James Wilbourne Kelley (1792-1849)
My Maternal 4th Great Grandfather, married Elizabeth Melle Burrow (1792-1848)
Reverend James Wilbourne Kelley, the son of William Kelley II and Hannah Walker, was born on October 27, 1789 in Wilkes County Georgia. James had a tumultuous childhood. He barely reached the age of one when his father died. His paternal uncle attempted to steal the family’s inheritance by wrongly accusing his mother of forgery. His stepfather, John Jones was arrested for “wasting the estate,” and imprisoned until he could make settlement. When James was eight the court took him away from his mother and sent him live with his maternal uncle. He was fourteen when the court declared his mother was legally insane. Still, it appears he managed to lead a good life. He became a farmer and a minister. At the age of twenty he married Elizabeth Melle Burrow.
[Image: AI generated image of James at his pulpit]
James and Elizabeth had eight children. Their first child Nancy Mary married into a prominent family, the Carltons, and raised a family in Georgia. Nancy is my ancestor. Their two youngest daughters married and moved to Texas, where one of them died of childbirth fever. Two of their daughters married and moved to Mississippi. One son married in Alabama but later returned to Georgia where he fought in the civil war. One son married a woman from Lousiana, became a preacher, moved to Mississippi and later to Texas. One son remained in Georgia and fought in the civil war. One of their grandsons was murdered over a money dispute, another built a million-dollar grocery store business in Atlanta. A more detailed recounting of the lives of their children is found in Elizabeth Melle Burrow’s blog.
[Image: AI generated image of James with his parishioners]
At some point James and Elizabeth moved to Lafayette Mississippi presumably to be closer to their daughters. Elizabeth died at age 56 in 1848, followed a year later by James at age 60. They are buried together in Seaton Cemetery in Springdale, Lafayette County, Mississippi. The cemetery is located on private land and has been greatly neglected. Overgrown with briars and thorns, it is the quiet resting place of 21 individuals, nine of whom tragically were less than three years old when they died.
[Photo: James Kelley’s Headstone in Seaton Cemetery in Springdale Lafayette County Mississippi]
James and Elizabeth were the first to be buried there and they occupied it alone for more than a decade. Their daughter Adeline married John Zachariah Duke, and their six-year-old little girl Elizabeth was buried at Seaton Cemetery in 1860. A year after the little girl died, her brother John Zachariah Jr was born. Brother John Jr married Manerva Mittee Couch, and three of their infants are interred at Seaton along with a twelve-year-old boy with the unusual name “Dump” Duke. When John Jr died in 1919, he was laid to rest with his children. One of John’s siblings married a Tidswell and there are three Tidswell children under the age of three buried there. The land likely stayed in the Duke name until it was purchased by the Seaton family. Two infants under the age of two bearing the n Seaton name were set to rest under the grassy field there in 1902 and 1905. They were the last to join the others in this quiet little corner of Mississippi.
[Photo: Seaton Cemetery in Springdale Lafayette County Mississippi]
