Margaret Ann Davis

Margaret Ann Davis was born on the 18th of July, 1835, in the river town of Hanover, in Jefferson County, Indiana, and departed this life on the 19th of December, 1882, at the age of forty-seven years. Her life thus spanned the years between the early settlement era of the Ohio Valley and the close of Reconstruction — a period during which Indiana grew from a thinly populated frontier into one of the most densely farmed states of the Union, and during which the railroads, the Civil War, and the temperance and religious revivals of the mid-century left their mark upon nearly every household along the Ohio River.

Hanover, where Margaret entered the world, was at that time a small but cultivated community, known regionally for Hanover College, founded a few years before her birth, and for its situation upon the bluffs above the Ohio. Jefferson County in the 1830s was settled in large part by families of Presbyterian and Scots-Irish heritage moving westward from Kentucky and the Carolinas.

Margaret was the daughter of Sarah McKee (1799–1888), who outlived her by some six years, surviving into her eighty-ninth year. The McKee name carries the marks of that same Scots-Irish migration that shaped so much of the Ohio Valley's early character.

Margaret was joined in marriage to Elisha Grenard, born in 1827 and thus her senior by some eight years. From this union descended at least one recorded son, Joseph Maroni Grenard, born in 1872 and living until 1954 — a child of her later years, born when Margaret was thirty-seven, and one through whom the line was carried forward into the twentieth century.

Margaret Ann Davis was a third great-grandmother of the compiler upon the paternal-grandfather (PP) line, standing as one of the Indiana-born forebears whose quiet labors bridged the pioneer generation and the modern age.