There is text below this image that is pertinant to this analysis. Look at the tombstone photo, and then scroll down:
As you view this headstone photograph that has been post-processed to a level of high contrast, has been enlarged for better letter recognition, and has been cropped to show just the text area, you see in the highlighted sections of this tombstone the following:
of
H_gdon
Ma 18
1 18_4
If you compare these partial letters to the listing from the Nelson County Kentucky Cemeteries, Vol. 4, p. 212 with Higdons highlighted in pink, you will see a match.
There is only one Higdon tombstone above has that has a date of death that ends in a 4:
Our confirmed match is John Higdon, b. 5 May 1843, d. 1 Sep 1844 (son of Philip & Nancy Higdon)
When Nancy Higdon captured her image in 1999, she copied down her ‘reading’ of this tombstone as:
John, son of PVN Higdon, born May 6 1843(?), died Sept 1 1844
So from this comparison, we now know that we are indeed looking at the tombstone of John, a son who died at about 1 1/2 years og age. His father was Philip Higdon, who died at about the age of 94, and his mother was Nancy Higdon, who died at about age 44. Nine years later after John’s death, Philip and Nancy had another child, a daughter named Sarah Francis Higdon, who died at about 4 years of age. When mother Nancy died, she was buried in the same Pioneer Cemetery in Bardstown, Kentucky as her deceased young son, John, and her deceased young daughter, Sarah.
It would be nice to know if PVN Higdon (as read by Nancy in 1999) was in fact P. & N. Higdon, a mis-reading that could easily be caused by the deterioration of the tombstone face in the vicinity of that line of text. It would be nice to know more about John and his family, so let us move onto the next page of this analysis.
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