Margaret Young Pitts

There were quite a few years difference between the birth date of Margaret’s last child and the previous nine children. The first nine were all born in Ireland between 1830 and 1843. Her husband, Alexander, left for America in 1849, then sent for his family to join him in Philadelphia. Margaret may have thought her birthing days were over, but in 1952 she gave birth to her fifth and final daughter, Annie, when she was 48 years old.

It was in 1830 that the former Miss Young became Mrs. Pitts at this Presbyterian church in Londonderry. They soon found it was easy to have children but difficult to provide for them, due to desperate economic times. The Irish famine of 1845-1852, known as the Great Hunger, caused a million to die and over a million to flee the country, just as the Pitts family had to do.

Of her five boys, Margaret grieved when one died as an infant in 1933. Then she said goodbye (temporarily) to two of them, David and Alex, when they joined the Union Army at the start of the Civil War in 1861. Alex was captured during the Battle of the Wilderness and held as a prisoner of war in the infamous Andersonville camp for more than nine months. He was lucky to have survived, but a disability earned him the right to an invalid’s pension in 1869.

Margaret saw her share of difficulties but there was joy to share at weddings and the joy of welcoming grandchildren. When she died there were 24 of them plus 18 great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandchild.

Her husband was a laborer for 30 years in his new homeland but was listed as disabled on the 1880 census. He died in the spring of 1883 of encephalomalacia, the softening of brain tissue caused by injury, stroke, or infection. Six months later, Alex Jr. died of an aneurysm, and both of them were buried here in Section 14.

In her last years, Margaret lived with her youngest daughter, Annie who, with three of her brothers, were living when Margaret died. They buried their mother beside the two Alexanders in the family plot. Annie was the only other child to be buried at Mount Moriah; she would later join her husband, Joseph Mann, in Section 149.