The Ancestry of Hannah Strader

Hannah Strader’s lineage is known back to the ancestors who came to the Colony of North Carolina about 1750. There is so much to say, in fact, that this is the most text-heavy of all the individual pages of the Nathaniel Martin/Hannah Strader website. Keep in mind that even though a great deal is mentioned here, this is still only a summary.

Much of the knowledge cited here comes as a result of the genealogical research of Howard Frame in the 1960s and early 1970s. Howard was descended from Elizabeth Strader, a sister of Hannah, who married Jeremiah Frame. The union of Jeremiah and Elizabeth was one of at least six Strader/Frame marriages, entwining the clans to such a degree that the Strader story was a natural focus of Howard’s investigations. Though Howard labored without the advantages of the internet era, he succeeded in finding enough documentation to pencil in a sketch of the family in early America. He found that Hannah’s bloodlines were thoroughly German, most or all of them qualifying as “Pennsylvania Dutch.”

The easiest way to structure a discussion of Hannah’s forebears is to to begin with the most ancient known and proceed chronologically. Below you will find three sections of text, each launching with one of three immigrant ancestors -- Johann Heinrich Strader, John Jacob Starr, or Heinrich Weitzel -- and proceeding down to Hannah. But first, it is useful to talk about the Pennsylvania Dutch migration in general.

The story begins in a region of Germany known as the Palatinate. This area, part of the Rhineland, lies just north of the Alsace-Lorraine region and up against the eastern borders of Luxembourg and Belgium. By the early 1700s this area was home to a population divided into three major sects of Christianity -- Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic. This division of power meant each group dreamed of becoming dominant, and no lasting stability could be counted on until such time as that happened. The prize was obvious. With the retreat of the plague years the land, a wonderfully fertile agricultural zone, had become prosperous. Among those who coveted it were outsiders, hoping to further their own interests by shifting the balance of control one way or another. The most infamous meddler was the French monarch Louis XIV, the famous “Sun King.” During his tremendously long reign (1643-1715) he repeatedly sent his armies over the border, ostensibly to support his Catholic brethren, but also for purposes of pillage. A crisis developed following a somewhat pointless invasion in 1707, a campaign apparently fueled by the ambitions of one of Louis’s field marshalls rather than by the king himself. The invaders withdrew almost at once. Some say that during the retreat of the French forces, the marshall gave the residents three days to flee, and then the army destroyed everything on their way home, a “scorched earth” military tactic. It is said that the fleeing people gathered eventually into refugee populations that had to fit themselves into the societies of neighboring countries. More objective histories say that the residents did not actually have to leave, but in the wake of an intensely cold winter of 1708-09 that destroyed orchards and vineyards that had stood for generations, the prospect of starting over elsewhere did not seem so daunting given that the families were going to have to replant fields and rebuild homes and barns and shops anyway. Moreover, even in peaceful times the Palatinate was too crowded, leaving few opportunities for the younger generations of agricultural families to obtain acreage sufficient to support a household. Soon pamphlets extolling the virtues of the colonies of Pennsylvania and North Carolina began circulating in editions in the tens of thousands of copies. Queen Anne of England, eager to help what she perceived as victims of religious persecution, and Parliament, eager to fill the American possessions with white, Protestant settlers but not wanting to deplete England to do so, approved a policy in 1709 that granted free passage to any “citizens of foreign nations” that wished to settle there, provided they swore allegiance to the Colonies when they arrived. Some, particularly a large surge of Lutherans, immediately took advantage of this offer. From 1709 through the early 1750s, as the queen continued to subsidize the voyages, many more followed, and the phenomenon began to draw more and more Germans from beyond the Palatinate as well.

One of the key groups in this mass exodus consisted of families who had at first sought asylum in the Netherlands. Perhaps some of them were biding their time hoping for the opportunity to reclaim their homes in Germany, but political unrest prevailed in the France/Germany border area for the remainder of the century. Eventually these families crossed the Atlantic. However, having spent as much as thirty or forty years in Holland, they had become “Dutchified” in speech and customs. As these later refugees crossed the Atlantic, many landed in Philadelphia and settled in eastern Pennsylvania. This is the group famous today as the “Pennsylvania Dutch.” Hannah’s forebears have been described as such here; however, strictly speaking the label only lightly applies, because the relevant individuals spent at most a dozen years, and some probably only a matter of weeks, within the bounds of Pennsylvania.

Hannah’s ancestors may well have rejected Pennsylvania as a long-term home because they were of somewhat different character than their co-travellers. Many of the latter, thanks to the decades spent in the Netherlands, had shifted their Lutheran or German Reformed religious affiliation to the Dutch Reformed Church. Hannah’s people had resisted this change. The sub-group naturally felt more comfortable cleaving to others like themselves, and one of the places they chose to gather was Guilford County, NC, where they were better able to preserve their way of life with less pressure to assimilate. Becoming speakers of English and having to use Anglicized versions of their names already represented a sea change in their identities; they didn’t want to give up all they had stood for. So down the famous Emigrant Trail came Johann Heinrich Strader, John Jacob Starr, and Heinrich Weitzel and the women who were, or soon would be, their wives.

Johann Heinrich Strader was a great great grandfather of Hannah. He is one of only two of that generation that has so far been identified by name, the other one being his son Henry’s father-in-law Nicholas Holstein. The rest of the immigrants who will be discussed below, including John Jacob Starr and Heinrich Weitzel, were one generation more recent -- great grandparents of Hannah.

Johann Heinrich was probably born in the early 1720s, though this is only an estimate. His birthplace was probably the Netherlands because he used Johann (sometimes rendered as Johannes) rather than Hans -- Hans being a “more German” variation of the name, which in English would be rendered as John, Jack, or Johnny. Having this first name does not mean he went by Johann, though. Many Palatinate households used naming traditions as an expression of religious faith. The name honors John the Baptist and/or the Apostle John. The practice was so common that -- as will be discussed below in the section dealing with John Jacob Starr -- the same immediate family might contain more than one son with the first name Hans/Johann/Johannes/John. You might think this would lead to confusion, but in that time and place, there was no problem, because the person would be identified by his middle name. The same phenomenon occurred with girl children named after the Virgin Mary. Sisters living in the same home might be named Maria Sofia, Maria Katarina, and Maria Anna. They would be called Sofia, Katarina, and Anna by everyone they knew. They would be expected to use the first name only on extremely formal occasions. This has bearing on genealogical research because the “formal occasions” protocol was often applied in cases of marriage records, censuses, deeds, and ships’ passenger lists.

The name Johann Heinrich Strader (rendered as Johann Henrich Ströder) appears on the ship captain’s list of the Ranier, sailing out of Rotterdam and arriving in Philadelphia on 26 September 1749. The same day, a “John Henry Streader” is listed as having made his oath of allegiance to the Colonies. The ship’s captain’s list also includes a Casper Streader and a “Johannes Ströder junge” or Johann Jr.

It seems probable that Johann Heinrich Strader of the Ranier is the same man who was Hannah’s great great grandfather, and that “Junior” was his son, who will henceforth be referred to in this essay as Henry Strader. If so, it would make sense that Henry was a child at the time, but the Ranier information does indicate that Junior signed his name, which implies he was old enough to write. The two Johanns might have been cousins or even brothers, or an uncle and nephew; the repetition of Johann as a first name doesn’t preclude any of these possibilities.

It is also possible there was some sort of relationship to Casper Streader. People with names that are the same phonetically, travelling on the same voyage of the same ship? It is tempting to connect those dots. However, no other evidence links Casper and Johann Heinrich. A Casper Stratter of Alsace Township, Pennsylvania -- very likely to be the Casper Streader who came on the Ranier -- left a will dated 1778 whose text survives, and that text makes no mention of Johann Heinrich or of any relatives living in North Carolina, where Johann Heinrich settled.

Deeds and other records from Guilford County establish that a Johann Heinrich Strader was living there from about 1750 onward. Whether this was the individual who sailed on the Ranier in 1849 has yet to be conclusively proven, but if “our” Johann Heinrich did not come on that particular ship, he came on one much like it, and was then part of a large migration of people like himself southward from Pennsylvania. It is generally known that Palatinate families with the surnames Albright, Clapp, Faust, Holt, Sharp (Scherb), Cortner (Goertner), Ingold, Brower, Keim, Staley, May, Amick (Ewigs), Smith, Stack, Nease, Ingles, Leinberger, Strader, and Wyrick established a colony of their folk in the period between 1745 and 1760 in the counties of Alamance, Granville, Guilford, Orange, and Caswell, NC. These were families who had kept to the German Reformed and Lutheran sects. Where genealogical uncertainty arises is in which deeds, tax lists, and church records refer to Johann Heinrich, and which refer to his son. On this webpage, the father and son pair are called Johann Heinrich and Henry for ease of identification, but in the records from the 1700s North Carolina, they would both have been Henry Strader -- Strader being rendered phonetically in most cases, by clerks who had to decide on the spot what spelling to use, clerks who perhaps were not entirely literate themselves. And to complicate matters further, spelling was not a standarized sort of thing in the first place in those pre-Noah Webster days.

When Johann Heinrich died is conjecture, because it is so impossible to distinguish him from his son in the extant records. We will leave that as a mystery and discuss Henry, the son, because some of the documentation from the later decades of the 1700s unquestionably refers to him and not to his father. Among those documents are various Granville County, NC court records. These include: 1) The will of John Holstein, dated May 1790, which granted “to brother-in-law Henry Streider land in Granville on Adock Creek.” Henry is also mentioned as one of two executors of that will, the other being Jacob Holstein, a brother of the author of the will. 2) A wedding record that links Henry Straiter (yet another spelling) to Catherine Holstein and gives a wedding date of 31 May 1773. John, Jacob, and Catherine Holstein were likely three of the children of one Nicholas Holstein (Hostine), whose own will is recorded in Granville County.

Neither Henry Strader nor Catherine Holstein were mentioned by name in the within-the-family records that survived into the 20th Century. Those records begin with the family Bible of Henry’s grandson, Jacob Strader, whose contents do not include details on Henry’s generation. The earliest forebears in that source are Daniel Strader -- son of Henry and father of Jacob -- and his wife, Elizabeth Wensck. However, public-source records establish that Henry and Catherine did exist, and they dwelled in the right place and right time -- and obviously had the right surname -- to have been Daniel’s parents. Henry and Catherine definitely had a son named Daniel, and only the strictest of genealogists would argue that it might be some other Daniel than the one who was Hannah’s grandfather. In addition to Daniel, the names of three other children of Henry and Catherine have surfaced. Those three were Henry, Adam, and Katy, with Daniel falling between Adam and Katy in the birth sequence. Three other children, all younger, are listed in the 1790 census, but their names are not mentioned in that source, only their genders (a girl then a boy then another girl) and age ranges. Henry was the eldest, born in 1774. More children may have been born after 1790.

One date mentioned for Henry’s death is 1792, but this does not agree with land transaction records. Again, the possible confusion with other Henry Straders is a factor, but it seems likely the “right” Henry bought and sold Orange County, NC land between 1787 and 1801, one tract deeded to Jacob Holstein in 1787 and another tract to his son Henry in 1794. The place of death for both Henry and Catherine is also unclear. By the end of their lives, a new migration had begun. North Carolina was now the “old country.” The “land of promise,” now that the Indian tribes were being pushed out of the region beyond the Appalachians, was Ohio. Henry and Catherine may have been content with the homes they had founded when young, and/or they may have died before the uprooting began. Their son Daniel, however, heeded the call westward.

Daniel’s life is firmly documented, and so we know his birth occurred 7 April 1777 in Guilford County. He was raised there as well. Six days after he turned twenty-one (i.e. 13 April 1798), he married Elizabeth Wensck, who had been born 22 August 1776, also in Guilford County. The bondsmen mentioned in the county marriage records is George Strader (rendered as George Steador), who was probably Daniel’s first cousin, son of the George Strader who fought in the Revolutionary War.

The first of Daniel and Elizabeth’s children, Jacob, was born 26 February 1799, about ten months after the wedding. Daniel and Elizabeth would go on to have many more offspring. The names of eleven children have surfaced. This may not be the full count, because these eleven names refer to children who reached adulthood. There may have been others who perished in infancy or in early childhood whose identities have been lost. Eleven may also be one too many names (see below).

Daniel and Elizabeth left North Carolina some time after the birth of their first four children -- Jacob, Polly, Susannah, and Mary, the latter born in 1804. Later census records of relatives hint that perhaps the family went next to Kentucky, but if so, it was a stopover of at most two or three years. Then it was on to Preble County, OH. According to the reference work History of Preble County, Ohio, 1798-1881, Daniel and Elizabeth arrived in 1809, but this does not agree with birth information concerning fifth child, named Elizabeth after her mother. She was born 25 March 1808 and her birthplace is listed as Preble County in a number of sources. Most likely the family had reached Ohio by the end of 1807. Their precise living place for the first few years -- during which time sixth and seventh children Daniel Jr. and Rosannah came into the world -- is unknown, but a county property transaction record reveals that Daniel purchased approximately 170 acres of land on 26 March 1813 from a Henry Strader -- this Henry probably being Daniel’s brother. The parcel, consisting of “the West half of fractional Section of No. 18 Town 8 Range 2 East,” was home to Daniel and Elizabeth for the rest of their long lives.

Daniel did not get to enjoy the experience of caring for and harvesting the first crop off his new land, though, because he left to fight in the War of 1812. The roll of Captain David E. Hendrick’s Company shows Daniel as serving May 1 to November 18, 1813. He had put in a tour of duty the previous year as well, and appears on the Roster of Ohio Soldiers of 1812, along with three other Straders.

Daniel survived the war and spent the next forty years as a leading citizen and prominent landowner of Preble County. The final four children, William, John, Levi, and Jane, were born by 1820 or not long after. The majority of the eleven kids lived in Preble County lifelong. Most were still local residents when Daniel passed away 11 February 1853. Elizabeth survived him only a brief while, expiring 30 August 1855. Husband and wife were both laid to rest in the Sherer Cemetery, Washington Township, Preble County. Sherer Cemetery had been established as a private graveyard of the Sherer family and then was expanded to include neighbors and in-laws. Two of Daniel and Elizabeth’s daughters had married Sherer men.

One of those Sherer/Strader marriages was that of Levi Sherer and Jane Strader. The best public-source evidence of the composition of the Daniel Strader/Elizabeth Wensck family happens to take the form of the records of the suit filed by Levi and Jane to force a partition of the family estate, described as 167 acres, so that the various heirs or their descendants would be able to get either get their fair share of the money or be able to obtain separate deeds to portions of the acreage, according to their wishes. Jane was the youngest daughter, and no doubt a suit was the only way she could get contrary older siblings to do right by her.

One puzzle brought up by the text of Levi and Jane’s petition is its reference to William Strader. This child of Daniel and Elizabeth does not appear in any other source. The most logical explanation is that William was an alternate name for John, who is known from other sources, and whose name does not appear in the petition. This would mean there were only ten known children of Daniel and Elizabeth, not eleven.

As mentioned, Daniel and Elizabeth’s eldest child was Jacob Strader, born in Guilford County before the migration, then raised in Preble County from the age of seven or eight onward. He would eventually become Hannah’s father. The first major step toward that development came with his marriage to Rachel Starr, daughter of John Starr and Catharine Weitzel. The wedding occurred 1 October 1818 in Preble County. Groom and bride were both eighteen years old and therefore had many decades together to look forward to. Before discussing length and breadth of that union, let’s shift back to the days when Guilford County was first being populated with its Palatinate settlers, and describe the lives of the grandparents and parents of Rachel Starr.

This individual’s life and identity are sketchy. His sons Adam, Jacob, and John -- all of whom married women of the same Weitzel family in Guilford County, must have had a father. The naming conventions of Palatinate families and the continuing use of the name Jacob in subsequent generations gives us the name John Jacob Starr by inference. The actual form of his name used in source material ranges from John Jacob to Jacob Starr to John Jacob Stohr -- Stohr probably being the “correct,” non-Americanized version of the surname.

John Jacob Starr’s father may have been Johannes Starr, age 38, a man who arrived 16 September 1738 in Philadelphia aboard the ship Elizabeth, which had sailed from Rotterdam via Deal, England. The passenger manifest of heads-of-families includes Johannes as well as three heads of Weitzel families -- Johann Werner Weitzel (or Weinard Weisell, age 27), Martin Weizel (or Weisell, age 30), and Henrich Weutsel (or Weitzel or Weisell, age 38). This is persuasive documentation that Johannes Starr might be the patriarch of the Starrs who settled in Guilford County, because these subsequent Starrs maintained a close association with the Weitzel clan. If the theory is correct, then Johannes was among the group of Palatinate German immigrants who stayed in the area of Berks, Lebanon, Schuylkill, or Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania until about 1750, then travelled down the Emigrant Trail to North Carolina. However, whether Johannes personally made it to that destination is unknown. His name does not appear in North Carolina court records. Perhaps he was dead by 1750. Perhaps he stayed in Pennsylvania. Given the uncertainties, Johannes is regarded as a “maybe” ancestor at this time.

As for “definite” ancestors, the best available within-the-family source for the history of the Starr family is the material written by his great great granddaughter Mary Rachel Frame Webb, whom we will call “Rachel Webb” (the name she went by at the end of her life, Webb being the surname of her final husband) from here to the end of this document. Unfortunately, her account is not particularly reliable in the matter of John Jacob Starr. In fact, it serves to confuse matters. Rachel Webb states that Rachel Starr’s maternal grandmother -- this would be Anna Margaret Low, wife of John Jacob Starr -- arrived in America from Germany as a widow with four boys, landing at Baltimore. This would mean John Jacob Starr died young. This scenario does not agree with the timing of the children’s birthdates. An early death also contradicts a theory in the volume Fox Family History 1703-1976 by John F. Vallentine, a reference work that touches repeatedly upon Hannah’s Guilford County forebears and was used as a guide by Howard Frame in his research. This book points to a record of the baptism of Adam Starr’s son John Jacob Starr, performed at the Brick Reformed Church in approximately 1779. The baby’s “sponsors” were his grandparents John Jacob Starr and Anna Margaret Starr. This implies John Jacob was in attendance to participate in the baptism of his grandson, and therefore was alive in 1779. However, it is also possible the sponsorship was honorary, a token of respect for a deceased family patriarch.

Boiling down the available references gives us a birthdate for John Jacob at the end of the 1720s, probably in Germany rather than the Netherlands. Both he and Anna Margaret Low, who is believed to have been born in about 1731, came to North Carolina well before 1750, perhaps with the first influx of their people from Pennsylvania to Guilford County, which dates from 1744. Their wedding must have occurred in 1749, about a year before the birth of their first child, Adam. These nuptials probably took place in Guilford County. Altogether five children are known, the youngest born about 1760. Those five were John Adam Starr (known as Adam), Jacob Starr, John Starr (known as John), Barbara Starr, and Anna Maria Starr.

You will note that these five include only three boys, not the “four boys” referred to by Rachel Webb. Webb also stated that the “widow” caused two of her sons to learn the tailor trade, and two the blacksmith trade. This much may have been somewhat accurate. John Starr is known to have been a tailor.

These three Starr brothers came of age in North Carolina and appear to have played a meaningful role in their communities as young men, and are mentioned in various local records of the 1770s through the early 1800s. In genealogical terms their most noteworthy accomplishment was that they all, as mentioned above, married daughters of the same family, named Weitzel. (1) Adam Starr married Margaret Weitzel. They had at least eleven children. Many of this brood would be part of the migrations from Ohio into Vermilion County, IL. A few went on to Green County, WI. For example, Adam’s namesake son Adam Starr, spent the last years of life in Clarno, Green County, WI, no more than a few miles from the home of his cousin, Rachel Starr Strader. (2) Jacob Starr married Anna Maria Weitzel. They had at least two children. Jacob is thought to have left Guilford County about 1790, but his later life has not yet been tracked. (3) John Starr would marry Catharine Weitzel. This pair would become the parents of Rachel Starr. But before elaborating on their lives, let’s take one more short step backward, and examine the life of the man who was the father to those three Weitzel daughters, and father-in-law to the three Starr brothers, the man we will refer to at first as Heinrich Weitzel:

This man was probably the son of the “Henrich Weutsel” who travelled on the H.M.S. Elizabeth and would probably, as a child, have also been a passenger on that voyage. That was probably the very day he Americanized his name to Henry. From here on down he will be referred to as Henry Weitzel because it is more in keeping with the public records. Those records, from Guilford and nearby counties through 1800, variously render the surname as Witzel, Wetzel, Weitzell, Whitsel, Whitzel, Whitzell, Whitesell, Whetsel -- as well as Whitesell and Weitzel. This applies not just to Henry but to many residents of those counties, most or all of whom were likely to have been members of the same extended clan. What version Henry himself would give us were he alive to be interviewed today is hard to say. Weitzel has been arbitrarily chosen as “official” here, though in fact a number of his children appear to have endorsed the idea that they should make themselves appear more English than German and were strongly tending to use Whitesell in their later years.

A Brief History of Alamance County reports that the Weitzel family of that region came from between Nurnberg and Dusseldorf in Germany, resided for about five years in Pennsylvania, moved to North Carolina in 1750, and settled on Gun Creek. This source (quoted in turn in the Fox Family History, published by the Fox Family Reunion, Ashland, KS, 1976) goes on to say that, “This history also confirms (Fox) family tradition in that Adam Weitzel of Orange County (now Alamance County) was a brother of Henry Weitzel of Guilford County, the two actually residing only a few miles apart. This relationship for them is probably correct, even though it appears Adam was probably as much as ten to fifteen years younger than Henry. The area along both sides of the present Guilford/Alamance County line was settled beginning about 1745 almost exclusively by Germans. Alamance County was created in 1848, mostly from Orange County, but with a small portion coming from eastern Guilford County, with later additions from northeastern Chatham County.”

The above excerpt is the first of many that place Henry (or perhaps his namesake father) in this particular part of North Carolina. Below is a map from 1808 that is helpful. Note the place name Weitzel in the upper right, circled and highlighted in red. This may well have been Henry’s precise place of residence for much of his life, and if not, was the place other members of his family were living, and he resided close by, probably just to the east in what was at that time known as Orange County.

As Henry Whitsel, Henry appears on the 1755 tax list of Orange County, which at that time included an area extending several miles inside present-day Guilford County. By 1762 he was a property owner along the waters of Alamance in what is now Guilford County. On 22 September 1770 Henry Weitzel took the oath prescribed by Parliament for naturalization at Hillsborough, Orange County. Henry (name spelled Weitzell) is recorded in the Brick Reformed Church records as a donor and collector of monies for the church in 1772. In Guilford County records, Henry is mentioned at least two dozen more times, including as a juror (1783), an assessor (1783), a purchaser of land (1762, 1763, twice in 1784, 1787), a recipient of land grants (1779, 1780, 1784, 1787, 1790, 1794), a seller of land (1773, 1785, twice in 1788, 1791, 1792, 1793, 1795), road overseer (1788), an executor (1791), and as a deceased owner (1797, 1798, 1806). All three Starr sons-in-law appear in these records, especially Adam Starr. In particular, Adam’s name appears as administrator of Henry’s estate. The names of Henry’s sons Tobias Weitzel and Henry Weitzel, Jr. also appear more than once.

Many of the records cited above confirm that Henry was the owner and operator of a mill along the Reedy Fork of the Haw River, and that he was a property owner along Beaver Creek. This means he may well have been the owner of the 1770s version of the mill shown at left, which is located on the Reedy Fork near Beaver Creek. The photo is a modern-day picture of an existing structure, still in operation and selling its flour not only to the local community but to the tourist trade. The website of this business does not specifically mention Henry by name in the brief summary it provides of the mill’s history. (Click here to visit said website.) However, the possibility this is “the” mill -- rebuilt and slightly relocated -- is too tantalizing to neglect to include the photo here. That possibility aside, it is a fact that Henry's mill was the site of a colorful historical incident. A minor skirmish of the Revolutionary War, to become known as the Battle of Whitsell’s Mill, took place in 1781 on Reedy Fork, Guilford County. British troops decided to occupy and make use of the mill, and local men briefly -- and unsuccessfully -- tried to prevent the seizure of the premises.

None of the available references provide precise birth and death dates for Henry and his wife, nor the birthdates for the majority of their children, but the following stats seem to be accurate: Henry was born about 1728, probably in Germany. His wife was Anna Maria Fronich. Some references include the name Sophronia but this is probably a misrendering of Fronich. She was born about 1729. Whether she came from the same part of Germany as Henry is unknown. The couple were wed about 1748 in Guilford County. Their ten children, born from 1749 to 1762, were Petrus, John, Heinrich (Henry, Jr.), Margaret, Samuel, Catharine, Anna Maria, Elizabeth, Phillip, and Tobias. This is believed to be the birth order.

Intriguingly, Anna Maria Fronich’s name appears on some of the property transaction records mentioned above. Furthermore it is her maiden name -- or variations of it, usually the Americanized version, Mary Froney. These documents date from late in the marriage, and do not seem to involve property that came as part of her dowry, nor can it be explained by widowhood, because she pre-deceased Henry. Perhaps she took charge of her life more than the typical woman of her era.

Henry and Anna Maria finished their lives in Guilford County. She died in the early 1790s. Henry’s death can best be determined by letters of administration on the estate of Henry Whitezel, deceased, issued to Adam Starr, Esquire, in 1797. An estate sale was held and was reported to the February 1798 court.

The three Starr/Weitzel marriages occurred in the mid-1770s, during Henry’s prime as a landowner, miller, and man of his community. Adam and Margaret were married 22 April 1773. Jacob and Anna Maria were next, wed on 5 January 1776, followed less than three weeks later by John and Catharine on 25 January 1776. All three weddings took place in Guilford County. All three couples began having children immediately, and those offspring arrived at frequent intervals.

John and Catharine were said by Rachel Webb to have had twelve children, but Rachel Webb gave the names of only seven in her notes, and only three others have been identified from other sources. The missing two were probably lost at birth or while they were very young. The ten whose identities are known are: John Henry Starr, Mary Elizabeth Starr, John Barnhart Starr, followed by Sophia, Catherine, Naomi, Daniel, Margaret, Absalom, and finally Rachel. More than one source agrees that Rachel was the very youngest, born 23 June 1799.

Rachel was born before her family left Guilford County, but she was not more than ten years old by the time the household was reestablished in Preble County, OH. It was probably only after getting to Ohio that she became acquainted with Jacob Strader. Though both the Strader Family and the Starr and Weitzel families originated in Guilford County, they seem to have lived in slightly different areas and may not have directly known one another. In Preble County, however, they were in fairly close proximity. Jacob and Rachel probably met when they were nine or ten years old. As mentioned above, they wed at age eighteen.

Jacob and Rachel had ten children, the first born nine months after the wedding and the last coming when Rachel was at the extreme end of her fertile years. These ten, as they appear in the Jacob Strader family Bible, were Mary Ann Marie (“Polly”) Strader, (b. 20 June 1819), Susan Anna Strader (b. 29 July 1821), Elizabeth Strader (b. 25 Jan 1824), Anna Catherine Strader (b. 11 May 1826), Hannah Strader (b. 30 June 1829), Margaret Ellen Strader (b. 12 March 1831), Daniel Strader (b. 11 March 1835), John S. Strader, (b. 22 January 1838), Rhoda Carolyn Strader (b. 25 March 1842), and Jacob Strader, Jr. (b. 15 November 1844).

Hannah’s known ancestry tree therefore looks like so:

In Preble County, the families mentioned above -- the Straders, the Weitzels, the Starrs, etc. -- began to give in to the great American melting-pot phenomenon. The spouses chosen by the new generations of the family were often not of German and/or Pennylvania-Dutch extraction. However, this mingling continued to obey a familiar pattern. The weddings were not just unions of a given man and a given woman. They were examples of a whole community blending together. Whether the groom’s forebears had come from the fens of Ireland and the bride’s from the Rhine Valley farmlands of Germany, the two of them were most likely to have been neighbors for most or all of their lives. Their families probably all attended the same church. They were almost all dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. They were all pioneer, frontier-dwelling settlers. Often multiple individuals of one immediate family would chose to marry members of another immediate family, just as the three Starr boys had married the three Weitzel girls. It was with this Preble County phase that a mingling began between the Strader and the Frame clan. The Frames had arrived in Preble County in the mid-1810s from Kentucky. The first instance of a wedding occurred when acob Strader’s sister Polly married Silas Frame in 1821. Twenty-two years later John Strader (who was much younger than Jacob and Polly) would marry Rachel Frame. By then, the next generation had started to get in on the act, as will be described below. It is accurate to say that all these people were on a single journey. It was not individuals, but an entire community, that moved from the Palatinate to the Netherlands in the early 1700s. It was a mass migration from Europe to North Carolina in the mid-1700s, a common destiny driving the North Carolina-born generation into Ohio. And the journey was not done. By the late 1820s and early 1830s, the new generations of these interconnected families would head on Vermilion County, IL. Many would, in the 1840s and early 1850s, proceed north to the Pecatonica River region -- Stephenson County, IL, Green County, WI, and Lafayette County, WI.

Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr made the move to Vermilion County in 1822, joining her sister (Mary) Elizabeth and brother-in-law Henry Johnson and acquiring a homestead nearby amid a mini-colony of Starr relatives that included not only Lizzy and Henry, but additional siblings Margaret Marsh (now a widow) and Absalom Starr, and soon to be joined by Naomi (“Polly”) Jordon and husband John. Coming along with the latter in 1824 were Rachel’s elderly parents, John Starr and Catharine Weitzel. Twenty-four-year-old Esau Johnson, eldest son of Lizzy and Henry, served as their guide. The mini-colony may have been the very first settlement in all of what is now Vermilion County, given that Elizabeth and Henry first occupied their log cabin in 1815. The locale was known as Johnson’s Point in honor of Henry. That name ceased to be used after the 1830s, but various sources confirm the cluster of farms lay two miles west of where the village of Georgetown would eventually rise. All the children from Elizabeth to Daniel were born on the homestead at Johnson’s Point, and possibly John as well.

After fifteen years, the family gave in to the temptation to go north. In the wake of the Black Hawk Wars of the early 1830s, northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin were free of Indian aggression and there were plentiful opportunities to homestead farmland or dig for lead in the mines of Lafayette County. Jacob and Rachel again journeyed in the wake of Elizabeth and Henry Johnson, proceeding in a large convoy of oxen-drawn wagons and livestock in the company of various relatives and neighbors. Rachel Webb’s history provides us with elderly John Starr’s comment to his son-in-law as they were setting out: “Jake, if I thought you could get coffee in the new country, I’d go with you.”

(It is useful to compare the two images of Rachel Starr Strader you see in this section. The large one is better quality, scanned from an original tintype in the possession of great great great grandson Dave Smeds, but the exposure was not the best it could have been. The contrast is so high that the black lace bonnet Rachel was wearing looks more like a black wig. The details of the bonnet are more apparent in the image at right. Unfortunately the latter had to be scanned from a snapshot taken in the early 1970s by Leah Hastings Schumacher of a framed print hanging on the wall of a now-unidentified relative’s home and not from an original -- note the glare from the flashbulb on the glass. With luck, the original will someday be located and a better scan made.)

Jacob and Rachel, along with many of the other members of their travelling party, settled at first in Stephenson County at Waddams Grove. (In the 1884 History of Green County, Wisconsin, the Straders were said to have first come to the place known as Richland Timber, but this is unfortunately no longer a useful place reference, as the term has fallen completely out of use, and seems to have applied to a long stretch of woodland, rather than an individual settlement.) Jacob and Rachel’s immediate neighbors there included Lizzy and Henry Johnson, and two of Rachel’s double first cousin Adam Starr’s grown sons, Henry Starr and Levi Starr. The latter were brothers-in-law of Esau Johnson, Esau having married his double second cousin Saloma (“Sally”) Starr.

In about 1845, not long after the birth of Jacob, Jr., the family established a new farm over the border in Green County, WI in Jordan Township. Among the bachelors frequenting Stephenson and Green Counties in the late 1840s was Nathaniel Martin, who would soon take notice of Hannah, or vice versa. (For more on that, proceed to Hannah’s biography page. Click here to go straight there.)

Because Jacob and Rachel and their children established themselves in Wisconsin as a unit, Hannah’s kin were around her as an adult to a greater degree than her husband’s kin were around him. Several of Nathaniel’s siblings never came west from Virginia at all, and his parents only arrived when they were elderly. By contrast, all of Hannah’s siblings spent years in or near Green County. Some finished their lives there. Parents Jacob and Rachel passed away in Green County as well, beginning with Jacob 28 February 1865. Jacob was buried in Kelly Cemetery (sometimes called Kelly/Franklin Cemetery) in Cadiz Township. Rachel thereafter lived with one or another of her children. The 1870 census shows her in the household of son John and his young family on his farm in Clarno Township. In 1880, she is with widowed daughter Rhoda and Rhoda’s two daughters in Cadiz Township a bit north of Martintown. Her nephew Esau Johnson wrote of visiting her there in May, 1880 -- as he put it, it was the first time he had seen his aunt (who was only one year older than Esau) in 53 years. Esau had left Vermilion County for good in 1827. Rachel survived her husband by more than two dozen years, finally passing away in Martintown 8 March 1889 at just under ninety years of age. Her remains were also laid to rest at Kelly Cemetery. Jacob and Rachel share a grave and a tombstone. (The gravemarker is shown at left. Photo taken by Robert Carpenter 1993. Note that this gravemarker is relatively new. The original marker is nearby. It is not in good condition and some descendant -- probably Florence Mauermann Behrens -- must have been motivated to commission a replacement that would remain legible into the 21st Century and beyond.)

While it is not possible to describe the entire line of descent of Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr with the sort of attention that has been devoted to Hannah’s family, what you see below is hopefully a good start. Hannah survived until 1919 so she would have been aware of much of the information, and it feels right to have it here. Please be aware that this section is a work-in-progress. From 2005 to the end of 2014, each of Hannah’s siblings only received a paragraph or two of coverage. Now there is more, with the added goal of saying at least something about each of her nieces and nephews. Eventually this material will be more than just a section on the page about her ancestry, and will have its own dedicated page. However, that will take some time to complete. As of now (March, 2016), you will not see the expanded coverage about the children of Hannah’s sisters Elizabeth, Anna Catherine, and Margaret. That will come later. Meanwhile it didn’t seem right to hold the rest back.

Mary Ann Marie “Polly” Strader was perhaps the sibling who had the most impact on Hannah’s life. In a way this is surprising because Polly was a full ten years older than Hannah and was gone from the bevy of the family home by the time Hannah was seven to eight years old. The two siblings did not get the chance to spend much time together as adults until the mid-1850s when Polly settled on a farm less than ten miles from Martintown. After that, though, Polly and/or her family members maintained regular and extended contact. A number of Polly’s children and grandchildren would go on to have a week-by-week presence in Hannah’s life. Of all the lines that spring from Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr, it is Polly’s clan that today is represented in the greatest proportion in Green County, WI or spots nearby -- and this was the case to an even greater degree during Hannah’s lifetime. (By contrast, Hannah probably never again laid eyes on her sister Susanna or any member of Susanna’s family from 1853 onward.) Polly was also one of the longest-lived of the Strader/Starr offspring and therefore Hannah was able to spend time with her oldest sister right up into the 20th Century, something true of only two other siblings, both much younger than Hannah.

Frustratingly, even though Polly and her descendants were so well known to Hannah herself, a number of questions have developed in the past hundred years about Polly and her story. One uncertainly is to what degree Polly embraced her nickname. She is called Polly in old family notes and is described as Polly in the probate file paperwork created in 1852 and 1853 during the interval when her late first husband’s estate was being settled. But she appears in virtually all other documents under an array of other names including Mary, Mary Ann, Anna, and Marie. We will continue to call her Polly here, but this is not to be taken as a declaration of her “true” identity.

One of the most authoritative sources about Polly in recent years was her great-granddaughter Florence Mauermann Behrens (1910-2000). Florence, a former schoolteacher, became a dedicated historian and family researcher. She served the town of Brodhead, Green County, WI as chair of the mayor’s historical preservation committee and she oversaw the efforts of the Brodhead library history room even in the 1990s when she was quite elderly. This means Florence was skilled as a genealogist and succeeded in finding out facts about Polly that eluded others. Moreoever, Florence had access to Polly’s own personal papers, which at the time Florence studied them were owned by her aunt, Blanch Sophia Whitehead Roderick, who had them from her mother Rhoda Cathryn Frame Whitehead. Unfortunately, even Florence did not have all the answers about Polly and her life. And even more unfortunate, Florence did not survive long enough to serve as a direct consultant when this website began to be assembled in 2005. Compounding this is the loss decades ago of most of the original trove, including Jacob and Rachel’s Bible, which Blanch’s grandchildren did not preserve.

Polly was already in her late teens by the time of the big family migration from Vermilion County to Stephenson County. She came along on the trip, but in fact she may not have done so as a daughter of Jacob and Rachel, but as a wife of William Swearingen. The latter may even have been one of the influences that caused Jacob and Rachel to move. Jacob and Rachel knew they could depend once again on the anchoring presence of Elizabeth and Henry Johnson, but their new son-in-law William had already visited Stephenson County. William, a son of Daniel Swearingen and Lydia Peters born to that couple in Kentucky 30 September 1816, was a river trader. During the early to mid-1830s as a teenager and young man, he had made a number of runs between the more settled parts of southeastern Illinois and the newly-opened-for-settlement lands in northwestern Illinois and southern Wisconsin Territory. (The latter did not actually exist in the jurisdictional sense when William began these journeys; it was part of Michigan Territory through 1836.) Assuming William recommended the Pecatonica River region as a fresh place for his new parents-in-law to live, that may have been the final endorsement Jacob and Rachel needed in order to make up their minds.

Florence Behrens’s notes say Polly and William were wed 24 September 1837 in Stephenson County. This date and place seem credible, but there is a statistical conflict that must be taken into account. Florence lists the couple’s first child as Susannah Swearingen, born 7 February 1837, died 12 March 1844 in Vermilion County. This birthdate is before the wedding date. Perhaps the wedding actually took place 24 September 1836, a date which would imply the ceremony occurred in Vermilion County, not in Stephenson. Perhaps the birthdate was actually 7 February 1838. Either of those changes would put the wedding before the birth. Four and a half months prior, actually. This would have meant Polly was pregnant as a bride. This is believable. What is not as credible is the idea that Susannah was born out of wedlock. The Straders were religious enough that this would not have been an acceptable scenario and it is not likely things happened that way. There are two other possibilities: 1) William may have been a recent widower when he married Polly, with Susannah being the product of a brief marriage to a woman who died in childbirth. However, this theory has no evidence to support it. 2) Susannah may not have existed. Florence may have found records of a Susannah Swearingen with that birthdate and death date in cemetery records of Fischer Graveyard in Covington, Vermilion County, IL and decided she must have been Polly and William’s daughter. It is possible Polly and William only had five children. Florence is pretty much the only source for the extra pair. The five whose existence is unquestioned consist of Mary Jane, born in 1838 or 1839, Lydia Elizabeth, born 13 December 1842, Rachael, born 25 December 1844, Sarah Jane, born about 1846, and William Henry Swearingen (possibly a Junior), born 23 June 1848. Florence included Susannah and one other child who died before reaching adulthood. She names that last child as Isaac, born about 1848, and Florence says he died at the age of twelve or thirteen of an intestinal complaint caused by “green apples.” While traces of Susannah can be found -- an example being the 1840 census which shows the William Swearingen household contained two little girls who would correspond to Susannah and Mary Jane -- there is no confirmation Isaac ever existed. He is not in the household in the 1850 census, for example.

The children, whether there were five or seven, were not all born in the same home. William’s occupation must have required him to keep seeking new opportunities. Mary Jane was born somewhere in Wisconsin. In 1840, as shown by the census, the family home was in Stephenson County near the Strader homestead. Once the children were more numerous and more mobile, though, a steadier arrangement would have become vital, and it would appear that Polly and William chose Vermilion County as their base of operations -- or at least, they were there more often than anywhere else. They were enumerated there in the 1850 census. Polly is unique among the children of Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr in coming back to the family’s former stomping grounds. Her parents and siblings never resided there after the 1836-37 exodus.

William Swearingen died 8 June 1852 in Vermilion County. Now a single mother, Polly did the natural thing and sought the company and support of her parents in Green County. This brought her back into the same social circle as her siblings. Her need for another husband and breadwinner was obvious and she did not remain a widow long. However, her second marriage was not successful. Her niece Juliette Martin Savage wrote in 1947 that Polly “only lived with her second husband a short time.” Florence Behrens notes this marriage was to a man named Starr or Blair, but apparently Florence was unable to learn anything more about the fellow than these two possible surnames. Both names are intriguing and are cause to wonder if Florence got her facts right. The name Starr suggests Polly married a Starr cousin. Certainly there a great many Starr cousins in the area who might have been the source of such a groom. The name Blair suggests she may have wed an uncle of Adelaide Blair, the eventual bride of Polly’s brother John Starr Strader. There is a possible date and place for this wedding -- 24 November 1853 in Cadiz Township (probably in Martintown). In some family notes this date and place is used in association with William Swearingen’s death, but the 1852/Vermilion County stats seem to be accurate, meaning the 24 November 1853 date must have some other reason to have been jotted down. The timing and place sound right for Polly’s second set of nuptials. All that can be said for sure about the second marriage is that it was brief. It seems likely that it ended with an annulment rather than a divorce.

Polly went on to marry Silas Frame 31 October 1855 in Argyle Township, Lafayette County, WI. When she had been born back in 1819 in Preble County, Silas had been an eleven-month-old baby on a neighboring farm, so it could be said their connection “went way back.” The union was one of the six Strader/Frame marriages referred to at the top of this page, and part of a trio involving three of Hannah’s sisters and a set of three Frame brothers. The marriage of Polly and Silas is not to be confused with one that occurred a generation earlier when Silas Frame, an uncle of the three Frame brothers, became the husband of Jacob Strader’s sister Polly Strader. Yes, that means that for two generations in a row, a Silas Frame married a Polly Strader! Sorting out which is which is a genealogical challenge unless one pays attention to the dates and places. The older Silas Frame/Polly Strader pair lived out their lives in Preble County, OH. The younger pair established themselves as newlyweds on a farm in Clarno Township, Green County, WI and stayed put. Silas in fact died on that farm in 1894, after which Polly spent most of her final years there.

Though Polly came to her marriage to Silas at over thirty-five years of age, she had an additional four children. They were Jacob Strader, born in 1856, Rhoda Cathryn, born 10 January 1858, Ellen, born in the spring of 1860, and Emma Frame, born 22 November 1861. That means Polly was the mother of at least nine, and possibly eleven, biological children. Impressive as that is, it is only a fraction of the mothering she did. She was the foster mother of several of her grandchildren. Her daughter Mary Jane died in the early 1870s. Within a dozen years four more such tragedies would follow. Lydia, Sarah, and William Swearingen would perish in their thirties, and Jacob Frame in his twenties. In her 1947 letter, Juliette Savage stated that all of these first cousins of hers died of tuberculosis. All these five except Jacob produced children before they expired. Polly and Silas came to the rescue time and time again. They accepted full custody of grandsons Silas Edward Trickle and Ashford Lewis Trickle. Several other grandchildren spent substantial periods in their home until their surviving parents had remarried and were able to handle the responsibility.

Polly was widowed again by the death of Silas in 1894. She stayed put in her home for a few years, then spent the last fragment of her life residing with her daughter Rhoda and son-in-law Charles E. Whitehead on their Clarno Township farm, and perished there at ten o’clock in the morning of 27 June 1905 about four weeks after a severe collapse of health brought on by old age. She was eighty-six years old. Of her siblings, only Hannah would surpass that mark. She was buried with Silas in Kelly/Franklin Cemetery. (Gravemarker shown above left.)

Polly’s offspring were, as a group, probably more a part of Hannah’s life than any other set of nieces and nephews. Here is a summary of each of their lives (not counting Susannah and Isaac Swearingen, in view of the fact that they may not have existed):

Mary Jane Swearingen married Loren Brewster Devoe 4 April 1861 in Clarno Township. They became parents of three children -- William Carlos, Charles Henry, and Cordella (aka Della) -- in the 1860s. In the early 1870s the couple moved to a farm in Cadiz Township in the vicinity of Martintown, where Mary Jane soon passed away, becoming the first of Polly’s children to be taken by tuberculosis. Loren lingered in and/or near Martintown for many years to come, marrying a second and then a third wife and siring a son with each. Hannah was particularly well acquainted with her grand nephew Charles Henry Devoe, who made Martintown his base for nearly the whole of the span during which he and his wife Fannie Long raised their eleven children. (And when they weren’t based in Martintown, they were only a few miles away in Browntown). The Swearingen-Devoe branch has tended to remain in Wisconsin more than other parts of the Strader/Starr clan, many of the others having abandoned the area quite early on. Even today Charles’s great-grandson Duane Devoe lives only a dozen miles from Martintown. (Duane is one of the modern-day relatives who has contibuted information for this website.) Mary Jane’s son William Carlos Devoe was an exception, leaving for Iowa as a young man and then spending his final decades in Missouri. Loren Brewster Devoe survived until 1916, passing away in Waterloo, IA, having spent his final few years with his youngest son (by third wife Ariel Howe) George Loren Devoe.

Lydia Swearingen married Robert Edward Trickle, Jr. (aka Trickel). The couple spent their marriage farming in Green County. Lydia, too, would die of TB, but she did not succumb until the latter part of the 1870s when she was almost forty years old, so hers was a very substantial brood -- much more so than her siblings and half-siblings. She gave birth to ten known children, having had an early start on marriage, becoming a wife in 1859 as a teenager. (Shown at right is Lydia and Robert in what must be their wedding portrait -- and it is literally a portrait, as in an artist’s rendering and not a photograph. In 1859 Green County, they would have found it easier to have the image created by an artist than by a photographer.) Two of her elder sons, William and Perry, married nieces of Loren Devoe. Another of Loren’s nieces married into the Lockman family of Martintown. The Trickel/Devoe/Lockman clan has been robustly researched by modern-day descendants including Duane Devoe and as a consequence much of the line of Polly Strader Swearingen Frame is unusually well defined in recent genealogies. Once Lydia passed away, Robert found it impossible to care for all of such a large group of children. He placed at least four of the younger kids into foster situations. The group includes the two youngest boys, Silas Edward Trickle and Ashford Lewis Trickle, whose foster parents were none other than their grandparents Polly and Silas. The youngest child of all, Nellie May, was taken in by E.C. and Eliza Gillett, Clarno Township neighbors who were otherwise childless, and they raised Nellie to adulthood in the village of Monroe. Nellie became known as a Gillett but was kept aware of her birth heritage. (She probably was a regular visitor at her grandparents’ farm during family get-togethers.) Meanwhile Robert moved as a widower to Delta County, CO accompanied by or soon joined by sons John, Perry, Andrew Jackson (Jack), and William. Some did not go quite as far, ending up instead in Dodge City, Ford County, KS. Younger members of the brood found the Colorado and Kansas options less compelling, perhaps feeling (understandably so) that they had been left behind. Ashford, after coming of age back in Wisconsin, chose to settle in Iowa instead. Nellie spent a few decades in Colorado, but finished her life in California.

Rachael Swearingen married Carlos J. Wells in late 1861. He was a son of Warner Wells, part of a clan that had come out of Otsego County, NY and become early-arriving settlers of Oneco Township, Stephenson County. This same Wells clan ties into the Starr clan in multiple ways. For example, Carlos’s brother Orson Wells (yes, no kidding -- but bear in mind the film-legend actor-director spelled his last name Welles with an extra “e”) married Martha Ellen Starr. Carlos’s first cousin Thomas Jefferson Wells married Susan Emaline Starr. Both Martha and Susan were daughters of Solomon Starr, one of Esau Johnson’s brothers-in-law. As newlyweds, Rachael and Carlos settled down on a farm in Rock Grove Township, Stephenson County, IL, and that was where they remained for good. They produced four children -- William Warner, John E., Cora Ellen, and Lura Ann Wells -- at the sensible pace of about one child every five years. They also took in Olive Wolf, daughter of Rachael’s late half-sister Emma Frame, when Olive was a teenager (perhaps simply to have a servant, as she is described in the 1900 census, or perhaps to let the girl get out of her stepmother’s house). Carlos was apparently popular within the clan. A number of Rachael’s nephews and grand-nephews were named Carlos (usually as a middle name) and he seems to have been the source. Carlos died in 1917. Rachael lingered on the farm, which was in the hands of daughter Cora and son-in-law David Rockey. She reached eighty years of age, making her the only one of Polly’s kids to come close to matching the number of years Polly herself survived. By the time of her death Rachael had been a fixture of Stephenson County for over sixty years. Her clan would carry on that connection and even today descendants inhabit the area. As for her kids, John and Cora remained within the county for life. William Warner Wells and family eventually relocated to DeKalb County, but in the grand scheme of things this was not a big shift. He and his household ended up only thirty miles southeast of the old farm in easy visiting distance. The only one who truly left was Lura Ann Wells, who with her husband Owen Reed moved to South Dakota in the early 1900s. Her three Reed grandchildren were the only ones Rachael did not get the chance to see on a regular basis. However, as it happened Rachael was visiting Lura Ann and Owen on their farm in Brown County when she passed away 17 January 1925.

Sarah Jane Swearingen took a page from her mother’s book and went through a marriage that was over so quickly it is difficult nowadays to confirm it happened. She wed neighbor Thomas Hackworth 12 March 1865 in Clarno Township. Divorce or annulment must have followed because both Sarah and Thomas appear in the 1870 census married to other people. In Sarah’s case, her second spouse was Stephen Decatur Black. (Called Dick Black in Juliette Savage’s 1947 letter -- apparently he was nicknamed “Deck” and inevitably some people started calling him Dick instead. Because of this nickname, a few pre-internet genealogies identified him as Richard Black.) Sarah and Stephen were wed 19 September 1868 in Green County, WI. Precisely seven weeks later, Sarah’s younger brother William H. Swearingen married Stephen’s younger sister Hulda D. Black. Stephen and Hulda were children of David W. Black and Nancy Cable.

As newlyweds, Sarah and Stephen moved in with his parents in rural Cadiz Township near Martintown. David and Nancy Black had founded their farm in the 1860s after the family had come out west from Tuscawaras County, OH. Stephen was the eldest son (by quite a margin) and was his father’s right-hand man in caring for the land, which he continued to do throughout the time Sarah was his wife. The couple produced three children: Nancy Anna, Rachel Weltha, and Ernest Decatur Black, the first born in 1869 and the last in 1879. It was while Ernest was an infant that Sarah’s case of tuberculosis manifested in full force. At that point, in order to lessen the chance that members of her household would contract the disease from her, she retreated to the sanctuary of her mother and stepfather’s farm in Clarno Township, bringing only young Ernest along and leaving her husband to look after the girls at home. Sarah passed away in the spring of 1880. Stephen went on to finish raising the kids back in Cadiz Township before he died in 1898. Because of the proximity, Hannah got to know her niece’s offspring quite well. Nancy -- better known by her middle name and as Annie, married Hannah’s nephew David Francis Eveland, which among other things means the genealogical line springing from them is doubly descended from Rachel Starr and Jacob Strader. Annie and Dave established themselves in the early 1890s on a farm in Wiota Township, Lafayette County, WI just outside Green County, remaining for good. Rachel Weltha Black married Milton Whitehead of the same clan as her aunt Rhoda Frame’s husband Charles Whitehead; they lived out their entire lives within Green County. Ernest Decatur Black moved away to Minnesota just after the Turn of the Century. He and wife Naomi Roberts did not produce offspring.

William Henry Swearingen and Hulda Black spent the earliest years of their union farming in Clarno Township, staying more-or-less within the sphere of Polly and Silas Frame. First child Anna was born in Clarno Township. In the early 1870s the couple spent a short sojourn in Hardin County, IA. Second child William Carlos was born there. By the middle of the decade (and possibly sooner) William and Hulda decided the Martintown area appealed to them and they became based in Cadiz Township. The family lingered about twenty-five years, though William did not live to see the end of that phase because he succumbed to tuberculosis 7 November 1883 at the age of only thirty-five. By then the family had expanded to six, the four younger ones consisting of Stephen, Elsie May, Cora Ellen, and Lee Henry (sometimes Henry Lee) Swearingen. Hulda went on to marry Orville Hubbard in 1891. The ties to Martintown weakened with the late 1890s deaths of Hulda’s parents and her brother Stephen. Older son William Carlos Swearingen had just become established in Mazomanie, Dane County, WI, so Hulda and Orville -- who was eighteen years Hulda’s senior and was ready to retire -- also moved to Mazomanie. The two would finish their lives there, Orville dying in 1927 and Hulda in 1933. Two of her other children, Elsie and Lee, also put down roots in Mazomanie. Descendants can be found in Mazomanie to this day.

Jacob Strader Frame is not to be confused with his double first cousin of precisely the same name, born the same year -- 1856 -- and in almost the same place. While his namesake would go on to settle in Nebraska and then in California, this Jacob Strader Frame by contrast accompanied his brother-in-law Robert Trickle to Delta County, CO in 1880. He was by then in his mid-twenties and as it happened, had only half a dozen years yet to live. Jacob is not known to have left any descendants. One family note states he married a woman named Sarah Curtis, but no corroboration of this has turned up. If this detail has any truth to it, the union was brief, perhaps leaving him a young widower. Generally speaking very little is known about him whatsoever. He is known to have carved pieces of wood and assembled them to make picture frames that are still in the possession of one of his sister Rhoda’s great-granddaughters -- though the artwork currently in those frames is from the Twentieth Century and no one can say what images Jacob created the frames for. These artistic endeavors, along with a copy of the telegram about his death preserved in the same cache of memorabilia preserved by Rhoda and her descendants, are among the only surviving physical items left that commemorate his existence in any way other than as a name on genealogical lists. Said telegram was written by Charles Bray, the coroner of Las Animas, CO. It reveals that Jacob drowned in or near Las Animas on Sunday, 22 August 1886. Apparently his companions knew only that he was J.S. Frame from Monroe, WI. On the 24th, Bray sent his telegram to the postmaster of Monroe asking if any relatives might still live in that vicinity, and if they existed, what they might want done with the cadaver. Soon the message was relayed to Silas and Polly. As far as can be determined, the burial took place in Las Animas.

Rhoda Cathryn Frame was the child upon whom Polly came to lean at the end of her life. In some ways this was inevitable. With the exception of Rachael Swearingen Wells, no other child of Polly survived past the mid-1880s. Rhoda was born in 1858 and spent her whole upbringing on the Clarno Township farm. In 1877, she wed Charles Edward Whitehead. The Whiteheads as a whole share a number of other genealogical ties to the Martin/Strader clan, but this union was the most direct example of the connection. The pair settled as newlyweds on a Clarno Township farm not too far from Polly and Silas’s property, though far enough away to provide a bit of a cushion between them. This farm was to be their home for all of Rhoda’s remaining forty-six years of life, after which Charles lingered there until retiring in his mid-seventies (in 1929 or 1930). Rhoda and Charles produced just three children, a son who died either at birth or in infancy, and two daughters, Blanch and Naoma, the latter better known as Oma. Rhoda and Charles took in elderly Polly at about the turn of the century, within half a dozen years after the death of Silas Frame. The old widow would remain until death. In many ways, it is accurate to describe Rhoda as a chip off the old block. Her temperament was much like her mother, and in her turn she became a similar sort of matriarchal figure. She was strong in domestic skills in the fashion of the females of the Starr-Strader-Frame clan, which is to say, she was competent, inventive, versatile, and well-organized. She maintained a neat house and a larder full of items she herself had grown, harvested, and canned. She had profound ability as a seamstress. She was a dependable presence within her community as well, including serving as a midwife on a number of occasions. Perhaps the biggest difference between mother and daughter was the sheer number of children, grandchildren, and fosterlings Polly took under her wing. Rhoda by contrast was able to concentrate her nurturance of the younger generation upon a far smaller number, mostly just her two daughters. Her main episode as a foster mother was a period of a few years in the early 1880s when she and Charles took in her adolescent first cousin Frank Eveland, whose mother had passed away. (For more on that, see the Margaret Ellen Strader section below.) Health was an important factor in Rhoda's ability to be this sort of person. She was one of the lucky ones to avoid tuberculosis and whatever other misfortunes claimed so many of her generation. Unfortunately, her luck ran out, depriving her of the sort of lifespan Polly had enjoyed. While visiting her daughter Blanch 12 November 1923, Rhoda stepped off a curb in Brodhead, WI. Her eight-year-old grandson, Ralph Roderick, spotted an on-coming automobile in time to leap back out of the way, but Rhoda was struck. She died almost instantly.

Ellen Frame appears in the 1860 census at the age of two months, proof that her birth was in March or April of 1860. Florence Behrens’s notes say Ellen died in infancy.

Emma Frame was Polly’s last biological (as opposed to fostered) child, born 22 November 1861 in Clarno Township. She probably did not feel as though she was the youngest, though, given how many nephews and nieces shared the home during her childhood. In late 1882, Emma married Charles E. Wolf, son of Michael Wolf and Hester Cable. Both the Wolf clan and the Cable clan be linked to the Martin-Strader clan in multiple ways, the most clear-cut example being the 1908 wedding of Charles Wolf’s nephew Tecumseh Edgar Claus to Hannah’s granddaughter Blanche Bucher. Emma and Charles do not appear to have established their own home as newlyweds. Instead they boarded with Polly and Silas. Charles helped his elderly stepfather-in-law keep up the farm. Emma may in fact have never known any other home than the one she was born into, because she died 21 December 1886 at only twenty-five years old. She left behind two little girls, Olive Mary Wolf and Esther Verda Wolf. Alas, this set the stage for one of the more heart-wrenching developments of the family saga, because the two girls went on to experience unhappy childhoods and this seems to have set the stage for dysfunctional behavior to manifest through the subsequent generations -- manifesting in such way as drug addiction, teenage pregnancies, bitter divorces, loss of child custody, and even murder.

Polly and Silas naturally were there to offer support when young Olive and Esther were first left motherless, but the situation was not secure. Both girls were very young -- so young they would have no memory of their birth mother in later life. By contrast, Polly and Silas were older than when their other grandchildren had been left in similar straits. Charles Wolf tried to deal with the problem by marrying again. His new wife was Lora Earlywine, who he married in late 1891, and with whom he established a home in Rock Run Township, Stephenson County -- his family’s stomping grounds. This took Emma and Esther out from under the wing of their doting grandmother and put them in the hands of a stepmother who favored her own offspring, the four boys she gave birth to over the course of the 1890s. And then Lora had the ill grace to die in 1901, leaving Emma and Esther without a mother yet again, and just at a point in life when a teenaged girl should have a mother -- even an indifferent stepmother -- looking out for her. Esther almost immediately married Henry Franklin Lawson. The young couple settled in Freeport, remaining for good. They had five children who grew to adulthood, along with a stillborn daughter and another daughter who survived only three days. To this day the Lawson clan is well represented in Freeport and its vicinity. Esther and Frank (as he was known) succeeded in having a long-term marriage and her kids did not experience the same sort of rootlessness she’d had to endure. Nevertheless, there are some painful tales that could be told of the lives of some of her descendants. It is among them that the above-mentioned problems have risen to the surface. The heartache has occurred too many times to say it’s coincidence. It is sure to be the emotional and psychological legacy of the lack of nurturing Olive and Esther must have experienced. As for Olive, after taking shelter in her teen years with her aunt Rachael Wells, she was based for a while in the city of Belvidere and then in Rockford. She wed three times, to Fred Franklin Flannery, then briefly to Leslie Orvis Markle, and then for a much longer stretch to William John Rambow, Jr. Olive herself did not have offspring. She did have Rambow stepchildren, but they were all grown by the time she became Mrs. Rambow in 1933. Esther died in 1946, and Olive in 1963.

Charles E. Wolf spent the latter portion of his life in Rock Run Township, passing away 10 October 1933. He spelled his last name Wolfe during the final quarter century of his life. His four sons all adopted that spelling and all male-line surviving descendants use it today.

Susan Anna Strader was born 29 July 1821 and was the only child other than Polly to be born in Preble County. She was still an infant when the family moved to Vermilion County. She was almost old enough at the time of the subsequent migration to Stephenson County to have become a wife. Had that development taken place at that point, she might not have come along on the migration at all, and her life story would be quite different than it is. Instead she remained with her parents and siblings well into her twenties. She finally wed when she was about twenty-six years old. That means she was the “old maid” of the family, given that her sisters were between sixteen and twenty-three years old at the time they first became wives.

Susan will be called Susanna for the rest of this essay. That was apparently a nickname, meaning of course that it is equally valid to spell it Susannah with an “h” on the end. Indeed, she is recorded as Susanna in the 1850, 1860, and 1870 censuses, and is Susannah in cemetery/death records. However, the name is Susan Anna Strader in the formal genealogical lists of the Strader-Starr family that originate with more than one of her nieces, and it is Susan in a small number of other independent sources, so Susan Anna Strader was probably her real name, even though she had a younger sister who had “Anna” as one of her names.

Susanna’s husband was Peter Pence Hughes, son of David Hughes and Sarah Margaret “Peggy” Pence. He was even more of a pioneer to southeastern Wisconsin than was Susanna. Born in Licking County, OH in about 1817, his father had died in approximately 1823 soon after a move to Illinois. His mother Peggy went on to wed Samuel Asher Townsend, who was turning forty at about that time and already had eight children from his first marriage and a couple more from a brief second marriage. Samuel was among the very first men to come to the lead-mining region, travelling there in 1827 with a couple of his elder sons and settling at first at Gratiot’s Grove -- meaning he surely rubbed shoulders with Esau Johnson and other early-arriving members of the Starr clan. In 1828, the women and smaller children of the Townsend family joined Samuel. That group included Peggy and of course Peter, who was still only about eleven years old. During the next half a dozen years, as Peter proceeded through his teens, the family seems to have lived variously at Gratiot’s Grove, Shullsburg, Mineral Point, and Dodgeville, i.e. within what is now Lafayette County and Iowa County, WI.

In the 1830s, Samuel and Peggy became based in Jo Daviess County, IL, but Peter does not appear to have gone along -- nor for that matter do any of the Hughes kids seem to have done so. Peter instead was part of the household of his older sister Susan and brother-in-law Joshua Tatman Bailey. The latter were wed at Mineral Point in early 1833. As far as can be determined, the Baileys spent the rest of the 1830s and much of the 1840s residing in Iowa County, probably near Dodgeville. By cleaving so closely to his sister and her family, Peter might be regarded as the male equivalent of an old maid. He was in his early thirties when he managed to venture south into Green County and lingered in Jordan Township long enough to become acquainted with Susanna -- or perhaps Susanna, who was old enough to roam in search of employment, ventured up to Iowa County and met Peter there. The pair found themselves to be suitable, and became spouses in approximately 1847. Unfortunately their precise wedding date and place has not turned up in any source.

In 1848, Susanna gave birth to her first child, Elias Hughes. By the spring of 1849, she was pregnant again. This would lead to the birth of son Peter Pence Hughes, Jr. That, however, was a birth that the elder Peter may not have been on-hand to witness. In 1849 and 1850, huge numbers of young men poured out of Wisconsin in order to take part in the Gold Rush in California. Peter was among them. Whether he departed in 1849 or in early 1850 has yet to be determined. It is however extremely likely he went with his brother-in-law Joshua Bailey. The latter’s journey is well-documented and definitely occurred in 1849. Joshua brought along his young sons Joel and Joseph. They reached Placerville, CA 10 September 1849. Joshua and the boys then remained in Placerville for more than a year before proceeding in late 1850 to White Rock Springs in Sacramento County, then half a year later up to Siskiyou County, and finally voyaging back by way of Panama to arrive back in Wisconsin by early 1853. Because Joshua had the youngsters to consider, he lodged with them in a hotel in Placerville, probably fearing the conditions in the mining camps would be too rough for his sons. Peter on the other hand was unencumbered. He apparently headed out into the hills, making his independent attempt to best utilize his time out West. Just where he went is unclear, in part because he is not recorded in the 1850 census. The Baileys do appear in that source occupying their quarters at the hotel, but Peter is not shown with them. He may have been in a mining camp that no census enumerator managed to reach. Or he may have already been in-transit back to Wisconsin. The 1850 census was collected late in quite a few areas of the United States. The data about the Baileys and the other denizens of Placerville was collected on the 25th of October, 1850. Peter is known to have returned to Wisconsin on a separate journey from his brother-in-law and departed at least a year prior. Peter’s presence in Wisconsin by the autumn of 1851 is evident from the fact that he and Susanna conceived their third child, Rachel Anna Hughes, that season. It stands to reason he may no longer have been in California as of late October, 1850.

While her husband was absent, Susanna took shelter with her parents in Jordan Township. She is enumerated there in the 1850 census along with her young sons. Also there at that time was her sister Margaret with her baby son Millard Fillmore Eveland -- because Margaret’s husband James Henry Eveland was another man who had caught gold fever. Enumerated on the same page is the household of Peter Hughes’s younger brother William Hughes, so it was not quite an “all Strader” scene.

Joshua Bailey came back full of enthusiasm over the potential for a permanent life in California. His notion was treated seriously. Joshua not only convinced his wife they should move their immediate family out, but persuaded a number of others to be part of the grand enterprise, Peter and Susanna among them. Oh, to have been a fly on the wall as he made his case. Joshua was talking about a move of 2400 miles, a journey through territory most of which was still in the control of native tribes, to a spot that had not even been part of the nation five years earlier. And everyone who went would be leaving behind nearly everyone they had ever known. It must have been quite a sales pitch.

Members of the Bailey family happen to have been profiled in at least two books written in the late 19th Century concerning the pioneer era of the Sacramento Valley. Because many of those family members were still alive at the time, the writers were able to conduct interviews and obtain information about them first-hand, and we today are in the lucky position of having that material to shine a light on details about Susanna and Peter’s crossing of the continent. The prime source is An Illustrated History of Sacramento County, California by the Honorable Win J. Davis, published in 1890 by the Lewis Publishing Company. Here is an excerpt from the section on Joshua Tatman Bailey that describes the 1853 journey: “His [Joshua’s] wife and two daughters, and Mrs. Bailey’s sister-in-law, Susan Hughes, came with a party of twenty-two men, bringing with them some large heavy stock, such as horses, oxen, mules, and cattle, also seven wagons to hold provisions; as soon as one wagon was emptied they discarded it. They were seven months in coming across, having to stop in order to allow their cattle to feed by the way.” Instead of “twenty-two men” the author may have meant, “twenty-two others” because the party was composed not just of the four women and a group of men, but several small children as well. Elias Hughes was only five years old, Peter P. Hughes, Jr. was only three. Rachel Hughes was a baby. Several of the Baileys were quite young, including little Sarah Eleanor “Nellie” Bailey, age four, who was finally getting the opportunity to become acquainted with her father, whose initial trip west had taken him away from her either while she was still in the womb, or at most only a couple of months old.

Susanna, her husband’s two nieces (Belle Bailey and Rachel Ann Bailey, both in their late teens at the time of the journey), and her sister-in-law Susan were singled out in the text because so very few women (of good reputation) had yet made their way to the Mother Lode region. The travellers were descending upon a part of California that had not been developed by the Spanish or Mexican colonialists. In terms of instilling a European-American-based way of life to the locale, Susanna was a true pioneer. This is not necessarily a label that applied to the miners who preceded her. Many of those men were opportunists with no plan to remain once they completed their attempts at fortune-hunting. They didn’t bring culture as much as they brought greed. Susanna on the other hand came with her family, the livestock, the household furnishings, and most important, the intention to stay and transform the setting into a lasting home. Susanna had already been an early-on-the-scene pioneer three times -- first as an infant arriving in Vermilion County, second as a teenager proceeding to Stephenson County, and third as an unmarried young woman coming to Jordan Township. This fourth time was character-definitive. She wasn’t just tagging along. Her role was active. If she’d put her foot down, she and Peter would have stayed in Wisconsin. Susanna’s choice to head west into the unknown showed her genuine nature. The action epitomized the sort of trailblazing that members of the Starr clan had exhibited so often in the preceding hundred years. Susanna is unique in that way among the children of Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr. Her siblings all spent the majority of their lives in the Pecatonia River region. Susanna by contrast spent barely more than fifteen years there, from the arrival at Waddams Grove until her departure in 1853.

Immediately upon arriving the Baileys decided where they wanted to settle, and did so quickly, building a house and moving into it in 1854. Their chosen site was in Brighton Township in Sacramento County out in the great Central Valley. The place would be known to locals as Sloughhouse. It lay along Jackson Road, already an established traffic corridor through the area and which remains so even today, though now it is often better known as Route 16. It is the most direct route for modern-day denizens of Sacramento to head off for the weekend to the wineries and bed-and-breakfast inns of Amador County. Susanna and Peter however rejected the opportunity to settle beside their kinfolk. It could be that seven dust-eating months of constant association hour after hour day after day was more togetherness than they could stomach. While there are sufficient indications that Peter and his sister and their respective families kept in touch over the decades to come, on the whole they were content to forge separate destinies.

Susanna and Peter settled instead many miles upstream (the “stream” being the Cosumnes River) in the foothills in Cosumnes Township in El Dorado County. The easiest way to get an impression of their place of residence is to look on Mapquest for the community of Fair Play. The Hughes home was either very close to or actually within the boundaries of the village, which though it is very tiny now, grew to as many as three thousand residents in its Gold Rush prime. They are likely to have kept the same house, or at least the same house lot, throughout their tenure, which lasted into the early 1870s. There is unfortunately no documentation to confirm precisely when in the 1850s that tenure began, but there is every reason to assume the couple and their offspring were in place by 1854 or even as early as the very end of 1853. As parents, Susanna and Peter surely wanted to provide their little ones with a sense of permanence, particularly after the upheaval of the long wagon-train journey. They are therefore unlikely to have spent a lot of time checking out alternate places to put down roots. Cosumnes Township may have been an area Peter had come to know during 1849 and 1850, and was the target the family was aiming for from the moment they hitched up their oxen to their wagon in Wisconsin. Susanna and Peter were therefore pioneers of Fair Play. The earliest settlers of the immediate vicinity are regarded by historians as being A. Sisson and Charles W. Staples, whose arrival can be pinpointed to the year 1853. (Charles Staples appears in the Fair Play enumeration section in the 1860 and 1870 censuses. In both instances, his entry is just three pages away from those of the Hughes family.)

Fair Play was a savvy choice of venue given that Peter appears to have decided mining would be his career. Chances are high he had been a lead miner back in Wisconsin. He knew the mining life, and knew that it suited his skill set and his inclinations. He would have understood the potential of Cosumnes Township. In other areas of the Mother Lode, gold could be found only in its placer form, i.e. as dust, flakes, and nuggets rinsed downstream. The early prospectors had depended upon that easily-obtained type, but already by 1853, the sources were becoming depleted. The rock formations of Cosumnes Township on the other hand contained primary gold deposits -- gold still in the vein. It had to be chiselled out of the ground, knocked apart from the quartz in which it was embedded, and purified via mercury amalgamation. The downside was, that process took infrastructure and capitalization. The upside was, the exploitation of the deposits often went on for many years at a stretch and supported a stable local economy. And for Peter, the situation was even better because he “got in on the ground floor” in an area that had not here-to-fore been heavily exploited. Fair Play remained a good place to be all the way through the 1860s. Even in the early 1880s there was still one stamping mill in operation in the vicinity.

Susanna and Peter had conceived another child during the wagon-train journey: Jacob Strader Hughes, born within six months of the arrival in California. It’s quite possible a cluster of births followed, but only two are known to posterity. The babies were David Hughes and Catherine G. Hughes, the latter better known as Katie. David appears in the 1860 census as a one-year-old child. He does not reappear in the 1870 census and therefore must have died young. His grave is surely in Cosumnes Township but details are not known at this time. If Susanna and Peter buried one little one during their years at Fair Play, it is quite possible they buried others, given how common it was in that era to lose children at birth or in early infancy. In some respects they were fortunate that five of their offspring -- Elias, Peter, Jr., Rachel, Jacob, and Katie -- reached adulthood. Four of those five spent the greater part of their childhoods in Cosumnes Township. The exception is Katie, born about 1862, who may have been only eight years old when the family at last moved away, and certainly was no more than ten.

That move away can be dated with only moderate precision -- possibly as early as the autumn of 1870, and possibly as late as the autumn of 1872. The 1870 census shows the household still in place in Fair Play. All of the (surviving) children were still at home aside from Peter, Jr., who is shown as a lodger in a nearby dwelling. The latter was however at the end of his brief lifetime. Peter, Jr. died some time during the first week of June, 1870. His death is mentioned in a short notice in the 8 June 1850 edition of the San Francisco Bulletin, with the exact day unspecified and Fair Play described only as “near Mount Aukum, El Dorado County” (with Aukum misrendered as Auburn). Inasmuch as the census enumerator did not actually visit Fair Play until the 27th of August that year to do his work, it is a testament to Susanna and Peter’s affection for their boy that they made sure his existence was reflected, and now that census report serves as a genealogical marker to confirm young Peter was still alive at the beginning of the month of June. Perhaps the family’s grief was among the factors that spurred the subsequent relocation. In any event, by no later than the winter of 1872-73, the whole gang had become based in the city of Sacramento, as demonstrated by the 1873 Sacramento city directory. Peter, Sr. had finally given up on mining as an occupation. He was well up into his fifties, and mining was work better suited to younger men. Another motivation for relocating was that profitable ore around Fair Play was getting hard to find. Already the population of the village had dwindled from its heyday. That helps explain why Elias and Jacob chose not to be miners, either. They knew they were more likely to earn a living in the city. The change of circumstances must have been startling. The family had been living in a rustic and lightly populated mining village. Now they were not just in a city, but right in the most urban part of the second-largest city in the state. The directories and voter registers of the mid-1870s show the Hughes family members at a series of addresses, but all of the spots they called home were located a few blocks northeast of the state capitol building.

Unfortunately for Susanna and Peter, being in Sacramento was quite likely the means of their doom. They were away from the clean breezes of the foothills and down in the mosquito-ridden delta -- their neighborhood was tucked into the nook where the American River dumps into the Sacramento River. Humanity crowded close on every side, bringing them into proximity with vectors of any number of diseases. Peter developed an infection -- perhaps due to injury, but more likely from a disease -- and died of septicimia 25 August 1875. Susanna likewise did not make it to sixty years of age. She caught typhoid fever, which claimed her life 10 November 1878 at home at Fifteenth Street and D Street, Sacramento.

The graves of husband and wife are definitely in the Sacramento city cemetery complex, but that district now encompasses a series of originally-separate cemeteries and given that no headstone for the couple can be found there now, it is difficult to confirm the locale of the Hughes-family plot. The indexing system used back in the 1800s seems to have changed. However, it would seem that Susanna and Peter were interred in sequential graves in the Oddfellows Lawn section.

Susanna’s biological line of descent appears to be extinct. Rachel Anna Hughes stated in a 1907 letter to her first cousin Rachel Webb that as far as she knew, she was already at that point the only survivor of the family, and Rachel herself produced no descendants. No sign of any grandchild has turned up despite years of research.

In brief, these are the fates of Susanna’s offspring:

Elias Hughes appears to have stayed continuously in Sacramento from the early 1870s on up to the second half of the 1880s. He became a machinist, and soon went to work at the Central Pacific Railroad yard, helping to build and repair railroad cars. He lived with his parents until their deaths, and shared a home with his little sister Katie for several years thereafter. By 1880, his job at the railroad yard was to paint the cars. The last certain trace of Elias is an 1886 cemetery record. It was Elias who purchased the grave plot and dealt with the funeral particulars when Katie was laid to rest beside her parents. Elias is however probably the Elias Hughes who appears in the 1900 census and the 1898-1906 voter registers in Butte City, Glenn County, CA as a machinist. Not all of the stats associated with the Glenn County individual are a perfect match for “the” Elias Hughes, but they are pretty close. Also, a January 1886 Sacramento Daily Union article refers to Katie Hughes having just returned from Willows, which is in Glenn County. Her reason for going to Willows would very likely have been to visit her brother. In the 1900 Glenn County census entry, Elias is shown as unmarried.

Peter Pence Hughes, Jr. died in early June, 1870 as noted above. The notice in the San Francisco Bulletin does not specify the cause.

David Hughes, as mentioned above, must have died in Fair Play as a child in the 1860s, possibly as a very small child.

Catherine G. Hughes did not marry. Her name was still Hughes when she died in 1886. She is therefore assumed never to have had children. In the late 1870s and early 1880s she kept house for her brother Elias. There is however one indication she asserted her independence, if only slightly. She is shown in the 1884-85 Sacramento city directory as Miss Katie Hughes at 1623 H Street. This address was four blocks away from where her sister Rachel was lodging. Elias meanwhile is shown as a roomer at the Central House, perhaps a boarding facility for Central Pacific employees. Like her mother, Katie died of typhoid fever. Her date of death was 4 March 1886. She was twenty-three or twenty-four years old.

Jacob Strader Hughes cleaved to his family members throughout the 1870s, living at the same address as his parents, and after his mother’s death, continuing to live with Elias and Katie for a year or so. He had just ventured off on his own by the time the 1880 census was taken. He is shown in that source still in Sacramento and still residing in the same neighborhood as his siblings, but at that point he was a lodger in the home of blacksmith Parker Tripplet and family. By that time he was several years into his chosen profession. Jacob was a plasterer. He continued to follow that occupation in Sacramento, then in Fresno in the late 1880s, and then in San Luis Obispo County. He is the only one of the Hughes boys who can be shown to have become a husband. His wife was Missouri-native Annie Davis, the surname Davis perhaps having been acquired from an earlier husband. The pair were wed 19 July 1889 in Fresno. By then Annie was in her late thirties. Whether the pair had offspring is unknown but it does not seem so. The last trace of Jacob is his entry on the 1892 voter register for San Luis Obispo County when he was approximately thirty-eight years old. His reason for relocating to that area may have been a family connection. His first cousin George Alton Washington Bailey had recently moved there. The latter would live out a long life in Arroyo Grande Township. What happened to Jacob is unknown, but his sister Rachel in 1907 had not heard from him in many years, and it seems likely he died early enough he was not alive to be listed in the 1894 voter register.

And so we come to Rachel Anna Hughes. Rachel is the one representative of the Susan Anna Strader branch who is known to have kept in touch with Hannah’s clan as late as the Twentieth Century. In the years from about 1905 to 1915 she corresponded with first cousins Rachel Webb and Nellie Warner and may have even taken the train down a time or two to visit them at their homes in Fresno County. Thanks to that contact, along with a consistent paper trail to follow in public records, she is the one Hughes whose life story from birth to death can be reasonably described.

Rachel spent the whole stretch from the early 1870s to her death in the early 1920s as a resident of the city of Sacramento. For some of the 1870s, she shared the same dwelling as other members of her family, the last instance being in 1879 with Elias, Jacob, and Katie, but Rachel otherwise demonstrated an independent lifestyle from her early twenties onward, supporting herself variously as a seamstress and spinner and then as a domestic servant. She wed three times. Her first husband was Thomas Jefferson Clunie, an attorney who would go on to serve as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The wedding occurred 23 March, 1873; however, the union ended immediately, undoubtedly in the form of an annulment on grounds of bigamy. Thomas had married Florence Turton four weeks earlier! One wonders how that scenario played out that spring. In the long term, we know the answer. Rachel went back to using her maiden name. Thomas Clunie was still married to Florence decades later.

Rachel was still going by the last name of Hughes at the turn of the century when she became a live-in housekeeper for an elderly man, Abraham Nusbaum. She was in effect his nurse, and was probably hired not by Abraham himself, but by the guardian the court had appointed to look after his welfare. Abraham had been declared incompetent to manage his own affairs. The circumstances were even more grim for his wife, Lucretia, who in the late 1890s had gone so far off the deep end that she had become infamous to readers of the Sacramento Daily Union for the delusional rantings contained in her letters to the editor. She had been institutionalized in Stockton State Hospital. The Nusbaums had owned quite a bit of downtown property, which was sold in order to resolve their debts and generate a sum sufficient to care for them in their remaining years. The one surviving real-estate asset was the family home at 812 Eleventh Street, which they had owned and occupied since the early 1870s. (They were probably the original owners.) Abraham was permitted to continue living there -- and retaining title -- as long as someone stayed with him. That someone became Rachel.

Lucretia Nusbaum passed away in the late spring of the year 1900. This cleared the way for Rachel to become the new Mrs. Nusbaum. The wedding took place 3 June 1902. Three years later, Abraham died, making her a widow. The sequence of events meant that she had financial security for the rest of her days. Not only did she have a small former residence in the city that she rented, but she had inherited the Fair Play ranch, earning enough from the grazing rights to more than cover the property taxes. Moreover, the former Husbaum home was so large Rachel did not only use it herself, but rented rooms. Even a small number of boarders was sufficient to keep her bank account healthy.

In the early 1910s, one of the incoming lodgers was Abraham Miller, twelve years Rachel’s junior. History repeated itself, only in a flip-flop way. Now it was Rachel who was the older of the set as she wed Abraham Miller in the summer of 1916. It is accurate to say it was the only marriage that allowed her to settle in and be a spouse, as she had never spent any meaningful interval living with Thomas Clunie and may not have ever had sexual relations with Abraham Nusbaum due to his age and decrepitude. She and her new Abe were a couple until her death. The Grim Reaper came for her 23 December 1923, some seven and a half years into the marriage. Abe inherited the house at 812 Eleventh Street. He remarried a few years after Rachel’s death and went on to live at that same address at least into the mid-1940s. (The house, not far from the Capitol, no longer exists. The entire block is now taken up by the huge building that serves as the headquarters of the California Environmental Protection Agency.)

As mentioned above, no headstones now exist in the Sacramento City Cemetery district to commemorate Susanna and Peter. It is probable none were ever commissioned, and the circumstances apply to all of their children as well. However, in Rachel’s case, an inscription exists. Her name and statistics were added to the side of the headstone of her husband Abraham Nusbaum and his first wife. (As shown above right.) The Nusbaum grave lies a long walk away from the Hughes plot, and given that records say Rachel’s remains were buried with her kinfolk, the inscription is a kind of red herring in terms of showing where her grave is. It’s unclear if this peculiar situation means her widower was too cheap to commission an original headstone for her, or if Rachel had made arrangements for her memorial to be handled in just that way, perhaps having set out those instructions in the years before she wed Abe Miller. The latter scenario seems more likely to be true.

Elizabeth Strader married Jeremiah Frame 18 May 1842 in Jordan Township when she was eighteen years old -- a typical age within the family to become a first-time bride, but in fact she was jumping ahead of her older sister Susanna, who would not marry Peter Hughes for another four or five years. Also typical was that the groom was notably older. Jeremiah -- better known as Jerry -- was already thirty. Born 23 April 1812, Jerry was a native of Bourbon County, KY, but had grown up in Preble County, OH and then in Vermilion County, IL. Depending how close the Frames lived to Johnson’s Point, he could well have known Elizbeth since she was a baby. Given the amiable feelings shared between the Frame clan and the Strader-Weitzel-Starr clan, Elizabeth and Jerry’s courtship was quite likely encouraged by both sets of parents as well as by other relatives. Certainly it is a known bit of family lore that other Strader girls were pointed toward other sons of James Frame and Susannah Bradshaw.

Elizabeth and Jerry produced ten children, the births taking place from 1844 to 1863. They were Rachel, Anna, Elias, Mary, Jacob, David, Caroline, Daniel, William, and John. However, the first two, Rachel and Anna, died so very young that it could be said Elizabeth and Jerry only had eight children. (In the future, a section will be added to this essay that will include details about the lives of all ten children. This will be placed immediately after Elizabeth’s biography.)

As a newly married couple, Elizabeth and Jerry may have continued to reside in Green County, probably in Jordan Township near her parents, but if so, they did not remain more than a few years. They became part of a reassembling of most of the Frame-Bradshaw clan in Argyle Township, Lafayette County, WI. From the mid-1840s into the early 1850s, the various Frame households were clustered close together -- a proximity so tight they are enumerated sequentially on the same page of the 1850 census. By the time of that survey, one of the households was that of Elizabeth’s sister Anna Catherine Strader and Jerry’s brother James Frame, Jr. The latter pair had wed one another in 1849 and may therefore have been late additions to the Frame mini-colony. Elizabeth and Jerry may have been among the very first arrivals. Certainly they were there by the time their third child, Elias, was born in early 1847, because records about Elias indicate he was a native of Argyle Township.

The lure of Argyle Township was employment. Jerry and his father and brothers all worked as miners. The extraction of lead ore was still a viable way to make a living in southwestern Wisconsin, and Argyle Township was one of the more dependable spots to pursue this livelihood. That said, the prospects were not what they had been during the lead rush period. In the late 1820s, Esau Johnson had been readily able to find promising ground in which to dig, but two full decades of exploitation had altered the equation. There were far fewer chances for “men of virtue but little pedigree” like Jerry to end up with a bonanza. Some spots simply had no more lead to give. Other claims still had potential but were under the control of men of wealth and high social stature such as William Stephen Hamilton -- youngest son of the famous Alexander Hamilton and the most prominent of all Lafayette County lead magnates. Nevertheless, the Frames were lead miners. Jerry would pursue the career on a part-time basis for decades, and in his early sixties would take one more big whack at it.

In 1849, bachelors and young married men, and even some middle-aged men, left Wisconsin in droves to seek gold in California. The exodus was particularly true of those men who were already familiar with mining as a profession. Among them was William S. Hamilton. Also among them were Elizabeth’s brothers-in-law Peter Hughes and James Eveland, and Nathaniel Martin’s brother Isaiah. Jerry no doubt wanted to seize that opportunity as well. But he stayed put. This turned out to be the wiser option, but he probably wasn’t looking at things that way in the spring of 1849 when he was first contemplating a possible departure. He may well have been wringing his hands, and only managed to remain anchored to Wisconsin by his sense of duty toward Elizabeth and the kids, and the bitter knowledge that he didn’t have the financial wherewithal to pay for the journey, his lead-mining career having generated too little.

By the time 1849 had become 1850 and that year was winding down, Jerry understood that he had been spared from a mistake. None of the relatives who had left found enough gold to be worth the ordeal of the cross-country trek. They all would have done better to stay home. In the case of William Hamilton, the moral lesson was even more stark. The latter had had a fine situation going for him in Lafayette County, but had let greed get the better of him. He was a rich man’s son who was not about to listen to the advice of others. He had no wife who could advocate against the gamble. But not only did he fail to duplicate his success in the gold-mining world, he caught a case of cholera in Sacramento in the autumn of 1850 and died.

The irony is, because Jerry stayed, he and Elizabeth entered what was to be the most secure phase of their lives. In the summer of 1850, Nathaniel Martin went to Boston and won the financing he needed to take control of, and pursue completion of, the sawmill at the site that would become Martintown. It was clear he was going to make something of himself and that his enterprise would engender plenty of chances for a helpful brother-in-law to earn spot-cash from time to time. In 1850, such work included picking up a hammer and helping to expand the mill itself. Soon it would consist of things like hauling timber from the local woodlands to the mill’s drying warehouse. Jerry saw the sense in embedding himself within Nathaniel’s sphere of influence. Elizabeth was delighted to be living near her sister Hannah. The Frames began farming in Cadiz Township near the village. They may even have had a house within the village itself for part of their tenure, which was to last well into the 1860s. One significant incident during that stretch has already been highlighted in Nathaniel’s biography: When Nathaniel had his nervous breakdown in the winter of 1857-58, it was Jerry who stepped in and served as Nathaniel’s proxy in his business matters. Jerry may not have been an experienced merchant, but he was someone Hannah trusted above all other candidates.

By the late 1860s, Elizabeth and Jerry had only one small child left in the home -- son John, born in 1863. The others were all becoming capable of independence, and in fact the eldest two, Elias and Mary Jane, would spread their wings even before the decade was over. Jerry appears to have grown restless to do more than just keep food on the table. He wanted what any man of his era wanted: To be successful, prosperous, and respected. By this point, being associated with someone as well-to-do as Nathaniel Martin and Henry Rush -- Elizabeth’s other rich, Martintown-based brother-in-law -- was no longer as much a source of relief and appreciation as it was a reminder to Jerry that he hadn’t done as well. So in 1869 or 1870, he and Elizabeth returned to Lafayette County. They brought with them their youngest six kids. (Oddly enough, these were the very six who had never before lived within that county. The eldest of them, Jake, had been born just after the move to Martintown in 1850.) This time Elizabeth and Jerry did not live in Argyle Township, but in Wiota Township, which had been the very place from which William Hamilton had overseen his lead-mining empire. People in the Wiota area were still bringing lead up from the ground even then, more than four decades after the initial flood of prospectors had descended upon the region. Although the main household income continued for the moment to come from Jerry’s agricultural efforts, there was only one reason to chose to move. Jerry had it in mind that he would go back to lead mining. He was dreaming that this time, Things Would Be Different.

(Shown at right is Jerry Frame in old age. This photo was probably taken on the same day as the one of Elizabeth shown upper left. Comparing the two views is one way their age difference stands out.) In 1873 or so, Jerry acquired the rights to a mine in Green County about half a mile northeast of the town of Monroe. Though the operation had first been established thirty years earlier, it had nevertheless remained productive right up until the point when Jerry bought it. For example, previous owner John Monahan had extracted 50,000 pounds of lead from it in the span from 1870 to 1872. Despite a gloomy assessment of its remaining potential, Jerry put in a couple of years of work there. Alas, his yield was only 4,000 pounds. That sort of meager reward for such a concerted effort caused Jerry to finally give up mining for good. To add insult to injury, the family farm’s wheat crop was ruined by chinch bugs. Disgusted with how poorly southeastern Wisconsin was treating them, he and Elizabeth moved in late 1874 or early 1875 to Greene County, IA.

Along with Elizabeth and Jerry came five of their children. This is a somewhat surprising number. It includes Carrie, Will, and John, who were still single and a part of their parents’ household. It’s only natural that they were brought along. But older children Mary Jane and Jake relocated as well, along with their spouses and offspring. Perhaps they were worried they might not get to live near the old folks again unless they did so in Iowa. It seems clear Elizabeth and Jerry intended to make Greene County their final dwelling place -- their burial ground, so to speak. They were old enough that they did not expect they would ever want to go through the trouble of packing up and moving on to yet another destination. Much to their frustration, their plans did not work out. The couple became dissatisfied with the heat and humidity of central Iowa and the resultant tornadoes. In 1879, Jake and his wife and kids made an extended visit to Lafayette County to tend to Jake’s father-in-law, whose health had taken a turn for the worse. Elizabeth and Jerry tagged along, saying farewell to Iowa for good.

At that point, Elizabeth and Jerry were confronted by the dilemma of what to do with themselves. Jerry was becoming genuinely elderly and Elizabeth now had no child left younger than sixteen. Many other couples in their circumstances would simply have decided they didn’t have enough lifespan left for anything ambitious and would have slipped into a quiet final phase as grandparent figures within the household of one child or another. Apparently Elizabeth and Jerry felt unready to give up their independence and were not willing to be viewed as people whose last crop of hay was already stacked in the field.

In hindsight -- i.e. from our perspective in the 21st Century -- it is easy to see that the best choice for Elizabeth and Jerry at that point would have been to hunker down in southwestern Wisconsin. They would have been surrounded by long-time friends and an abundance of kinfolk and would have had familiar surroundings. The fact that they did not do so may have been a matter of coincidence. The year 1879 was an awful one for the Frame-Strader-Martin clan. Elizabeth’s sister Margaret Eveland died. Many family members were ill with tuberculosis and others had recently succumbed to it. Nathaniel Martin had recently suffered another mental breakdown, one that had been so bad he had briefly been committed to an insane asylum. Hannah had not only that to deal with, but was also reeling from the summer-of-1879 drowning of her much-beloved teenaged son Abraham Lincoln Martin. Polly Strader Frame and husband Silas were struggling to cope with the household of orphans they had taken in. Anna Catherine Strader’s marriage to second husband Henry Rush was on the rocks. It must have seemed to Elizabeth and Jerry that Wisconsin was a less-than-ideal place on which to rest their hope for a secure old age. As a consequence, they were perhaps too tempted by an opportunity that fell into their laps -- a prospect they would have been better off resisting. But pursue it they did. The choice may well have cost Elizabeth ten years of life.

The opportunity came in the form of a scheme hatched by son Elias. The latter, along with wife Mary, had moved away to Seward County in eastern Nebraska at the beginning of the 1870s. The young couple had developed a homestead and were now ready to do so again up closer to the Dakota Territory where unclaimed land was still available. Elizabeth and Jerry understood this mentality. As children, they had helped their families develop homesteads in frontier Vermilion County, IL. As young adults, they had done so again in the Pecatonica River region. True, they were getting long in the tooth to cast themselves as pioneers again, but when Elias suggested they come along, they agreed. The venture was both a chance for them to seize their destiny, and an opportunity to renew their bond with their eldest son, and get to know a set of grandchildren they had until then only seen during visits.

Elias had set his sights upon the Sand Hills region of northern Nebraska. He and Mary sold their Seward County land to his sister Mary and brother-in-law Ike Rinehart. Elias and Mary, as well as Elizabeth and Jerry, probably moved westward in the latter part of 1879, in time to throw together some sort of shelter sufficient to make it through the winter, or perhaps they waited until early 1880. Certainly they were in place by the time the census was taken (effective date, 1 June 1880). On the fourth of August, 1880, Jerry arrived at the land office in North Platte and submitted an application for a claim to a homestead of 160 acres adjacent to the property his son had picked out for himself and Mary.

The Frames occupied a stretch along a watercourse that came to be known as Plum Creek. The stream’s canyon had earlier in the decade sheltered gangs of horse thieves who hid there after raids. The milieu could scarcely have been more wild. It was tamed only in the sense that natives were no longer readily able to use the region for hunting buffalo as they had done up through the mid-1870s. The various tribes were being forced onto reservations in the wake of the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota and the resultant surge of white men into the more remote parts of Nebraska and South Dakota. Elizabeth had not lived so close to the very edge of civilization since her birth, back when the little settlement in Vermilion County had consisted of perhaps no more than five or six log cabins and a handful of cleared fields. It would not be until the arrival of an extension of the Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad in 1883 that true villages would be founded. The nearest was Johnstown, with Ainsworth several miles to the east. Johnstown was named for John Berry, the man who had owned the acreage upon which the clapboard buildings and wooden sidewalks would rise. That said, the Frame family as a whole was so much a part of the founding of the community that the place might well have come to be known as Frametown. As it was, one of the streets was -- and still is -- named Frame Street. Johnstown would become the official address of all of the Frame households once a post office was opened. 1883 was also the year that the area would cease being part of the Unorganized Territory of Nebraska, and become Brown County.

Meanwhile, the winter of 1880-81 was incredibly brutal in northern Nebraska. Snow arrived early and lay heavy on the landscape. Across the Unorganized Territory, thousands of cattle perished, unable to dig down to the native buffalo grass, unable at times even to make it through the thick drifts toward the piles of supplemental hay their owners had left out for them, even when those piles lay within their view. Family records don’t say how much livestock Elizabeth and Jerry may have personally lost that winter, but one things is certain: They’d been given their warning. They chose not to take one bad season of weather as an omen. Unfortunately it was an omen. Elizabeth and Jerry had come to a spot where Mother Nature simply could not be counted on to treat inhabitants kindly for more than a few years at a time. Unlike Illinois and Wisconsin, summer rain was not a reliable thing. Stands of timber were infrequent. The soil was not as rich. The Frames arrived with some awareness of these aspects, but could not have anticipated how ghastly conditions would become over the next fifteen years. The eruption of Krakatoa volcano in 1883 -- though the event occurred on the other side of the world -- would trigger additional devastating Nebraska winters. In 1890, a severe drought would arrive that would blight the region for a full five years. By 1895, half of the settlers who had come to Brown County in the 1880s would be gone. The Frames would be among those who left early in that period. The Sand Hills Chapter of the Frame Family Story would barely exceed ten years. They were never tempted to go back, nor did further waves of settlers have any better luck. In the long term, despite its oversized dimensions, Brown County’s population never exceeded 7,000 people and is now half that. According to 2010 census figures, the population of the village of Johnstown now sits at a whopping sixty-four residents.

(Shown at left is Johnstown in 1885. That was the year the Nebraska state census was taken. The enumerator reported that the village population consisted of eighty-four individuals. This photograph was preserved within the personal memorabilia of Elizabeth and Jerry’s daughter-in-law Mary Trickle Frame, wife of Elias. Most or all of the people standing on the wooden sidewalk of the closest building are family members, some of whom had just journeyed into town on the wagon you see in the foreground. The building is the drygoods store and residence of Daniel and Andora Fast. Another photo in the collection shows the storefront straight on and presents a better view of the human subjects except that the image is even more faded than this one and it is almost impossible to make out distinguishing details of anyone’s appearance except Jerry’s long white beard wafting in the breeze.)

Hindsight is hindsight. In the early 1880s, the Frame-Strader kinfolk were still willing to regard the plan to establish homesteads in Brown County as a solid chance to garner a dose of prosperity. Elizabeth and Jerry were, as ever, a beloved matriach and patriarch; accordingly, they drew relatives to them. Three children were with them in Brown County from the git-go. In addition to Elias, the old couple were accompanied on their journey by John and Carrie, the former still not yet adult, and Carrie still unmarried though she was in her early twenties. In 1882, undaunted by stories of the snows of 1880-81, two more households came out from Wisconsin: Son Jake (Jacob Silas Frame) with his wife Rebecca and their kids, and also nephew (as in, nephew to both Elizabeth and Jerry) Jacob Strader Frame, son of James Frame and Anna Catherine Strader. The latter brought with him his young wife Hattie and their baby son Harley. Son Jake occupied adjacent land. Nephew Jake chose a spot only a mile or two away.

Making it through the whole five years required to gain title to the 160 acres was almost too much for Elizabeth and Jerry. The land itself may not have fully supported them. Jerry was too old to keep up with younger men who could maintain their ranches better and oversee larger herds of cattle. In order to supplement the income stream, Elizabeth occupied quarters in the village of Johnstown and did cooking and housekeeping for a small number of boarders, assisted by son John and daughter Carrie. (The Johnstown scene above may possibly include the building in which this took place.) Jerry meanwhile kept the home fires going and took his meals alternately at Elias and Mary’s house and Jake and Rebecca’s house. However, as a consequence of the increased social exposure of the village, Carrie finally “met someone” in the form of bricklayer David Green. The two were married in 1885 and away they went. The newlyweds remained in Brown County at first, but they were not based right in Johnstown and so for the first time in forty years, Elizabeth had no other female family member with whom she shared a home.

The patent on the homestead was granted 3 September 1885. Proud though Elizabeth and Jerry must have been to say they had achieved their goal, the fact is the development came too late to have much practical consequence and amounted to a bittersweet victory. Jerry survived only four more months, perishing 20 January 1886. The cause was pneumonia, which is a way of saying, a bad winter cold was too much for his old lungs and weak heart.

Elizabeth was only sixty when widowed -- turning sixty-one five days after Jerry’s passing. She would survive her husband by only three years, but she had no reason to expect that would be the case. She was healthy and given the longevity typical of her family, she had every reason to think she might have another quarter century or more still to go. The majority of her siblings were still alive in 1885 and her own mother was still hanging in there back in Martintown. Elizabeth soldiered on, continuing to embrace life and continuing to be loyal to Johnstown. Her example was contagious. Soon her son Daniel and daughter-in-law Margaret and their daughters Tilly and Alice arrived. In addition, her sister Katie Anne, a recent divorcée, showed up as well, taking shelter with her son Jacob Strader Frame and his family. The fact that Daniel came is the final objective demonstration that Elizabeth was a beloved mother. Now reaching thirty years of age, Daniel had long been forging his own destiny. He had not gone along with the family to Iowa in the mid-1870s, and after marrying Margaret back in Lafayette County in 1879, the pair had settled in Canton, SD. But there Daniel was, now residing Johnstown. At the whole-family holiday gatherings held during Elizabeth’s final couple of years of life, she had the joy of presiding over a feast-company of relatives who cherished her.

Unfortunately, it did not matter that Elizabeth came from a robust line. She caught cholera and passed away 23 March 1888. She was buried in East Woodlawn Cemetery east of Johnstown, and while that was the logical thing to do in 1888, soon it would mean that there were no local relatives to routinely stop by and leave flowers on her grave, because the clan abandoned Brown County so thoroughly within the next few years. No siblings or children lie at rest near her. Other than Jerry, the only family members interred there were three young grandchildren, and two of those were eventually reburied elsewhere. (The photo above right was taken by Dave Smeds 24 August 2016. The headstone was the first one that Dave encountered after stepping out of his car -- a welcome sight given that until that moment he was only guessing he had found the relevant cemetery. It is hard to make out the inscription in this reduced view, but it is quite clear on the stone. Jerry’s inscription is on another side. Theirs is the oldest surviving gravemarker in the entire cemetery. The next-oldest dates from the early Twentieth Century.)

The California-based offspring of Elizabeth in 1901. Left to right, Will Frame, Jake Frame, and Elias Frame, with their wives Theodosia Heater, Dora Sweeney, and Mary Catherine Trickle.

Anna Catherine Strader -- better known by her middle name and sometimes by a reversal of the first and middle names (Juliette Martin Savage refers to her as “Aunt Katie Anne” in her 1947 letter, and she is called Katie Anne in a 1901 biography of her second husband Henry Rush) -- initially married James Frame, who had been born 17 July 1820 in Preble County, OH. The wedding took place 21 October 1849 in Jordan Township. The couple had three children -- David Patterson Frame, Mary Rachel Frame, and Jacob Strader Frame. James was yet another Lafayette County lead miner. However, he gave up the profession in the early 1850s, taking to farming a forty-acre parcel in Cadiz Township, Green County. His abandonment of mining may have come too late. His health went bad by the mid-1850s, perhaps an after-effect of lead poisoning, though his daughter later attributed it to general overwork, recalling a time when her father collapsed from heat stroke after a grueling day harvesting grain. James spent about four years as a semi-invalid and then died 26 January 1861. He was buried in Kelly Cemetery. Katie Anne soon married Henry Rush, a Bavarian immigrant and a veteran of the so-called Mexican War of 1846 to 1848, who just after the war had settled in Martintown as a carpenter. He had been married twice before. Both wives had died young. The first wife, Nancy Warren, had produced five children with Henry, including two that had died in infancy. The second wife, Maria Shockley, had given birth to three more. Katie Anne helped finish raising her Rush step-children in addition to caring for her Frame kids. She and Henry did have one biological child together, but lost that one as an infant. Henry owned a great deal of land in the Martintown area -- second only to Nathaniel Martin in the extent of his holdings -- and in the 1870s was a key business associate of the Martin family, operating the Martintown hardware store and conducting sales of building supplies and lumber, some of the latter product inevitably being generated by the Martin sawmill. Henry remains a notable figure in Cadiz Township/Green County history, among other things being the founder and sponsor of Rush Elementary School. During his lifetime he was popular with his Martin in-laws, but it seems Katie Anne did not regard him as the best of spouses. This led to a divorce in 1881, after all the children of the various marriages were grown. Henry would go on in 1894 to wed Mary Golaxson, twenty-nine years his junior, to whom he remained married until his death in 1913 in Martintown.

Having been unable for one reason or another to count on the men in her life, Katie Anne took steps to control her destiny a bit more. Among other measures, she learned to read and write at about sixty years of age. This gave her more direct control over her assets -- she had kept title to the land she and James had owned in Green County. She no longer cared to live near Henry Rush, though. She moved to Brown County, NE along with her son Jacob Strader Frame and his new wife Hattie Radliff. Jacob and Hattie soon founded a farm in the Ainsworth/Johnstown area close to the land belonging to Elizabeth and Jerry Frame. Katie Anne continued to be a part of Jacob and Hattie’s household for the remainder of her days. Jacob in turn became quite close with his cousins Elias, Jake, and Will Frame. When he returned from the west recommending that they all move to the San Joaquin Valley of California, his advice was heeded. Jacob and Hattie went first, bringing Katie Anne with them. She did not get to be a Californian for long, though. She died 3 August 1893. Her grave is located at Porterville’s Home of Peace Cemetery.

The image of Katie Anne shown at right was scanned from a print manufactured during her lifetime, found in 2012 amid the memorabilia that had belonged to her daughter-in-law Hattie Radliff Frame. The color is artificial, added by the photographer. It is highly unlikely she was wearing lipstick when she posed. The use of such dramatic red was a form of advertising for the photography studio, a way the owner could declare, “Lookee here, isn’t it fantastic I can make photographs have bright colors?” Unfortunately by modern standards the embellishment does not compliment her appearance. (Thank you to Katie Anne’s great great grandson Bill Haskins, Jr. for finding and scanning it. Bill also found similar portrait shots of Katie Anne’s children David, Rachel, and Jacob, which will be displayed here once their mini-biographies are completed.)

Margaret Ellen Strader married Virignia-native James Henry Eveland 27 February 1848 in Jordan Township. Like Peter Hughes, James went to California to mine gold. Like her sister Susanna, Margaret remained in Wisconsin and lodged with her parents. Both Peter and James returned to Wisconsin in the early 1850s, but while Peter convinced Susanna to move the whole household to California, Margaret persuaded James they should remain in Wisconsin. Margaret and James settled in as a farming family near Monroe. From that point until she died Margaret's circumstances were as stable as any of the Strader-Starr offspring, matched or exceeded in that regard only by Elizabeth and Hannah. Margaret and James had nine children -- all boys. First was Millard, born 19 January 1849, having been conceived before his father yielded to his case of gold fever. The youngest was George Washington Eveland, born 8 August 1871 (or perhaps 1872). It was such a large brood and so lacking in an older daughter to help keep house that in the late 1860s, with eight of the nine boys already born, Margaret persuaded a neighbor girl, Lucinda Frame, to help out. Lucinda, who soon became Millard Eveland’s wife, was a daughter of Thomas Alexander Frame and Sarah Devoe. As mentioned in Hannah’s biography, Thomas Frame was the man Hannah was “supposed” to marry, which would have created a fourth Frame/Strader union in the same generation, a scheme that Hannah’s preference for Nathaniel Martin thwarted. Sarah Devoe was a sister of Loren Devoe who, as mentioned above, married Millard’s first cousin Mary Jane Swearingen, the daughter of Margaret’s sister Polly. While Millard and Lucinda were not actually blood relatives, theirs was in a sense a marriage of first cousins, because Lucinda’s uncles Jeremiah, James, and Silas Frame were all brothers-in-law of Millard’s mother.

Today the tally of Margaret’s descendants is quite high, in the same league with Elizabeth and Hannah. The number would be reaching the ceiling if not for the shockwave created by her death. Margaret passed away in Monroe Township 6 January 1879 before she could finish raising her younger kids and before any of her boys other than Millard had settled in with spouses. (Margaret’s grave, shown at left, is at Kelly Cemetery near her parents.) James Eveland apparently found himself unable to cope with being a single father. He moved to Phillips County, KS and spent his final couple of decades as a widower farmer, not even living in the same state as any of his sons until he joined Millard and family in Thurston County, NE at the very end of the century. Inasmuch as the parents were not in Green County to serve as anchorage, the nine boys scattered far and wide. Though all eventually married, many did so well into adulthood and sired very small families, the most extreme example being second son Daniel, who did not wed until he was turning seventy and who had no children at all. Only one son lingered long-term in southern Wisconsin. That was David Francis Eveland, who dwelled right in Martintown in the 1890s and thereafter lived out his days nearby in Wiota, Lafayette County, WI. He married his first cousin, once removed Nancy Anna Black (also known as Anna Black), a granddaughter of Mary Ann Marie “Polly” Strader Swearingen Frame. The other Eveland boys left by no later than the early 1890s to a variety of locales in Iowa, Nebraska, and later, Minnesota, South Dakota, Idaho, and Washington. Only a small fraction of them appear to have kept in touch with one another. The rift was probably widest in the cases of the two youngest sons, Benjamin Franklin “Frank” Eveland and George Washington Eveland. Frank was only eleven when his mother died, and was fostered by his cousin Rhoda Frame Whitehead, daughter of Polly Strader (and an aunt of Anna Black). George, only seven or eight when Margaret died, must have been similarly shipped out, precise circumstances unclear, and as an adult very much forged a separate path of his own in Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota. In a twist of fate that echoed his own youth, George was unable to be a day-to-day parent to his firstborn son Leo, born in 1897, the cause being a divorce from Leo’s mother in late 1900 or early 1901.

The reason the Eveland clan eventually became substantial in number is because those who did found families tended to create huge ones. George Washington Eveland sired eleven kids with his second wife, making him father of twelve counting Leo. Millard and Lucinda’s son James had thirteen children with his wife Mary Julia Styer. A strikingly large fraction of the greater clan is doubly related due to marriages of cousins or multiple unions within the same two families, a la the pattern shown among the Starrs and Weitzels, Straders and Frames, et al. Not only was there the union of David Francis Eveland and Anna Black, but soon after James Eveland (Margaret’s fifthborn son) married his bride Iva Mae Hiserote in 1888, his niece Anna Isabel Eveland (daughter of Millard) married Iva’s brother Charles Hiserote. In the Twentieth Century, a number of members of the Eveland/Styer branch married members of the same Allen clan in Idaho.

Daniel Strader worked for Nathaniel Martin as a young man, and while doing so boarded with Hannah and Nathaniel. He was no doubt a welcome presence during the 1858 episode of insanity that incapacitated Nathaniel for a time. Daniel married Sarah Jane Mace 16 August 1862. The wedding took place four days after he had enlisted in the Union Army (obviously before he reported for duty). He served in the 31st Regiment, Wisconsin Infantry and died in the war of typhoid fever at Columbus, Hickman County, KY. His date of death was 29 July 1863. He is credited with having sired Harriet Almetta Strader, who supposedly was born 14 January 1864. Chances are this date is wrong and the year should be 1863, meaning that Sarah was a pregnant bride. If the birth year of 1864 is correct, it implies Daniel obtained a furlough in the late spring of 1863 or that Sarah was able to visit him. By the time of the birth or shortly after Sarah moved back to her birth home in Muskinghum County, OH and soon went on to Poweshiek County, IA, where she would spend the rest of her long life, dying in 1922. In 1869 she married Levi Walker Ferneau, settled with him on a farm near the town of Montezuma, and produced six children with him in addition to raising Hattie. (Shown at right is Sarah’s gravemarker at the Oddfellows Cemetery in Montezuma, IA.) Because Hattie was never a part of the lives of the Straders of Green County, her existence is not mentioned in any of the original early and mid-20th Century genealogical notes made by Hannah’s descendants or her sisters’ descendants -- the notes that were so central in the creation of this essay. Hattie had to be rediscovered in a genealogy posted on the internet. This forgotten-kin aspect is somewhat of an irony because Hattie did not die until 1951, meaning she survived to a later calendar date than any grandchild of Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr except two who made it to the late 1950s -- those two consisting of George Washington Eveland (himself another near-forgotten grandchild) and Bessie R. Strader. Whereas at one time Daniel Strader’s line was thought to have been extinguished before it had the chance to be founded, the list of his known descendants, who spring from the five children Hattie had with first husband James Oliver Briney, is now substantial. (A DNA match that came to light in 2019 confirms that Hattie and her line are biological descendants of Daniel.)

With dad Jacob Strader dead as of 1865 and brother Daniel a casualty of the war, it was up to John Starr Strader to step up and become the patriarch of the family. He slipped into the role somewhat gradually, not giving up his bachelor ways until 22 January 1868 -- his thirtieth birthday. His bride was Adelaide D. Blair -- Addie -- with whom he settled on a farm in Jordan Township for the first year or so of the marriage. In late 1869 or in early 1870, they moved to a different farm, this time in Clarno Township. Over time the Blair clan and the Straders would come to be associated genealogically in multiple ways. John and Addie’s wedding appears to have been the first manifestation of that entanglement. Unfortunately that bond was active a distressingly short time because Addie perished 24 September 1870, less than two years into the marriage. She left two sons motherless -- Homer Herbert Strader, born 4 May 1869, and Sebert Blair Strader (known as Bertie and later as Bert), born in July, 1870 and therefore only a couple of months old when deprived of his mother. Unlike many men of his era, John neither fostered out his offspring nor did he marry again at once. He was willing to take on the challenge of being a single father. Perhaps he had been too fond of Addie to bear the thought of replacing her while his memories of her were still fresh. The circumstance that made this possible was that John took in his widowed sister Rhoda, whose husband John Campbell had died at nearly the same time Addie had. Rhoda had two very small daughters, Nellie and Anna Campbell, so the combination of families worked out well. The arrangement was probably regarded as temporary but as it turned out, would last more than seven years. During much or perhaps even all of that time, Rachel Starr Strader was an occupant of her son’s home, which meant the four kids -- Homer, Bertie, Nellie, and Anna -- had plenty of adult oversight.

Finally on 23 February 1878, John wed Henrietta E. Harris of Sturgis, St. Joseph County, MI. At thirty-four years old, Etta (also known as Henriette) was not a young bride -- she would be referred to as an “old maid school teacher” by Juliette Savage in the 1947 letter -- but she was young enough to bear John two more children, Bessie R. Strader (middle name probably Rachel), born 10 May 1881, and John Stanley Strader, born in May, 1884.

In May 1880, when Esau Johnson came down from Sparta, WI to visit the many relatives he had in southern Green County, WI, John was one of the cousins he stayed with. By then, Esau was about to turn eighty and John was forty-two, and yet the two first cousins had never before met.

John’s farm in Clarno Township was a thriving concern, described in an 1884 profile of the county as 240 acres of good farmland, and abundant with fine hardwood timber, which John harvested in the winters when his crop work was on hiatus, selling it in the form of lumber and railroad ties. His brother-in-law Nathaniel Martin’s mill no doubt played a role in processing that bounty.

In 1896 -- or about then -- the family relocated to a farm in Dell Prairie Township, Adams County, WI. Their mailing address was Kilbourn, but various references emphasize the Dell Prairie Township place name because Kilbourn, though located only four miles south of the farm, was on the other side of the county line in Columbia County. John had perhaps exhausted the supply of timber on his Clarno Township acreage to the degree that he craved a piece of less-exploited property with which he could continue usual winter occupation. The move happened just as eldest son Homer, having completed training as a veterinary surgeon, was ready to settle down. Homer and his bride Alice Catherine Shank -- a former Monroe High School classmate of his -- farmed a nearby parcel within Dell Prairie Township. Bert, Bessie, and Stanley continued to reside with John and Etta.

In the early autumn of 1902, Homer died of septic poisoning from an infection in the wound he had sustained three months earlier when his thigh had been shattered by the kick of a horse -- perhaps one of the horses Homer had been doctoring. The impact had caused the bone to protrude out through the skin, and the damage was so severe Homer was bedridden from that point until his death. Widow Alice Shank Strader retreated back to Monroe to the security of her birth family, which removed John and Etta from routine contact with their only set of grandchildren -- Homer Iliffe Strader (born 29 September 1898) and Ula Kathryn Strader (born 15 March 1901). The emotional anguish appears to have dimmed John and Etta’s affection for the Dell Prairie Township farm. The couple soon moved to Rock County, WI. Bert, now in this thirties, chose to stay behind, so the household was reduced to John and Etta and Bessie and Stanley -- which is a way of saying it was now as much a Harris family unit as a Strader one. This was a defining change, because from this point in his life John behaved more as a member of Etta’s family than of his own. This surely was not out of any dissatisfaction with his blood kin, but simply “the way things turned out.”

They had only been in Rock County a brief time when a new opportunity presented itself. Etta’s sister Carrie, who as a young bride had lived with John and Etta, had long since moved to southeastern Virginia with her husband Boyd Henry. John and Etta decided to follow suit -- a huge change given that both husband and wife were people of the northern portion of the nation, very much Yankees and not at all Dixie folk. Yet they went, departing in the latter part of 1905 or the first part of 1906. With Bessie and Stanley, John and Etta settled within so-called “Tidewater Virginia” on a farm on the south bank of the Pamunkey River in New Kent County, VA. The area was and still is very lightly settled and still has no place-name designation that has stuck. The farm was located in a swath of land between Cooks Mill Road and the river, very near Chestnut Grove, the birthplace of Martha Washington, and upstream of the tiny village of West Point (which is on the opposite bank in Prince William County). The Straders themselves called it Brett or Brette, which appears to be a name no one else used. Another name bandied about at the time was Cousiac. Censustakers designated it part of Black Creek Township in 1870, and part of Cumberland Magisterial District during the period when John and Henrietta lived there. When John purchased the parcel, it was still called the Col. Gordon plantation after former owner William Westmore Gordon, an attorney famous for his role in the Civil War as a Confederate Army officer and a man often labelled a hero of the South for his resolute part in the First Battle of Manassas (aka First Battle of Bull Run), though he had only dwelled upon the property for at most half a dozen years right after the war, leaving it behind for good in 1871. These days residents of the area have Lanexa addresses. John’s relatives back home, hearing the word “plantation,” may have pictured a setting invoking the antebellum South connotation of the word, with huge fields of cotton and/or tobacco and a large number of resident laborers. But it was just a farm. Even though John was on the brink of seventy years old when he arrived, he actively managed the acreage, using it mainly for the raising of purebred swine. The only other adult male workers living on the land consisted of Stanley and one farm hand, Sam Braxton, a young man of color. The latter’s household included his young wife, two small children, and an adolescent female cousin.

Daughter Bessie went off to nursing school in Boston within a couple of years of the move to Brett. She returned in 1909 and lived at home for a period, but as she found employment in her profession, ranged farther and farther away. Stanley went out 29 January 1910 in a small sailboat on the Pamunkey River with Clem Meekins, a local fisherman (quite possibly a relative of the Braxtons). Neither could swim, and when a gust of wind capsized their boat about three hundred yards from the dock out in the middle of the river, they could not swim to shore. They hung on to the overturned craft for half an hour, crying out for help. John grabbed a dinghy and tried to reach them, but only had a plank of wood as a paddle, and the tide carried him beyond them and forced him up against the bank. Helpless to stop it, John, Henrietta, and Clem’s wife Rosa watched in horror as the two young men lost their strength in the chilly January water and eventually slipped under the surface. Clem’s body was never found. Forty days passed until Stanley’s body turned up. By the time those remains made their belated way into the care of a mortician, John and Etta had decided the burial place would be in her family’s section at Oak Lawn Cemetery in Sturgis. This in turn ensured that John and Etta would themselves be buried at Oak Lawn when the time came. (Which is a way of saying John is not buried with his first family. The graves of Addie and her children and grandchildren are at Greenwood and Bethel cemeteries of Monroe, WI.)

(Shown at left is the section of the Pamunkey River where Stanley drowned. Photo taken by Connie and Dave Smeds 4 November 2014. The river is so wide along this part of New Kent County that it is more of a bay than a river.)

In the spring of 1912, John and Etta bought Boyd and Carrie’s farm half a dozen miles north of Williamsburg near the village of Norge, and immediately moved there while Boyd and Carrie shifted to a rented farm nearby. Though the location was new, John used the land for the same purpose as the old one, i.e. for the raising of purebred pigs. However, in 1916 or more likely during the first part of the year 1917, John must have conceded that he was too old to farm any longer. Carrie and Boyd had retired to Richmond, VA, so John and Etta did likewise. They moved into a house in the Fulton Hill neighborhood of the so-called East End borough of the city of Richmond. That was the couple’s home when Etta died 1 November 1917. Her demise was yet another family tragedy. She dropped a container of kerosene and somehow the spilled liquid -- some of which had drenched her skirts -- caught fire. John was not there at that particular hour. Neighbors rushed over and succeeded in quenching the flames. The kitchen was not badly damaged, but Etta’s burns proved fatal. John was now a widower for the second time and would not marry again. He remained in the Fulton Hill neighborhood, but rather than stay where he was and be on his own, he became a lodger. The 1920 census shows him boarding with Horace and Mary Wilkerson and other members of their family. John did not stay with the Wilkersons for good, though, because the final residence on his death certificate is different than the one shown on the census -- though it is still in Fulton Hill. He died 23 March 1923 at Richmond’s Memorial Hospital of a cerebral hemorrhage.

At the present time, John’s surviving clan consists of only a handful of individuals, and they are not biological descendants. Stanley had not married nor produced offspring by the time he drowned at age twenty-five. Sebert likewise was childless. He was blessed by a relatively long life, though -- certainly a long life compared to his poor brothers. He continued to reside in Kilbourn. He served as the clerk of Dell Prairie Township for many years. He appears to have still been there as of his final few weeks of life, by which time the place was no longer known as Kilbourn, having taken on the name Wisconsin Dells. When Bert’s final decline came upon him, he was hospitalized in nearby Baraboo, Sauk County, WI, and that is where he died 27 September 1946 at age seventy-six.

As mentioned, Bessie Strader returned from nursing school to her parents’ New Kent County farm in 1909. Her first jobs as a nurse were in nearby parts of Virginia such as Norfolk, Richmond, and Petersburg. She had already remained single through her twenties and would continue in this fashion through her thirties. She may have been adamant about keeping her independence, i.e. she may have been profoundly unwilling to let herself be encumbered by a husband. Her choice to be a career woman despite possessing a substantial degree of beauty prompted her uncle Boyd Henry to imply she must be a lesbian -- or words to that effect. The characterization may have been accurate, but in that era, Bessie did not dare let the accusation stand uncontested, so she sued Boyd for slander and defamation of character April, 1913 in court in Williamburg, asking for $5,000 in damages. (To give an idea of how much that sum was worth in 1913, that same year John’s grand nephew Bert Warner purchased a house in Sanger, CA for $6,000, and Bert could have found one for less if he had been willing to settle for a fixer-upper instead of a quality residence constructed only two years earlier.) In the late 1910s Bessie became a chiropractor in South Carolina, basing herself in Anderson in 1920, in Greenville in 1921, back to Anderson from 1922 to 1927, and in Spartanburg in the late 1920s onward. Despite the possibility that she may have been a lesbian, she wed Richard T. Durham in approximately 1922. She was already in her forties and the union does not appear to have been for purposes of procreation, but for maintenance of reputation. Richard Durham may even have been disabled and marrying him was one way she could serve as his caregiver while simultaneously not having to make excuses why she and her spouse slept in separate beds. He appears to have passed away in the early 1930s. In 1935, Bessie wed dentist Leroy Feltz Crenshaw. This does look like a “real” marriage. There is ample sign they were fond of one another, and she immediately began using the public name of Mrs. L.F. Crenshaw -- she had not in the 1920s been known as Mrs. Richard Durham except on rare occasions. That said, the union does give the impression of having been a “Hollywood marriage” à la Rock Hudson’s marriage to Phyllis Gates, i.e. one that put the spouses in the limelight of society but did not involve the usual sort of conjugal behavior in private. Bessie continued to earn her own income independent of her husband. She purchased (or perhaps already had purchased) a peach farm of over 150 acres near the hamlet of Thicketty Station in Cherokee County, SC between the towns of Cowpens and Gaffney. She and Feltz may or may not have dwelled upon that acreage. If not, their residence was in Cowpens, which meant Bessie would have had only a short commute to supervise her orchards, and Feltz would have had only a slightly longer commute in the opposite direction to reach his dental office in Spartanburg. Bessie passed away in either the second half of 1958 or the first few weeks of 1959. The Gaffney Ledger edition of 17 June 1958 notes that she had just given her farm to Feltz. This surely means she had been diagnosed as terminal and wanted to avoid tangling up the real estate in the ordeal of a probate process. She was dead by no later than 16 February 1959, because Feltz filed a legal notice that day as the executor of her estate. Feltz did not survive her by much. He passed away in Spartanburg 21 November 1959. (Bessie was the very last grandchild of Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr to perish. Even if we assume she only survived to the second half of June, 1958, that still means she outlasted her cousin George Washington Eveland by several weeks.)

Homer Herbert Strader’s date of death was 10 September 1902. He died in a hospital in Tomah, Green County, WI in the wake of an unsuccessful operation to try to deal with the septic poisoning. In some ways, given the severity of his injury and the lack of antibiotics, his death had been certain ever since the horse had kicked him in May, 1902. This was not the only loss his poor wife would suffer that decade. Homer Iliffe Strader became ill in late 1907 -- probably with tuberculosis though available sources do not specify what type of chronic condition he had -- and succumbed to the disease 13 April 1909 at home in Monroe. Ula fortunately would have far better luck as far as health and longevity were concerned. She lived to be almost ninety-seven. She became a stenographer in Washington, DC in her late teens, and went on to get a degree at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. After graduation in 1926, she spent a brief interval in Louisville, KY before moving to Chicago, IL, where in 1928 she married Gerald Llewellyn Tyler. Their marriage lasted six to ten years. Apparently all of it was spent in Chicago and its suburbs of Evanston and Oak Park. The couple had only one child, and that one was stillborn. The birth, in Chicago in 1933, and its associated record is the last source that places Ula and Gerald together, though they may have been technically husband and wife for several years more. By 1938, Ula had returned home to her mother and stepfather Jacob Huffman in Monroe. She seems quite likely to have been unable to have a healthy child, but she was determined to have a family. Her solution was to adopt a daughter in 1939. Given that adoption agencies of that era were not inclined to tender custody of a baby to a solo parent, Ula probably worked out an arrangement with Gerald Tyler wherein he would be the adoptive father of record, though he does not appear to have played any role in raising the girl other than to supply her with his last name. She became Alice Catherine Tyler (1939-2005). She was a newborn or at least still a very young infant when Ula became her mother. Her biological origin is unknown.

From the late 1930s onward, Ula was based in Monroe, with possible brief exceptions, such as an interval in the mid-1940s when she appears to have lived in Winslow, IL. She never married again, but maintained a close emotional bond and association in Monroe with her mother and stepfather, and with her aunt Dora Shank Crosby and uncle Anson Newell Crosby. Together with these relatives, Ula invested in commercial property in Pocahontas, Buena Vista County, IA -- such investment being one indication Ula did well financially in spite of the lack of a spouse. Ula remained very active in lodge functions and various clubs and charitable societies. Not all of that was volunteer work. In the 1940s, she was a Green County employee assigned to the child welfare department, responsible for the program devoted to finding homes for abandoned children. (This role implies her daughter may have been such an abandoned child back in 1939.) Ula passed away 16 January 1998 in Monroe, within a few miles from the place her Strader ancestors had settled more than one hundred fifty years earlier. Inasmuch as her only survivor was Alice, Ula’s passing marked the extinction of John Starr Strader’s entire bloodline. Alice in turn passed away in Milwaukee in 2005 at the age of sixty-five.

Rhoda Carolyn Strader married John B. Campbell. John was a son of William and Margaret Campbell. Born and raised in Muskingum County, OH, he had come to Green County as a young man. He and Rhoda were married 21 September 1865 in Monroe after he had served in the Civil War. The pair immediately settled on a farm in Jordan Township. In the early 1870s, they moved to Clarno Township. They became parents of three children, including one that died as a baby. The children who survived were daughters Nellie (full name Rachel Eleanor Campbell) and Anna, both born in the latter half of the 1860s. John died some time in the second half of 1870s. (Born about 1836, he may not even have reached forty years of age.) The 1880 census shows Rhoda living as a widow in Cadiz Township, the household consisting of herself, her daughters, and her mother Rachel Starr Strader. They were probably dwelling in or near Martintown. She did not remarry until 1890, after both Nellie and Anna had reached adulthood and become wives and mothers. Rhoda’s second husband was William George Dunell, son of Charles Dunell and Anna Gaines. William had been born in England and had raised three kids in Senatchwine, Pulham County, IL and Tullahoma, Coffee County, TN with his first wife, Mary Elizabeth “Louisa” Burnhart. William may have been introduced to Rhoda through her nephew William Patterson Frame of Greene County, IA. Rhoda and William enjoyed only a relatively brief marriage because William passed away within a few years -- the precise date is unclear except to say that he was gone by the time the 1900 census was recorded. No children resulted from the union inasmuch as the wedding took place after Rhoda had reached the end of her childbearing years -- in fact, the ceremony occurred on her forty-eighth birthday. Rhoda spent much of her second widowhood employed as a live-in housekeeper in Green County. After 1905 she was Hannah’s only surviving sister and is known to have visited Hannah a number of times, and even moved in for a while in 1905 to help Hannah cope with her new widowhood. Eventually Rhoda resumed live-in housekeeper arrangements, the last of those apparently covering the summer of 1913 in Eleroy in Stephenson County about a dozen miles south of Martintown. The Eleroy chapter was followed by what appears to be a substantial stay with Hannah, beginning in October, 1913 and continuing for at least a year. Some time in the mid-1910s, Rhoda’s health became a concern, and it would appear to be at that point she moved to the farm of her daughter Anna and son-in-law Silas Keller in Clarno Township. The property was near Monroe. She may have had her own house (or cottage) there, rather than crowding in with Anna and Silas, who still had at least three children that had yet to fledge from the nest. Rhoda died at her residence of pneumonia 25 October 1915. Her remains were interred two days later at Staver Cemetery in Clarno Township.

Rhoda’s daughter Nellie wed Ezra Josiah Wickwire 6 April 1884 in Cadiz Township and at the end of the 1880s or beginning of the 1890s moved with him to Iowa. Over a fifteen-year span she and Ezra had five children, then she married Ezra’s brother Fred Wickwire, with whom she had three more. In the early 1900s she and Fred moved to Nebraska, and then in about 1916 on to Wyoming, where Nellie passed away in 1940. Her offspring settled variously in Nebraska, Wyoming, and Twin Falls, ID and descendants remain in all those places. Anna Campbell produced a family line with Silas Keller that for the most part has lingered in southern Wisconsin, mostly in Rock County and Green County. Descendants can be found in there to this day. They include members of the Coplien clan of Monroe.

Jacob Strader, Jr. died in infancy shortly after the family reached Green County. Juliette Savage attributed his death to tuberculosis, but she may have been guessing at the cause.

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