A Very Sweet Family

Nathaniel's marker (photo
 by Shirley I. Shawver Nees).

In 1834 Henry and Susan (Bass) Tapscott left Kentucky and headed for Illinois with their kids, and with more born on the way. A few years earlier another couple had done the same. But Nathaniel and Elizabeth (Maddox) Sweet of Fleming County, Kentucky, detoured through Ohio, rather than Indiana, arriving in Vermilion County, Illinois, in 1836. In the 1840s the Sweets pulled up stakes again and traveled to Clark County, where at first they scattered - Auburn, Cumberland (later Casey), and Melrose townships. Later many congregated in Martinsville Township, just a few miles west of Henry and Susan Tapscott’s newly established farm. Descendants claim that the Sweets broke the virgin prairie soil with a primitive plow and six yoke of oxen, not unlikely though they probably would have had to borrow some cattle from neighbors. But true or not, they started a collection of Sweet farms in the Martinsville area. And they had sufficient descendants to populate that community, for like Henry and Susan Tapscott, Nathaniel and Elizabeth had twelve offspring.

Nathaniel died 3 Jun 1874 at the age of “73y. 8m. 27d.” according to his cemetery marker; Elizabeth passed away on 15 Sep 1878, aged “76y. 2m. 19d.”. Nathaniel and Elizabeth are interred in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery in Martinsville township, today the resting place of over seventy Sweets and innumerable other descendants lacking the Sweet name (as well as four Tapscotts).

The last several weeks have been spent doing a final unraveling of the Sweet family, which married into the Tapscotts and has thus earned a chapter in The Tapscotts of the Wabash Valley, possibly a very large chapter since it was a very large family. And, of course, we shall hear about some of these Sweets in the days and weeks to come.

P.S.: Nathaniel and Elizabeth Sweet are my great great great grandparents, but through my grandmother Edna Earl Wright, not through my grandfather John Wesley Tapscott

All genealogical data reported in these blogs are based on primary and/or reputable secondary sources, or transcriptions thereof, and never on online trees. Contact the author to request sources, which have been omitted here to improve readability.