Mary Ann Graybeal Hardin Jones McCarrell

This is my great-great grandmother, Mary Ann Graybeal Hardin Jones McCarrell, born July 5, 1838 in North Carolina,  pictured with her second husband, my great-great grandfather John James Jones.  Her first marriage was to a Mr. Hardin when she was twenty-two.  He died in the Civil War, leaving her with young children.  She married Captain John James Jones when she was thirty.  They had two daughters, including my great-grandmother, Sarah Catherine Jones.  He was a Civil War Veteran, his left leg perpetually bent at the knee.  He had to have lived less than four years after the marriage, since she married Mr. Evan McCarrell, a widower with two sons and two daughters when she was thirty-four.  It is likely this was a marriage of convenience since he was several years her senior and both had children to raise.

Mary Ann Graybeal died accidently at the age of fifty-eight, July 8, 1886,  when she travelled with her step-son to Knoxville, Tennessee, to consult a doctor about a lump in her breast.  Unfamiliar with gas lights, when they went to bed in their hotel room, one of them blew out the gas-light instead of turning the gas off.  She was asphyxiated, though he survived.

Her older three daughters were married at the time she died.  The youngest, Sarah Catherine(Kate) lived with her married sister Carrie for a while.  At the tender age of fourteen, she married my great-grandfather, Gordon Perkins.  My grandmother always felt she married as soon as she could to get her own home.