Josephine Ward Thomson Swann (ca. 1828-1906)
MSA SC 3520-2271
Wife of Thomas Swann, Governor of Maryland, 1866-1869
Notes
1. Sources for Mrs. Swann's birth give numerous years. We have chosen to use an esitmated year of 1828 as that matches her age in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. Her obituary and death certificate both say that she was 75 at the time of her death, giving her an estimated year of birth as 1830. This would mean she would have only been 15 at the time of her marriage in 1845. Findagrave.com has her year of birth as 1820, however, no source is given and no year of birth is listed on the tombstone photo available. It is also unlikely that she was 25 at the time of her 1845 marriage, as the New York Herald noted that the married John R. Thomson "while still a young girl." ("The Swann-Thompson Marriage." New York Herald, 20 June 1878.)
2. Death notice, The Sun, 4 March 1906.
3. Dumas Malone and Allen Johnson, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, vol. IX. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1934), 237.
4. Heinrich Ewald Buchholz, Governors of Maryland From the Revolution to the Year 1908, 2d ed. (Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins Co., 1908), 191.
5. Malone and Johnson, eds., Dictionary of American Biography, vol. IX., 237.
6. "Mrs. Swann Dead," The Sun, 3 March 1906.
7. Entry for Mrs. Josephine Antoinette Ward Thomson Swann on findagrave.com. Accessed March 24, 2017.
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