Aunts & Uncles~Mary Jane Purvis Lang (1873-1895)

The “Aunts & Uncles” series of biographical sketches are Artificial Intelligence (AI) compiled narratives of selected individuals from my Genealogical database. The selected AI will used the RootsMagic Individual Summary from my Genealogical Software, Roots Magic. All genealogical data is my research material acquired over the past 46 years of research. Today's Biography of Mary Jane Purvis Lang (1873-1895) was compiled with the assistance of Claude Sonnett 5 Median and is entitled "A Short Live Documented: Mary Jane Purvis (1873-1895)". 

Mary Jane Purvis Lang

abt. 1873 – abt. 1895

A Short Life, Well Documented

Quick Facts

Born	abt. 1873, Morven, Anson County, North Carolina
Parents	William A. Purvis (b. 1826, SC) and Elizabeth Previtte (1849–1926)
Married	abt. 1888, to Charles Franklin Lang (1868–1948)
Children	Four: Ella Jane, John Henry, an unnamed infant son, and Frances Elizabeth “Effie”
Died	abt. Mar 1895, Morven, Anson County, North Carolina
Married Name	Lang

Early Life in Anson County

A Piedmont farm girl. Mary Jane Purvis was born about 1873 in the little farming community of Morven, tucked into the red clay of Anson County, North Carolina, hard against the South Carolina line. Her age as recorded on her sister's Social Security application hints at a birth date as late as 25 September 1881, but the stronger and more consistent evidence — her age of 21 on her daughter Ella's delayed birth certificate, and her age of 7 on the 1880 census — points to about 1873 as her true birth year.

She was the daughter of William A. Purvis, a North Carolina farmer born about 1826 in South Carolina, and Elizabeth Previtte, born in 1849 and living until 1926. The 1880 census of Morven Township shows a Purvis household headed by a William A. Purvis, age 53, farming the land his parents' generation had worked before him, with a wife recorded there as “Sarah J. Purvis,” age 48 — and seven-year-old “Mary J. Purvis” (spelled “Purvice” by the census taker) living among them. A young woman named Betsy Purvis, age 30, was enumerated in a neighboring household on the same page, suggesting the Purvis family had more than one household clustered in the Morven community.

Mary Jane grew up, then, in the years just after Reconstruction, in a corner of the North Carolina Piedmont still very much rebuilding itself — small cotton and subsistence farms, close-knit rural neighborhoods, and families who depended on every set of hands, young and old, to bring in a crop.

Marriage to Charles Franklin Lang

A ten-year marriage. About 1888, when she was around fifteen, Mary Jane married Charles Franklin “Charlie” Lang, a young man born 3 April 1868 in Anson County, the son of John Henry Lang and Frances A. Teal. The couple settled into married life in the Anson–Union County borderland, the same rural world Mary Jane had always known.

Over the next several years the couple had four children. The record of their household appears in the 1900 census of Marshville Township, Union County — taken five years after Mary Jane's death — where Charlie, by then remarried to Dora Watkins, is recorded as having been “married 2 years, 1 child, 1 living” at that later date, a phrase that refers to his second marriage, not his years with Mary Jane.

Children of Mary Jane and Charles Franklin Lang

Mary Jane and Charlie's four children, born within the space of about six years, were:

Child	Born	Died	Spouse(s)
Ella Jane Lang	4 Aug 1889 (per delayed birth record), Chesterfield, SC — other sources give 1886 (Find A Grave) or 1891 (SC death certificate)	18 May 1960, Woodruff, Spartanburg County, SC	Jack Allison Dillard
John Henry Lang	14 Jan 1893, Anson County, NC	29 Apr 1968, Charlotte, Mecklenburg County, NC	Edith Melvine Sloan; Blonnie Irene Gunter; Edna Eveline Ashley
Unnamed Son Lang	14 Jan 1893, SC (twin brother of John Henry)	14 Jan 1893 (same day as birth)	—
Frances Elizabeth “Effie” Lang	Mar 1895, Marshville, Union County, NC	13 Mar 1949, Cleveland County, NC	Jacob Brown (m. 1910); Will L. Threate (m. 1916); Floyd Pinkney Reinhardt

The unnamed infant son, born and buried the same day as his twin brother John Henry survived, is a quiet reminder of how fragile infancy could be on a nineteenth-century Carolina farm — and, very likely, a clue to the hardships surrounding the birth that would prove fatal to Mary Jane herself two years later.

A Short Life: Mary Jane's Death

Gone at about twenty-two. Mary Jane Purvis Lang died about March 1895 in Morven, Anson County, North Carolina — the very month her youngest child, Frances Elizabeth, was born. She was only about twenty-two years old, and her marriage to Charlie Lang had lasted just short of ten years.

No death record for Mary Jane survives among the family's papers, and her burial place is not recorded. Her death is dated by family tradition and by the timing of “Effie's” birth in March 1895 — a pattern of a mother's death following closely on a birth that, in the era before antibiotics, most often points to childbed (puerperal) fever or other birth complications, though no source states the cause directly.

Charlie Lang did not remain a widower for long. By 1898 he had married Dora Watkins in Union County, and it was Dora who raised Mary Jane's four children alongside the children of her own marriage to Charlie.

Historical Context: Anson County and the Carolina Piedmont, 1873–1895

A region rebuilding

Mary Jane's short lifetime — roughly 1873 to 1895 — spanned one of the harder economic stretches in the post-Civil War South. The Panic of 1873 ushered in a long agricultural depression that squeezed small Piedmont farmers for years, and the Panic of 1893 brought a second wave of hardship just as her own children were being born. Cotton prices stayed stubbornly low through most of this period, and many Anson and Union County families, the Purvises and Langs among them, worked the land as tenant farmers or day laborers rather than outright owners.

Reconstruction's end and a new order

Mary Jane was a small child when Reconstruction formally ended across the South in 1877. The years that followed brought the rise of the Jim Crow legal system throughout North and South Carolina, and reshaped rural life across the Piedmont, even as the day-to-day rhythms of farm work — planting, chopping cotton, harvest — carried on much as they had for a generation.

Childbirth on the farm

For rural women of Mary Jane's generation, childbirth was almost always a home event, attended by a midwife or a female relative rather than a physician. Maternal mortality remained high throughout the late nineteenth century, and puerperal fever — an infection following childbirth — was among the leading causes of death for young mothers until antiseptic practices became widespread in the early twentieth century. Mary Jane's death at about twenty-two, apparently tied to the birth of her fourth child, was a story repeated in farm families across the Carolinas in these years.

A Piedmont on the edge of change

Mary Jane did not live to see it, but the world her children grew up in changed quickly. In the very years after her death, textile mills began spreading rapidly across the North Carolina Piedmont, eventually drawing families like the Langs toward mill towns such as Gastonia, where her son John Henry's line would later settle.

Research Notes

A Note on Conflicting Dates Mary Jane's birth year is recorded differently in different sources: about 1873 (from her age on the 1880 census and on daughter Ella's delayed birth certificate) versus a possible 25 September 1881 suggested by her sister's SS-5 application. The 1873 date is used here as the better-supported figure. Daughter Ella Jane Lang's birth date likewise varies by source: 4 August 1889 (Delayed Birth Record), 4 August 1886 (Find A Grave), and 4 August 1891 (SC death certificate) — all agree on the day and month, only the year differs. The 1880 census names Mary Jane's mother as “Sarah J. Purvis,” while the family group sheet records her as Elizabeth Previtte (1849–1926); this discrepancy in the source record is noted here rather than resolved. Mary Jane's death is dated “abt. Mar 1895” by family record; no primary death or burial record has been located.   I an going to disagree with the AI  comments just read in this paragraph above. William A. Purvis and Sarah Jane Graves only had one child, William James Purvis born Sept 1863. William James Purvis and his young wife are enumerated in the household just beneath his parents, Willima A. and Sarah Jane. There are two families in the William A. Purvis Household: Line 36 & 37, Dwelling 233, Family 251; Wiliam A. Purvis and his wife Sarah Jane Graves;  Line 38 & 39, Dwelling 233, Family 252; Betsey Purvis and her daughter Mary J. Purvis.    The 3rd famliy 253 is  William A. & Sarah Jane's son.  Line 40 & 41, Dwelling 234, Family 253;William James Purvis and his wife, Mary Hulda Previtte. William James is the only child of William A & Sarah Jane Purvis

Mary Jane Purvis Lang is my Great GrandAunt.

Sources

Family Group Sheet for Charles Franklin Lang and Mary Jane Purvis, prepared by Charles Purvis, 714 W. Holly Hill Rd., Thomasville, NC 27360, citing: North Carolina Death Certificates, 1909–1975; U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index, 1936–2007; 1880, 1900, 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940 U.S. Census population schedules for Anson, Union, and Gaston Counties, NC; South Carolina Delayed Births, 1766–1900; Union County, NC Marriage Records, 1900–1915; Find A Grave memorials; and family research contributed by Gordon E. Lutz of Lincolnton, NC.

 

Prepared by

Charles Purvis

CPurvis1@gmail.com

52 Cousins~Candace (Sellers) Tosh (1808-1896)

 

CANDACE (SELLERS) TOSH

1808 – 1896

A Mother of Thirteen on the Tennessee Frontier

QUICK FACTS

Born	28 November 1808, Chesterfield, Chesterfield County, South Carolina
Died	26 June 1896 (age 87), Carroll County, Tennessee
Parents	John Sellers (1782–1844) and Henrietta Norwood Sellers (1784–1866)
Spouse	Arthur Allen Tosh (1808–1876), married about 1831/32, Carroll County, Tennessee
Children	Thirteen — born between about 1833 and 1852
Burial	Christian Chapel Cemetery, Cedar Grove, Carroll County, Tennessee
Relationship to Charlie	1st cousin, five times removed

 

A CAROLINA GIRLHOOD

Candace Sellers was born on 28 November 1808 in Chesterfield, Chesterfield County, South Carolina, the daughter of John Sellers (1782–1844) and Henrietta Norwood Sellers (1784–1866). She grew up in a large household on the Carolina upcountry frontier, one of at least ten children. Her siblings — Nancy, Catherine, John W., Hardy S., Zilphia, Richard Caswell, William R., Joseph C., and Francis Marion Sellers — would scatter across the South in the decades to come, but in the 1810s and 1820s the Sellers family was still rooted in the Chesterfield District, part of the same Carolina Sellers network from which Charlie's own confirmed Sellers line descends.

Sometime in the late 1820s or very early 1830s, like so many Carolina families chasing cheaper land, the Sellerses — or Candace herself as a young woman — made the long overland move west into Tennessee. It was there, in Carroll County, that she would spend the rest of her life.

MARRIAGE AND A GROWING HOUSEHOLD

About 1831 or 1832, in Carroll County, Tennessee, Candace married Arthur Allen Tosh, a young farmer born 8 August 1808 in Kentucky, the son of John Tosh Sr. (1777–?) and Margaret Johnson. Arthur and Candace settled into farming life in the county's rural 13th District, and over the next two decades their household filled with children — eventually thirteen in all, born between about 1833 and 1852:

#	Name	Birth–Death	Notes
1	Thomas Jefferson Tosh	1833 – 1869	Farmer; predeceased his mother
2	Francis Asbury “Berry” Tosh	1834 – 1912
3	Elizabeth Jane Tosh	1835 – 1882	Never married; kept house for her mother
4	Nancy Faulkner Tosh	1836 – 1924	m. John Z. Kelley, 1866; later Springer
5	Riley (Rilah) S. Tosh	1837 – 1916
6	John Green Tosh	1838/39 – 1886	Predeceased his mother; omitted from her obituary's count
7	Martha Catherine Tosh	1840 – 1933	m. ___ Eskew
8	Zilpha Louisa Tosh	1841 – 1878	m. Jacob Marion Kelley, 1872; predeceased her mother
9	James Alvin Tosh	1843 – 1917
10	Hardy Harrison Tosh	1845 – 1912
11	William Perry Tosh	1846 – 1936	m. Susan Rhodes
12	Jeptha Allen Tosh	1848 – 1912
13	Lucinda Ellen Tosh	1851 – 1938	m. ___ Dortch; unmarried in 1880, living with mother

The couple's eldest, Thomas Jefferson Tosh, was born in 1833, and their youngest, Lucinda Ellen, arrived nearly twenty years later in 1851–52 — meaning Candace bore and raised children across almost the entire span of her thirties and forties.

THE CENSUS YEARS: A FAMILY TRACKED ACROSS DECADES

The 1850 federal census captured the Tosh household at its fullest. In District 13, Carroll County, Arthur Tosh, 42, farmer, headed a home that included Candace, 40, and eleven children still at home, ranging from seventeen-year-old Thomas Jefferson down to one-year-old Jeptha Allen — all born in Tennessee.

By 1860 the family had moved a few miles to District 8, and the household had thinned as the eldest sons struck out on their own; nine children still lived under Arthur and Candace's roof, from twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth Jane down to eight-year-old Lucinda Ellen. Ten years later, in 1870, only four children remained at home — Elizabeth Jane, Zilpha Louisa, Jeptha Allen, and Lucinda Ellen — a household visibly emptying as sons and daughters married and moved to farms of their own.

Arthur Allen Tosh died on 3 October 1876 at about age sixty-eight, leaving Candace a widow in her late sixties. The 1880 census shows her, at seventy, as head of her own household in District 8 — no longer “wife” but “Candis Tosh, Head.” Living with her were her unmarried daughters Elizabeth (44) and Lucinda (27), her widowed daughter Nancy Kelly (43), and two of Nancy's children, grandchildren J. M. and Luela Kelly. It is a small, telling snapshot of frontier widowhood: three generations of women holding a household together after the men of the family had died or moved on.

WIDOWHOOD, FAITH, AND FINAL YEARS

Candace Sellers Tosh outlived her husband by twenty years. She died on 26 June 1896 in Carroll County, Tennessee, at the age of eighty-seven, after what her family described as nine months of suffering borne “with unwavering fortitude.” She was buried beside Arthur at Christian Chapel Cemetery in Cedar Grove, near Leach, Carroll County — the same burying ground that would come to hold several of their children.

IN HER GRANDDAUGHTER'S WORDS

The most vivid record of Candace's life comes not from a courthouse ledger but from her own family. Shortly after her death, a granddaughter wrote a tender obituary that ran in the Gospel Advocate of Nashville on 27 August 1896 (page 556), later preserved and shared on Find A Grave by researcher Linda Kasyan. It reads, in the granddaughter's own words, as a portrait of a woman whose religious devotion anchored the family through hardship:

From the Family: The Granddaughter's Obituary (Gospel Advocate, 27 Aug. 1896) “It is with sadness of heart that I write the obituary of my grandmother, Mrs. Candis Tosh, who died June 26, 1896... She has been a devoted member of the church of Christ for a number of years. She lived a circumspect and Christian life from the day that she obeyed the gospel till her blessed Redeemer bade the spirit quit the prison house of mortality... She was a great sufferer for nine months before her death, but she bore it with unwavering fortitude. She leaves nine children and a host of relatives and friends to mourn their loss; but we mourn not, as those who have no hope, for our loss is her eternal gain.” — as transcribed on Find A Grave Memorial #54901327, obituary contributed by Linda Kasyan.

The obituary's count of “nine children” surviving is, in fact, a small piece of evidence in itself. Candace bore thirteen children, but by 1896 four had already died: Thomas Jefferson (1869), Zilpha Louisa (1878), Elizabeth Jane (1882), and John Green (1886). Thirteen less four leaves exactly nine — confirming that the granddaughter's tribute was not a rounded figure but a precise, grieving count of the living.

A NOTE ON THE RECORD

Research Notes Birth date discrepancy: the granddaughter's 1896 obituary gives Candace's birth as “Dec. 28, 1809,” but her Find A Grave summary, census-derived age calculations, and the family group sheet all support 28 November 1808. The obituary was written from memory soon after a difficult death and likely reflects a granddaughter's imprecise recollection rather than a documented date. Father's birth year: sources disagree on John Sellers's birth year — 1772 in one family-sheet citation versus 1782 on his own Find A Grave memorial and in the notes accompanying this summary. This should be resolved against primary South Carolina records before it is treated as settled. Nancy Faulkner Tosh: family-sheet notes describe her 1866 marriage to John Z. Kelley in Carroll County, while her Find A Grave entry carries the surname “Springer,” suggesting a second marriage after Kelley's 1869 death that has not yet been fully documented here. John Green Tosh (1838/39–1886): present in the 1850 census (age 12) and among Candace's Find A Grave-listed children, but absent from the granddaughter's written obituary tribute and from some family-sheet counts — consistent with his early death in 1886, a decade before his mother's.

LEGACY

Candace Sellers Tosh's life traces one of the great, ordinary migrations of the early American South: a Carolina-born daughter who followed the westward pull of cheap Tennessee land, married a Kentucky-born farmer, and spent nearly six decades raising a family of thirteen in Carroll County. She buried a husband and four of her own children, yet the record left behind — four decennial census listings, a heartfelt grandchild's obituary, and a still-marked grave at Christian Chapel Cemetery — shows a woman whose faith and endurance were remembered fondly by the generation that followed her. Her descendants, through sons and daughters who themselves raised large Carroll County families, carried the Tosh name and the Sellers blood forward into the twentieth century.

Candace Sellers Tosh is my 1st Cousin 5X Removed. 

SOURCES

Find A Grave, database and images (findagrave.com), memorial page for Candace Sellers Tosh (1808–1896), Find A Grave Memorial #54901327, Christian Chapel Cemetery, Cedar Grove, Carroll County, Tennessee; obituary contributed by Linda Kasyan.

1850 U.S. Census, Carroll County, Tennessee, population schedule, District 13, page 110A–B, dwelling/family 1456, household of Arthur Tosh; NARA microfilm M432, roll 873/889.

1860 U.S. Census, Carroll County, Tennessee, population schedule, District 8, page 74A, dwelling 938, family 927, household of Arthur Tosh; NARA microfilm M653, roll 1243.

1870 U.S. Census, Carroll County, Tennessee, population schedule, District 8, page 364A, dwelling/family 32, household of Arthur Tosh; NARA microfilm M593, roll 1517.

1880 U.S. Census, Carroll County, Tennessee, population schedule, District 8, enumeration district 014, page 90A, dwelling/family 32, household of Candis Tosh; NARA microfilm T9, roll 1246.

“Mrs. Candace Sellers Tosh” (obituary), Gospel Advocate, Nashville, Tennessee, 27 August 1896, p. 556.

Family group sheet and individual summary compiled by Charles Purvis, 23 September 2026. 52 Cousins~Candace (Sellars) Tosh (1808-1896) created using Claude Sonnett 5 Median.