My great grandparents in 1900: James Lawrence McDaniel and Midia Belle Meeks

 This is the third installment of my series of posts on my great grandparents. In this one we're looking at James Lawrence McDaniel (1873-1944) and Midia Belle Meeks (1876-1947) of Spencer County, Indiana.

In the 1900 census James and Midia (spelled Mida in this census) are renting a farm in Huff Township, Spencer County, Indiana. Their first daughter, Cora, is 3 years old. James and Midia have been 3 years married at this point. By 1910 they are back in Hammond, Indiana, where James' parents live, and they are again renting a farm. In the 1920 census they are in Vanderburgh, Indiana, and James is a laborer in a flour mill. And somewhere between then and the next census they move to Columbus, in Bartholomew County, where daughter Emma Grace, my grandmother, will meet and marry James Franklin Spencer. The 1930 census-taker put down James as a farm laborer who did not, by the way, own a radio!

James was the son of Joseph McDaniel and Margaret Price. In the 1900 census these two are living in Hammond Township,  Spencer County, Indiana. Also in Hammond Township we find Midia's parents, David and Emaline Meeks. 

Most of my ancestors either came from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, moving westward with stops in Ohio, then to Indiana (these would be my mother's side of the family), or they came northward from Kentucky to Indiana (my father's side). In the case of the McDaniel and the Meeks clans, these were Kentuckians before they were Hoosiers. The McDaniel clan started this long multi-generation migration in Maryland and Delaware. Before that, they were MacDonnells in northern Ireland. James' grandfather, John Wesley, died at Natchez, Mississippi, in 1863, fighting with an Indiana regiment. He is buried in the Natchez National Cemetery.

As for the Meeks clan, they came from Virginia (having immigrated from Cumbria) and eventually moved on to Kentucky via North Carolina. Several of Midia's near relatives became Latter Day Saints and lived in Nauvoo in the 1840s before setting off as part of the great Mormon migration. One of her ancestors, Athe Meeks, was killed by Indians in 1812, and another, also named Athe Meeks, lived in the same small village in Spencer County where Abraham Lincoln spent his boyhood. The same 1820 census that lists Abraham's father, Thomas, also lists Athe Meeks and his wife's father, William Vest (the 1820 census only listed male heads of households). Did my ancestor Athe Meeks know young Abe personally?

James Lawrence McDaniel died in 1944 in Columbus, Indiana, and is buried in the Garland Brook Cemetery there. Midia Belle's death followed three years later in a Columbus nursing home. They raised 10 children together: Cora Mae, William Radis, Lewis Roosevelt, James Carl, Emma Grace, John, Hatcel Herbert, Flo, Beatrice, and Ralph Joseph. My grandmother, Emma Grace, is in the back row in this picture, and Mida Belle is front left.





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