Jane (Watson) Branson (1782-1859) is the farthest back I know about my motherline. Jane’s father was David Watson, but I don’t know her mother’s name.
Jane Branson’s Legacy
Jane (Watson) Branson (1782-1859) Born in Virginia in 1782, before there were States, before the nation had a president, Jane Watson married Lemuel Branson in Grainger County, Tennessee, among the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. Their six children, three sons and three daughters, were loaded them up with their belongings to trundle four hundred miles to Parke County, Indiana, coaxed there by Lemuel’s only sister. There Lemuel built a log church and meeting house, which he called Rocky Fork. Twenty by twenty-eight feet, a wood stove at its center, a tall pulpit at one end. Among the worshipers were Levi and Elizabeth Moore. Jane was in her mid-fifties when Lemuel died. Not long after, Levi lost his wife. Jane married Levi, but was widowed again only four years later. She ceded her portion of Levi’s estate to his sons. Son John Branson and his family were lured west. Jane watched their wagons disappear in the distance, then those of daughter Lucy Branson Moore’s family, to join her brother in the young State of Iowa. Jane Branson’s granddaughter Emilia was just 8 years old when her folks left Indiana with seven children in two wagons on May 6, 1855, along with recollections of Rocky Fork, and of a grandmother’s legacy of faith and integrity.