Isabella Lacey of NY and her Mississippi connections

Isabella was born in 1812 to Rev William B Lacey, DD and his wife Hannah Stafford in Albany, NY; she was the oldest of 6. In 1831 she married Rufus Wheeler Peckham, the youngest son of RI natives Peleg Peckham and Desire Wheeler who had moved to Albany County, NY by the time of his birth in 1809. Rufus, like many in his family, was a lawyer, District Attorney, Judge and Congressional Representative for New York. Isabella died at the young age of 36, leaving her husband with 3 boys. She would not live to see the youngest, named for his father, be appointed a Justice of the Supreme Court by President Grover Cleveland in 1895.

Isabella’s mother was born in Albany where she died in 1831, the year Isabella married. Her father remarried the following year, adding 4 more children to the family and by 1840 they had relocated to Louisiana. It seems that the family shifted back and forth between Louisiana and Mississippi over the years.

All of Isabella’s siblings moved south with their father and stepmother. Her brother George had begun his law studies with her husband Rufus Wheeler Peckham in New York. He continued in Louisiana and was admitted to the bar in Baton Rouge.

Every member of the family who went south stayed there and all are buried in Louisiana or Mississippi. Four members of the family (her brothers Augustus and George, her nephew William Taliaferro and half-brother William) all fought for the confederacy during the Civil War.

Following the migration of the family made me wonder if they kept in contact over the years and the considerable distance.  By the time the family landed in Louisiana in 1840, Isabella had 3 sons aged 7, 5, and 2.  I happened upon excerpts from the papers of her son Wheeler H Peckham held at the Library of Congress referencing letters between Isabella and her sister Mary Lacey Taliaferro.  It recounts that Isabella’s young teenaged son Joseph visited the family in Mississippi and accompanied his 3 year old cousin, William Taliaferro, to New Orleans. So clearly they did have some contact. Both of those family members had very short lives: Joseph died in New York at 17 and William in New Orleans at 21.

I’ll try to get to the Library of Congress to look through the family papers there – perhaps I’ll find additional documentation of interaction between the northern and southern branches.