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Stricken with cholera, David Wishart's sister MARY was trying to regain her health during springtime of 1870 in her new farmhouse with its fine dark walnut interior. The dedicated young wife and mother, not yet 40, had spent half her years attending her family through many times of crisis and hardship in America. She had frequently dealt with the family sicknesses in Pennsylvania, Kentucky, and Nebraska, and her own well-being had fluctuated sporadically over the past two decades. The years of 1865, 1866, and 1867 in Nebraska had been the healthiest of her adult life. Her 20th wedding anniversary was approaching, and the troubling illness afflicting young MARY TAYLOR the past couple years had become quite serious in early June. Over in the county of Forfarshire, Scotland, the 45-year-old dressmaker wife of James Doward was busy raising their two sons in their Letham home during the year 1870. On July 6, Elizabeth solemnly studied the distressing letter just received from her younger brother David on that early-summer Wednesday. Before long, the broken-hearted Scottish woman dutifully made her way to the house of her aged parents over in Arbroath. The painful news immediately struck WILLIAM and ELIZABETH WISHART with a terrible sorrow, but the shocked couple were partially consoled that their 39-year-old daughter, MARY, was somehow content three weeks earlier during her fateful final moments thousands of miles away on a remote Nebraska farm. Angels had beckoned her to the land of the leal. 
To a prolonged illness, on June 15, 44-year-old JOHN TAYLOR had mournfully lost the dear woman who was his devoted mate throughout a score of life's challenging years. His beloved wife died peacefully, presumably in their new Pawnee county farmhouse. Wednesday was the day of the week when JOHN had long ago married his adolescent sweetheart, and it was also the weekday more recently when she passed away. The sad news immediately reached neighboring friends and relatives. Words of condolence and expressions of concern for JOHN and the children came from their Scottish relatives. Aunt Elizabeth Doward felt deeply saddened for "pour little JONNY" and wished she could be near her motherless 2-year-old nephew. Elizabeth's and MARY's brother David had been in America only a year and was staying there in the Pawnee county area. Their brother William Wishart had passed away three years earlier, probably in Illinois. Other brothers and sisters of the Wishart family were still in Great Britain. Like their mother, two of MARY's eight children were also deceased. After spending the latter half of her life in the USA, MARY was buried in American soil at the cemetery on the west edge of the town of Pawnee. |
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