John Pritchard
FamilySearch ID: GMSV-L5H
(1838-1911)
Private, Company K, 77th Illinois Kickapoo Township, Peoria County, Illinois.
John Pritchard, Jr. was one of five men who, like Samuel Kirkman, were born near Manchester, England. He was born in Heywood, Lancashire on April 28, 1838, and lived with his family in nearby Bury, Lancashire. John Jr. was the fourth child born to John Pritchard (b. 1811) and Ann Lonsdale (b. 1810), but sadly, he was their first child to survive past the age of 2½ years.
The family emigrated to the United States in 1843 just as John Jr. turned 5 years old, arriving in New Orleans from Liverpool on a ship named Bornholm. The 1850 Census confirmed that the Pritchards were residents of Peoria County, Illinois, the family consisting of father John, mother Ann (Lonsdale), John Jr., and five younger siblings. Ten years later, two additional children joined the family, bringing the total number to ten.
When the Civil War broke out in 1861, John Sr., John Jr. and Thomas were working as farmers in Kickapoo Township, Peoria County, Illinois. Of all the soldiers represented by Samuel Kirkman's CdV collection, John Pritchard was the only other man who, like Kirkman, lived in Kickapoo Township. [Kickapoo Township lies just west of the city of Peoria, and today includes the towns of Kickapoo, Edwards, and Pottstown, as well as Wildlife Prairie Park].
In the summer of 1862, at the urging of governors from several northern states, Abraham Lincoln called for 300,000 more volunteers to suppress the rebellion. On August 16, 1862, at the age of 24, John volunteered for service in the Union Army, becoming a Private in Company K of the 77th Illinois Volunteer Infantry. Muster records indicate that he stood 5 feet 9 inches tall. He mustered out of the army on July 10, 1865. John's younger brother Thomas (b. 1839) also served in the Civil War, having joined the 47th Illinois Volunteer Infantry on September 4, 1861, about a year before John enlisted.
One noteworthy characteristic about the Pritchard family was that John and two of his siblings would marry three Lonsdale siblings who were their first cousins. The first of these marriages was John's younger brother Thomas, who married Mary Lonsdale on February 1, 1865. About a year later, on March 8, 1866, John Jr. married Mary's older sister Ellen Lonsdale (b. 1842), who was four years younger than John. On June 25, 1873, John's younger sister Sarah would marry Ellis Lonsdale. Such marriages were not particularly rare at the time, and first-cousin marriages remained legal in Illinois until 1887.
John and Ellen would raise seven children, with all but the first son surviving to adulthood. Their youngest child, Archie, lived 77 years, dying in 1961.
In 1878, at the age of 40, John Jr. and his brother Thomas moved to York County, Nebraska to farm a 160-acre tract of land. Around 1903, at the age of 65, John moved again, this time to Spokane County, Washington. He would live the remainder of his life there. His wife Ellen died on July 30, 1907, at the age of 65. John died nearly four years later, on June 9, 1911 at the age of 73. He is buried in the Greenwood Memorial Terrace in Spokane, Washington.
Ancestral Connections: None. However, John Pritchard is buried in the same cemetery Greenwood Memorial Terrace in Spokane County, Washington as fellow solider Imle Coulson. Given this cemetery's great distance from central Illinois, each man's decision to move to this part of the country may not have been purely coincidental.
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