I represent Elizabeth Digby Pilott. I was the wife of Lt. Henry Pilott of His Majesty’s 31st Regiment of Foot. I was born in County Laois, Ireland; my father was an Irish Protestant minister who disapproved of my marriage. Henry and I ran away together and were married in Ireland in 1762. My children were Jane, Catherine Mary, Elizabeth, and Judith Henrietta. Catherine Mary was an infant when we left Portsmouth, England, with the regiment for Pensacola. She contracted yellow fever and died soon after we arrived in 1765, at about one year of age. I wrote a memoir that is one of the few sources of information we have about women’s lives in the colony of West Florida. I wrote it for Judith because she wanted the story of her parents’ lives. It tells of the struggles we faced on arrival; my caring for my sick husband and child; I watching the few female friends I had sicken and die as well. There was happiness: Jane, Elizabeth and Judith Henrietta were all born and baptized in Pensacola. And when the epidemic passed and life resumed some kind of normalcy, it was said of me that I was a staple of Pensacola’s polite society. I died in Bath, England, on November 12, 1826 at 84 years old.
Sources: 1, 13, 14, 37, 53, 111