Editing Jan Karon (section)

==Early life==
Jan Karon was born in the Blue Ridge foothills town of [[Lenoir, North Carolina]]  as '''Janice Meredith Wilson'''.<ref name="Mitford Site">[http://www.mitfordbooks.com/ Mitfordbooks.com]</ref> She was named after the novel ''[[Janice Meredith]]''.  Before she was 4, her parents split up and left her with her maternal grandparents on a farm a few miles away in [[Hudson, North Carolina]].<ref>[https://www.blueridgeheritage.com/destinations/hub-station/ HUB Station – Blue Ridge National Heritage Area]. Retrieved February 2, 2021.</ref> 

Her mother Wanda, who was 15 at Jan's birth, went to [[Charlotte, North Carolina|Charlotte]]. Her father, Robert Wilson, joined the [[Royal Canadian Air Force]]. At age 12, Jan moved from Hudson to Charlotte, to rejoin her mother, who had married Toby Setzer and had two more children. She dropped out of school in ninth grade at age 14, and married Robert Freeland in [[South Carolina]], where girls her age could do so legally. Freeland, who was five years older, worked at a Charlotte tire store, while Jan worked in a clothing store. At age 15, she gave birth to her only child, Candace Freeland.

Jan and Freeland's marriage was troubled from the beginning, and tragedy rocked it further. While Freeland was sitting in a car with one of his brothers and one or more friends, a gun was handed through the window and went off. The bullet punctured one of Robert Freeland's lungs and chipped his spine, nearly killing him and leaving him paralyzed. Jan was distraught, the marriage suffered, and she filed for divorce.