Katie Byrd

Black female, born about 1871 in Louisiana. Died of dropsy in Pensacola, Florida on 12 December 1896 at the age of 25. She was single and had been in the state for three years at the time of her death. She worked as a seamstress. W.F. Fordham signed her death certificate as physician, and S.B. Hutchinson buried her in the Escambia County Poor Farm cemetery.

Finding Katie in documents is difficult due to the lack of information on her death certificate and her relatively short stay in the area before her death. I located a Katie Byrd in the 1880 census for Mobile, Alabama, showing her as the six-year-old daughter of George Byrd, a mulatto man. That Katie Byrd married George Weaver in 1892. George and Katie Weaver were still being enumerated in the 1910 census, however, and that Katie Weaver died in 1918.

There being no 1890 federal census available and the last extant Pensacola City Directories before her death is 1890, well before the time she was said to have been living in the area. (I checked it anyway; there is no Byrd or Bird that could be her.) Despite her being listed as single on her death certificate, she was not too young to have been married in the past, and Byrd might have been her married name.

SOURCES:

Florida Certificate of Death for Katie Byrd (No. 2881), Florida Deaths, 1877-1939. Database. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2016. Index based upon data collected by the Genealogical Society of Utah, Salt Lake City.