Harriet Hobbs and Thomas Hearn

Thomas Hearn, the third son of Lavinia Cannon and Lowder Hearn, was born 16 Jan 1790. His son William Lowder Hearn wrote in 1888:

The two elder brothers of my father, George and Joseph, inherited the landed property of their father (Lowder) who died when my father (Thomas) was a small boy, who at an early age was put out to learn the trade of a saddler. With a man by the name of John Houston, who was the father of Judge Houston, of Dover, Del. For some reason he did not continue long with Mr. Houston, but came to Laurel and there learned shoemaking with a man by the name of Kinney. Among my earliest recollections is the shoe-shop of my father, where he carried on the business of manufacturing and selling shoes and had quite a number of apprentices working for him... My father was an industrious and thrifty man and himself made about all he was worth. Some twelve thousand dollars. He died at the age of forty-five, after a very short illness.

-- Brief History and Genealogy of the Hearne Family, p. 224

There's a small problem with this story, which is that Thomas's father Lowder is supposed to have died in 1809. Thomas would have been 19 and hardly a "small boy." However, one can well believe that there was no land left for the third son.

Thomas married Harriet Hobbs. Harriet had been born in about 1796, the only child of daughter of Jennie Bounds and William Hobbs (Brief History, pp. 222, 224). Her father was a blacksmith in Laurel, Delaware. Her mother died "at an early age" of consumption (tuberculosis), the disease that was later to kill Harriet herself.

Harriet and Thomas's oldest child, Ann, was born in about 1815 but died when she was five. William Lowder was born 24 Sep 1818, the second child of his parents and their only child to survive to maturity. Two younger children, Lavinia and Mary Jane, died in infancy.

Here's William Lowder again:

Mar. 1835, my father died, and I being the only child, and my mother in poor health. I was obliged to quit school. I was put into my father's store to carry on the business, in my seventeenth year, and so continued until my mother's death. Jan, 1836...

-- Brief History, p. 222

Harriet Hobbs Hearn died of consumption when she was 40 (p. 224). She, her husband Thomas and her father William Hobbs are buried "in the old Presbyterian churchyard, one-half mile northeast of Laurel, on the Broad Creek side" (p. 225).