Date of Death: 1908
Interment source:
Bay View Cemetery Association, Corpus Christi, Texas. Record of Interments
NO HEADSTONE
Biography
There is little information to definitively identify Jane Murphy. There is no tombstone to indicate her years of life or relationship to a personal family of this area. Only the Record of Interments of the Bay View Cemetery Association provide her name and year of death—1908. Because of the absence of extant local newspapers from that year, no obituary has yet been found (as of October 2005). However, census records do report the presence in Corpus Christi of a "Jane Murphy". In the 1880 census (p. 15A) Jane is listed as a member of the African-American community. She is 33 years old (born about 1847) and a native of Mississippi (as well as her parents). She lives with the household of Andrew Dove (bookkeeper, 51 years old, of Scotland) and works as a "laundress". Jane again appears in the 1900 census of Nueces County (E.D. 133, p. 8A). She reports her birth as December of 1838 and now she says she is a native of Missouri and that her father was from Missouri and her mother from Kentucky. She labors as a cook, and she has saved up enough that she owns her own home free of mortgage on Tancahua Street. She died in 1908 and so does not appear in the 1910 Federal census of Nueces County.
Research and transcription: Michael A. Howell