Jessie Maria James was born August 25, 1896 to George W. James and Mary Alice Beleau James in Lexington, MO.
At the age of six or seven, she was kidnapped while walking home from school. During the early 1900s, many white children were abducted to be used as slaves or to be sold into slavery.
Jessie Maria was taken by a man who brought her to the train station and they took a train to western Kansas. He left her there with an old woman who made her work all the time. She was there for more than a year.
One day when she was working in a field near the road, two men came by in a buggy. She ran to the buggy and told the men that she was stolen from her family. The old lady came out to the road and the men left. The old lady beat her. A short time later the men in the buggy came back. They brought the sheriff with them and Jessie Maria was taken to an orphanage. She wasn't sure where the orphanage was and she was not there for very long.
She was then taken to a Lutheran orphanage in Winfield, KS where she spent several months, maybe even a year or more.
The Gritzmakers were a Lutheran family looking for a young lady to help care for their younger children. They did not adopt her, but took her into their family when she was about 9 years old. She lived with them in Carrier, OK (about 5 miles northwest of Enid) until she was about 18. The Gritzmaker family moved to Springfield, MO in 1916 but Jessi Maria did not go with them.
At that time Jessie Maria put an ad in the newspaper in Kansas City, Mo. In a small one line ad, she told her name and that she had been kidnapped and was looking for her family. A lady who lived across the street from Mary Alice saw the ad. Overjoyed, Mary Alice answered the ad and they were reunited.
Jessie Maria had been a part of two families and she maintained a close relationship with both families for the rest of her life.
In August of 1918 Jessi Maria James married Hiram Daniel Peckham and they raised five sons and one daughter. The family lived within a 50 mile radius of Enid, Oklahoma for most of their fifty three years together.
Jessie Maria James Peckham died in 1971 and was buried next to her mother in the Enid Cemetery, Enid, OK.