Roseanna McCoy

Roseanna McCoy was a daughter of Randolph and Sarah McCoy of Pike County, Kentucky, and became the best-known woman associated with the personal side of the Hatfield–McCoy feud. Born in 1859, she belonged to a large family living along the Tug Fork border region. Around 1880 she formed a relationship with Johnson ‘Johnse’ Hatfield, a son of Anderson ‘Devil Anse’ Hatfield, despite the hostility and growing violence between their extended families.

Roseanna lived for a time with the Hatfields but eventually returned to the McCoy side while pregnant. She and Johnse had a daughter, Sarah Elizabeth, who died in infancy, and Johnse later married Roseanna’s cousin Nancy McCoy. Family and popular accounts also credit Roseanna with warning the Hatfields when McCoy relatives captured Johnse, helping secure his rescue. She died in 1889, still a young woman. Later retellings often romanticised the relationship as an Appalachian Romeo-and-Juliet story, simplifying a life shaped by kinship pressure, abandonment and feud violence.

In Ann Rinaldi’s The Coffin Quilt, Fanny McCoy grows up along the Tug Fork as distrust between her family and the Hatfields hardens into a feud. She watches Roseanna McCoy fall in love with Johnse Hatfield, a relationship that offers a brief possibility of reconciliation but instead becomes another source of accusation, abandonment and revenge. As killings and reprisals multiply, Fanny must decide how much of her family’s version of events she can accept.