Illinois in 1863 because Franklin was not a Confederate sympathizer. They first settled in Washington County, Illinois, but within a few months moved to DeSoto in Jackson County, Illinois. In 1873, F.B. Hanks was elected sheriff of Jackson County.
Emily Lewis and Franklin B. Hanks had a total of eleven children, four of whom were deceased by the book's publication in 1878.
The 1860, 1870, and 1880 censuses reveal their children to be the following:
- John Hanks b.c. 1854
- James Hanks b.c. 1856
- William R. Hanks b.c. 1859
- Sarah Hanks b.s. 1862
- Charles F. Hanks b.c. 1864
- Nancy A. Hanks b.c. 1866
- George Hanks b.c. 1869
- Laura L Hanks b.c. 1875
One interesting tidbit in the biography is that Emily was a Methodist.
There seems to be some disagreement over whether Emily died in 1883 (per the family tree on Family Search) or 1895 (per her Findagrave memorial with no photograph of her tombstone). The Findagrave memorials for both Emily (Lewis) and Franklin B. Hanks state that their places of burial are unknown. I'm wondering if their death dates are actually unknown as well.
Franklin's father Thomas Hanks lived in Christian County, Missouri, where he was a minister. Emily (Lewis) Hanks' place of death is given as Christian County, Missouri on Family Search, but as Stoddard County, Missouri on Findagrave. So far, I'm finding no newspaper references to their deaths. Additionally, I have found no documentation that Emily and Franklin Hanks moved closer to his father in Missouri after 1880.
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