McDonough ILGenWeb

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Jan 29 2018

I'm looking for information on my 2nd great grandparents, Rollin Charles Underwood and Tamar Ann Armstrong Underwood, who lived in Blandinsville in the 1870s, and I don't seem to be able to find more info online or on the ancestry sites. Both were originally from upstate New York. Rollin had gone out to Oregon to work as a teacher as a young man, then fought in the Civil War. Tamar had apprenticed as a milliner at 15 and worked as a milliner until after the war, when they were married. They first went to Iowa to farm, but then Rollin was appointed Blandinsville postmaster in 1874 and served till 1879. Tamar died in 1877 (of tuberculosis, I think) in Blandinsville. Rollin remarried a woman named Margaret Coats, who had been a teacher in Blandinsville. Rollin and Margaret were living there in 1880, according to the federal census, but Rollin also died in 1881, possibly in Florida. The family story was that the younger of Rollin and Tamar's two daughters was ill and needed a drier climate, so Margaret uprooted and took the girls to Kansas, where she somehow supported them on her own. The older daughter was my great-grandmother, who was 8 when her natural mother Tamar died.

What I'd like to find is any record of Tamar's death and where in the area she is buried, and really anything that might still be there about them. I found a list of area cemeteries and searched for Underwood graves but couldn't find one. They were probably Methodist.

Thanks so much,
Jane Marcellus jane.marcellus@gmail.com

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