Road Trip – The courtship of T C Weir (1862-1944) and Clem Boyd (1862-1939)

In 1862 two of my ancestors, Thomas Clark Weir, and Jensy Clementine Boyd were born in Randolph County Illinois. They were part of a large scotch-irish community of Weirs, Wrights, Holidays and Boyds who had immigrated from the south years before and lived, farmed, intermarried, and had copious numbers of children. In fact T C and Clem were second cousins as TC’s grandmother had been a Boyd. T C was the middle son of nine children born to John Weir and his wife Jane Wilson. John was a farmer and a Reformed Presbyterian elder and was known as a strict and determined man. Clem was the second youngest daughter out of ten children born to James John Boyd and Missouri Wright. Her father, a United Presbyterian Elder, died when she was only two and she was raised by her mother and oldest brother. TC and Clem would have attended the octagonal school house in Sparta and were apparently “lovers” in elementary school.

However, John Weir began to worry as he saw the land in Illinois filling up. John was a farmer and expected his sons to farm as well. But John had four sons, and though his father had given him land, he worried that he did not have enough to give land to all his sons. John decided that the time had come to move west. He had church and family connections in Winchester Kansas and in 1881 he and all his children moved to Winchester. T C would have been nineteen when he left Sparta for Winchester.

Clem and her family stayed in Randolph. Eventually she and her sister moved to Russel Kansas and ran a dress shop there together. The dress shop closed and they returned to Sparta in 1889. According to a family story TC wrote Clem from Winchester and mentioned a girl he was interested in. Clem quickly decided it was time for a road trip. Clem, her brother John and at least one of her sisters made the trip out to Winchester. On August 18^th the local newspaper reported that T C’s Mother, Jane, was hosting a party in honor of the Boyd siblings.

The road trip apparently had its intended affect. One year later on September 30^th 1890 T C and Clem were married at the home of Clem’s mother Missouri in a double wedding with her sister, Mollie. The couple returned to Winchester and T C’s mother threw them a second reception with seventy five guests. TC and Clem’s marriage would last almost fifty years until Clem’s death in 1939. The header image for the main page of this site is a photo of their family in front of the family home in Winchester.

TC  (center) and Clem (right) at their home in Winchester