Shelby County, Kentucky, appears as an eastern starting point in the account of families who moved west to Jackson County, Missouri. It was home to Solomon Young and Harriet Louisa Young, and to Nancy Tyler Holmes and her family; Mary Jane Holmes’s attachment to Anderson Shipp Truman also tied the county to the story of the Trumans’ arrival in Missouri.

A place of family origins

Solomon Young, one of eleven children, and his wife, Harriet Louisa Young, one of thirteen, came from Shelby County, east of Louisville. Nancy Tyler Holmes, a widow with ten children, was from the same county. Their family origins link Shelby County to a broader pattern in the narrative: large households leaving Kentucky for the frontier country of Missouri.

The westward departure

Nancy Tyler Holmes made the journey to Missouri around 1845, several years after Solomon and Harriet Young, once her sons had established themselves in Jackson County. The migration placed the families within reach of Independence, then the region’s principal town. The book describes the common route west by steamboat: travelers went down the Ohio River to its junction with the Mississippi at Cairo, continued upriver to St. Louis, and then transferred to a boat bound up the Missouri River toward the settlements near Independence. This route gives the Kentucky origins a practical counterpart: a long passage by river connected eastern homes to new lives in Missouri.

Mary Jane Holmes and Anderson Truman

Shelby County also belongs to the courtship that preceded the Truman family’s move west. Mary Jane Holmes was secretly longing for Anderson Shipp Truman, who was still back in Shelby County. In the summer of 1846, she returned to Kentucky on the pretext of visiting a married sister and announced that she intended to marry him. Her mother, Nancy Tyler Holmes, was horrified by the decision and wrote from Missouri on July 24 that she had been unable to sleep or eat since hearing the news. The precise reason for her opposition is uncertain; a later explanation was that she considered the Trumans socially inferior because they owned no enslaved people.

Mary Jane and Anderson Shipp Truman married in Kentucky in mid-August at the home of her married sister, a red-brick house with white trim that still stood when the book was written. Anderson then rode to Missouri, intending to stay only long enough to obtain his new mother-in-law’s blessing. Instead, he was warmly welcomed by Nancy Tyler Holmes and her daughters. His first letter to Mary Jane described their embraces and the household’s laughter and tears, and expressed his willingness to make a life in Missouri if she joined him. In this account, Shelby County is more than a point of origin: it is the place Mary Jane left to marry, before the couple’s shared future took shape in Missouri.