Christiana and John Tillson moved from Massachusetts to central Illinois in 1822. Upon arriving in Montgomery County near what would soon be Hillsboro, they set up a general store and real estate business and began to raise a family. A half century later, in 1870, Christiana Tillson wrote about her early days in Illinois in a memoir published by R. R. Donnelley in 1919. The Tillsons lived quite ordinary lives in extraordinary times, notes Kay J. Carr, introducing this edition. They moved west and prospered in the land business at a time when America was being transformed from a rural, agricultural country into an urban, industrial nation. Their views and sensibilities, Carr says, might seem strange to us, but they were entirely normal to people in the early nineteenth century. Thus Tillson's memoir provides fascinating but believable snapshots of ordinary nineteenth-century American life.

John Tillson married Christiana Holmes in 1822.