Elizabeth Conway Kennedy Shot Clean Off Her Horse. That'll Teach Her to Free-Range Her Cattle, I Reckon.

Recently a young cousin asked me for some information on her ancestry for a presentation she had been assigned in her honors civics class. Poor kid. She was deluged by pages of family history, charts and anecdotes, all straight from the Too Much Information Desk (a desk from which any avid genealogist writes at every possible opportunity).

One of the stories I related to her was the tragic tale of how our ancestor John Kennedy and his sister Mary Elizabeth Kennedy came to be orphaned in the year 1800. I didn't know very much about it myself, having only been told that one or both of the children's parents had been murdered, and having been unsuccessful in tracking down additional details.

Since new information comes online every day, I decided to have another look and this time I hit pay dirt. Allow me to relate to you the story of the tragic demise of David Kennedy and his wife Elizabeth Conway Kennedy, of Castlewood in Russell County, Virginia.

First, a word about the actors in our drama. It is believed that David Kennedy came from Ireland since, on the 1880 census, son John Kennedy gives his father's place of birth thus. David may have been widowed prior to his union with Elizabeth Conway. He had an older son, Samuel, who died in a tragic accident at Burton's Ford when a neighbor woman mistook him for a swan and shot him early one foggy morning as he was washing his face in the nearby river. I'm not making that up. Apparently the Burton family who lived across the river had been planning to shoot a wild swan that frequented the river bank, and when Samuel went down to wash (dressed in a white shirt in preparation for an impending trip to town), the trigger-happy Mrs. Burton fired away. (The Name and Family of Kennedy and Powers, W. P. Kennedy, 1941, p. 14-15)

Now, back to our story.

David and Elizabeth (called "Nancy" by son John) lived near the present-day town of Castlewood, close to the aforementioned Burton's Ford. Elizabeth Kennedy is generally believed to have been a daughter of Thomas Conway, whose property cornered with that of Henry and Elizabeth Kiser Hurst. According to the traditions of both families, a disagreement developed between the families when the Kennedys allowed their cattle to range free, resulting in damage to the Hurst crops. Elizabeth Hurst and Elizabeth Kennedy "engaged in bitter quarrels on more than one occasion" on account of the trespass.

Elizabeth Kennedy was a keen horsewoman and often rode out surveying her stock, or on errands. On the 10th of June of 1800, she rode into the local community and on her way back to her farm she encountered Elizabeth Hurst doing laundry in the creek just downstream from Bickley's Mill. Mrs. Hurst's infant son, Samuel, was laying on a quilt near his mother, and another son, Andrew, had just returned from hunting. The boy leaned his rifle against a large poplar tree and was trying to quiet his fussing brother when Elizabeth Kennedy rode into view on the road above the creek. As usual, the two women began to argue. One Hurst researcher says she has been told that Mrs. Kennedy "clubbed" Mrs. Hurst, which would imply that the two women were on equal footing, but most accounts agree that Mrs. Hurst snatched up her son's hunting rifle and shot Elizabeth Kennedy off her horse, which made it more likely that the victim was still on the road above the creek, and Mrs. Hurst was on lower ground within reach of the tree by the creek.

Mrs. Hurst was duly arrested for murder.

"The prisoner being arraigned at the bar, it was demanded of her whether she was guilty or not guilty. She answered she was not guilty. Whereupon divers [sic] witnesses being sworn and examined against her, and she being heard in her own defense: on consideration whereof it is the opinion of the court that the said Elizabeth Hursk [sic] for the offense ought to be tried at the next District Court to be held at Washington Court house on the 2nd day of October next, and thereupon she was remanded to jail." (Russell County VA Law and Order Book No. 3, Page 59, year 1800)

In case you're wondering how things went, she was acquitted, but her defense nearly bankrupted Henry, who had to sell part of his property to pay her way out of trouble.

Sadly, in the late winter or early spring of 1800, Mrs. Kennedy's husband, David, had gone south on his lucrative annual round of horse-trading through the Carolinas, never to return. According to his granddaughter Elizabeth Kennedy, as David was awaiting payment from the planters who had purchased his horses, he suddenly fell ill and died. There was no convenient way to return him to Virginia so he lies buried in an unknown location "somewhere in the Carolinas."  (Kennedy, p. 17) Perhaps the stress of her husband's recent death added to Elizabeth's decision to engage in the fatal quarrel with her neighbor, although more likely, from the sound of it, it was force of habit.

Thomas Conway Sr. and Richard Price administered the estate of the unfortunate Mrs. Kennedy. The orphaned children, John (about 3) and his sister Mary Elizabeth (about 5) were probably initially taken in by the Conway family, although a grandson of John insists that David's old friend from his militia days, John Smith, took the boy when his mother died.

In December of 1800 and again in October of 1804 the court ordered that the "Overseers of the poor bind Mary Kennedy, an infant orphan of Elizabeth Kennedy, deceased, to John Holbrook, according to law." The children were by no means paupers since their parents were moderately prosperous farmers, but the Overseer of the Poor was the legal authority charged with settlement of guardianship and payment from the estate for an orphaned child's upkeep.

Young John was most likley raised into his teens by his Conway relatives (possibly by the widowed Mary Conway Fletcher, his mother's sister). A friend of the family remembers that the Conway farm abutted her father's farm, and "Johnnie Kennedy" frequently cut across her father's land on his way to the public road. (Kennedy, p. 24) In 1814 John Kennedy left home to enlist in the Federal Army and served in Company A of the Virginia Militia during the war of 1812.

According to Wade Powers Kennedy, the family records were passed to granddaughter Ann Fraley Murphy (who was raised in the household of John and Mary Horne Kennedy) and were subsequently lost. However, there was no shortage of grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the unfortunate couple who had not heard every detail of their tragic story from the time they were knee-high to a grasshopper. I suspect the only reason I had not heard it myself from my own grandmother was because her "Grandma Brooks" (Ibbie Kennedy Brooks, granddaughter of John and Mary Horne Kennedy) had been raised in her mother's family, the Talberts (after her father Wiley F. Kennedy died during her infancy 1867).

The Kennedys, I can assure you, have long...long...memories. If Grandma Ibbie Kennedy Brooks had known the story, I haven't the slightest doubt that I'd have heard it with my own ears from the time I could understand the words "shot off her horse."