Ida Riley Cayson Portrait

Ida Riley was born during 1854, the daughter of Nathan Riley and Caroline Morse. She married Eldridge Cayson in Itawamba County.

Her father, Nathan Riley was born April 10, 1820, in South Carolina, the son of John Riley and Mary Little. He died on November 8, 1863 during Civil War service when Ida was 9 years old. Of his death, the writer Washington Lafayette Clayton penned, “I remember having been in a fight in Collierville, Tennessee in about August 1863, in which we attacked the fortification; and we were ordered at one stage of the right to lie down, and I was myself lying by the side of Nathan Riley, an Orderly Sergeant, and while we were loading and shooting I heard a whip-crack noise by my side and he said 'I’m shot!' The wound was only a flesh wound in the thigh, though, and it seemed to me, and I always believed, if he had been carried to a good hospital, or to some private house where proper attention could have been given to him, he might have recovered. But he was carried something like 50 miles to his country home, and the neglect of the wound together was too much for him and it proved fatal.”¹

Ida’s father, Nathan, was buried in the old Shumpert Cemetery in Itawamba County near the Riley farm.

¹Gwin, Minrose, Olden Times Revisited: W.L. Clayton’s Pen Pictures, University Press of Mississipppi, Jackson, 1982, page 108.