Eliza Jane Lynden : Short Biography

Known to her family as Eliza or Ellie, Jane Elizabeth Lynden was the youngest child of John Lynden (1794-1878) and Eleanor Jane "Ellen" Lynden (1802-1875). She was born in August, and, oddly, August marked many of her life's milestones: she married Samuel Thompson (1846-1887) in August of 1874; her mother died in August of 1875; her father died in August of 1878; her husband died in August of 1887; and she married George Edwin Hinkley in August of 1896. 

I am more certain of the month of her birth than the year. On the 1900 USA census her DOB is August 1846, but her gravestone says 1847. California death records, plus the1920 and 1910 census, say 1845.

When Samuel Thompson died, Eliza was only 41, a widow with six children. In 1892 she left County Longford and took all six children to America, joining her brothers Henry and John in the beautiful Lompoc Valley of California. Of all the Lynden siblings who emigrated, she seems to have been the only one who did not travel in steerage! I am not sure if she had the means to buy passage or if her brothers helped her. By that time, they were prosperous ranchers and might very well have supported her journey.

Interestingly, the Thompsons arrived in America on the Etruria, the same ship that Annie Moore, first Irish immigrant to come through Ellis Island, arrived on. But seven or eight months after that voyage!

A few months after her brother Henry Lynden died, she married George Hinkley, a neighbor. It seems the marriage did not last; later she reverted to her first husband's name and is buried in Santa Barbara Cemetery as Eliza J. Thompson.