Mary Vance McKisick
1820 - 1849
Mary Vance McKisick was born in Tennessee on January 14, 1820. She was
the daughter of Col. James McKisick and Mary Vance Greer and the
grandaughter of Col. Daniel McKisick (who fought in the Battle of
Ramsour's Mill in the American Revolution) and Jane Wilson McKisick. When the family moved to Northwestern Arkansas in 1835, Mary was 15 years old. She married only two years later.

Grave markers in the Centerton, Arkansas Cemetery
Near Bentonville, AR; north of Fayetteville
(the marker for "Mary V. McKisick" is for
the mother of our "Mary Vance Oldham)"
She was married to Williamson Simpson Oldham on December 12, 1837 in
Fayetteville, Arkansas. They had five children. Soon after the move
from Arkansas to Texas in 1849 she died leaving among those children a
two year old daughter named Ada Yell Oldham. Soon after her death, W.
S. Oldham married Anne S. Kirk. The children of Mary Vance McKisick
Oldham were reared by their stepmother, Anne Kirk Oldham, and after her
death by Agnes Harper Oldham whom W. S. Oldham married in 1857 after
the death of his second wife.
Our focus is upon her daughter, Ada Yell Oldham, who was just two years
old when her mother died and still only ten years old when her
stepmother, Anne Oldham, died and Agnes Oldham became her second
stepmother. Ada Yell Oldham was 20 years old when she married John
James Spratt in 1867. The great mystery is how and where J. J. Spratt
and Ada Yell Oldham met. The Spratt family history has them remaining
entirely in Northeast Texas (Upshur and Camp Counties) while the Oldham
family history is always centered around Austin and Washington County,
or Houston. At the time of the marriage of John James and Ada, her
father had returned to Houston from exile in Mexico and Canada. He died
the following year.
The only record I have found of the death and burial of Mary Vance
McKisick Oldham is in the book "The Revised Dickson-McEwen and Allied
Families Genealogy" which has a valuable chapter entitled, "McKisick
Genealogy". It is there stated that Mary Vance McKisick Oldham "died
May 4, 1849 (?)" [sic], and concludes, "She is buried at Falls of the
Bragos, [sic] Falls County, Texas." Of course this must be a
typographical error for "Falls of the Brazos". The date of her death is
also different than that of other sources and may be the reason for the
question mark.
The Jane Wilson McKissick Story
Back to W. S. Oldham page