Landreth(ith) Family Database

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The Landrith family is on Peggy (Landrith) Nutt's paternal side of her family. The family name was spelled Landreth at least as far back as the year 1580, but the family line from which Peggy comes changed the spelling to Landrith perhaps as early as the 1830s. This introductory article to the Landreth-Landrith family centers on Peggy’s 3rd great-grandfather, Jonathan Landreth, born in southwest Virginia in January or February 1800.

Jonathan Landreth was the first of nine children born to Benjamin Ray Landreth Jr. and Rhoda Baker Ayers. All nine of the children were born in or near Wythe county in southwest Virginia.

Jonathan, at about age 20 and not yet married, along with his sister Hannah (about age 18) and brother Thomas (about age 16), moved westward to Union county in extreme southern Illinois with the family of their uncle Jonathan and aunt Catherine Landreth. It was here in Union county on 5 June 1821 that young Jonathan fell in love and married Mary Thompson.

Also while in Union county, Illinois, Mary gave birth in May 1822 to their first child, Hiram. This child was the first of eleven children born to Jonathan and Mary. Sometime after Hiram’s birth, probably in the fall of 1822, Jonathan and his small family moved back east to Wythe county, Virginia. They remained there for about eleven years, during which time six more children were born to them.

About June 1833 Jonathan and his family again moved to Illinois, this time settling further north in North Palmyra township, Macoupin county, Illinois. The last four of their eleven children were born here.

Jonathan and Mary’s marriage lasted for 58-1/2 years before death claimed Jonathan in North Palmyra township on 3 December 1879. Nine and one-half years later, on 16 March 1889, his widow Mary died there also. They were buried in the family cemetery on their farm.

The oldest known burial on the Landreth farm was that of Jonathan’s half sister, Martha J. (Landreth) Collins, in September 1874. In 1876 Jonathan Landreth deeded this one acre piece of his farm to the trustees and County of Macoupin for a burial ground, and it became known as the Landreth Cemetery. There are nine known burials in the Landreth cemetery, and probably were more. This cemetery has since been "turned out." By the mid-1900s there was no longer a fence around the cemetery, and livestock grazed around and over it trampling all of the slab-type stones. In April 1995 one of the locals, whose property is a little east of this burial ground, purchased it at a township auction with a notion of restoring the cemetery.

If anyone has additional information on this branch of the Landreth(ith) family, I would be delighted for you to contact me and help fill in any information gaps.