Life of John Warner and Marancy Alexander

John and Marancy are the apex figures of the family this website is devoted to. They were key figures in the pioneer era of Winslow, Stephenson County, IL -- a milieu and era that looms large in the story of the Warner-Alexander clan. Naturally one would expect the couple to be described here in great detail. And so they are -- but not to the extent I'd like. By the time family members began preserving facts about John and Marancy in the mid-Twentieth Century, many of the specifics were lost to memory, and within-the-family memorabilia was either absent or it was incomplete. Only one letter written by John has ever turned up, and none by Marancy. I am disappointed that I can offer no photograph of Marancy, even though she lived well into the era when photographs had become commonplace and surely there must have been some taken of her. I am likewise disappointed that John’s death at only forty-one years of age remains unexplained. Maybe the missing parts will be filled in over time. I hope so. Meanwhile this essay is already much more expansive than the version I first uploaded in 2007. I plan to keep on improving it. Maybe one day it will be as complete as it should be.

Before you read more, you should be alerted to a detail that might cause confusion. John’s mother gave birth to John’s older half-siblings while living in Otsego County, NY. Likewise, Otsego County may have been where John himself was born. As a teenager, John lived in Oswego County. If you glance quickly at those names, you may think it’s the same place. It’s not. Otsego County is in the heart of the state near the headwaters of the Susquehanna River and slightly to the south of the Mohawk Valley. Oswego County is on the eastern shore of Lake Ontario. The gap between John’s probable birthplace and the farm where he came of age is a matter of some seventy miles. While it is possible today to drive a car from one spot to the other in a couple of hours, in the 1820s and 1830s, they were unconnected places with little day-to-day influence upon one another.

John’s date of birth is 13 November 1816. He was born in upstate New York. His birthplace is almost certain to have been one of two candidate locales -- Worcester Township, Otsego County, NY or Onondaga Township, Onondaga County, NY. John’s mother’s name was Lois, maiden name not yet determined. His father’s name was Aaron Warner.

Lois’s origins can be guessed at, but it is a slippery process. Even one of the seemingly solid facts about her early life is subject to doubt. She is listed in the 1850 and 1860 censuses with a birthplace of New York state. This stat is repeated in the mother’s birthplace column of her son George’s 1880 and 1900 census records. And yet there is reason to think she might have been born in Connecticut. Her year of birth is somewhat easier to determine. Except for the 1850 census -- which shows an age for her that is not possible -- all sources point to a birthdate of 1779 or early 1880.

By contrast, Lois’s story once she became a wife is in far better focus. A number of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, now all deceased, left correspondence in which they recalled that she had been married before she became Mrs. Warner, and that her first husband had been a Mr. White. We now know that this first husband was in fact Mayflower descendant George Chapman White, a son of Patience (Hamlin?) and George White, Jr. The latter was a captain in the Revolutionary War. George Chapman White was the last-born of the many children that sprang from the union of George, Jr. and Patience. He was born about 1779 -- meaning he and Lois were the same age, a somewhat unusual circumstance in that era when men tended to marry after they had shown themselves capable of supporting a wife, whereas women married in their mid-to-late teens, yielding many unions with a considerable disparity in age between spouses. Lois and George were wed in approximately 1798. They appear to have spent the entirety of their fifteen-year marriage -- which ended with George’s death in 1813 -- on a farm in Worcester Township, Otsego County, NY.

It is from the background of George C. White that we may know something of Lois’s origins. (We will only occasionally refer to him as George Chapman White, in keeping with the majority of the documentation about him, which drops the Chapman in favor of the middle initial.) George C. White spent his early years in Albany County, back when Albany County encompassed significantly more territory than it does now. His family had earlier come from what is now Dutchess County and Columbia County, a swath of territory to the east of the Hudson River where the eastern edge of New York state rubs up against both Massachusetts and Connecticut -- a tri-state conjunction. This zone, which incorporated large land grants such as the Beekman Patent of 1697, had drawn a substantial influx of settlers in the early 1700s. Patience Hamlin had been born in this region, and George White, Jr. had moved there early in his life from western Massachusetts. There is good cause to suspect Lois’s forebears were also among the settlers.

After the northern and western parts of New York colony opened up in the wake of the conclusion of the French & Indian War, many families spread beyond the Dutchess County/Columbia County region. The Whites were part of this mass migration. They moved to Albany County in the late 1770s and stayed for about fifteen years. In the early-to-mid 1790s, they shifted a bit farther west to Otsego County. They were among the pioneers of what was then a section of Cherry Valley Township, but which would become Worcester Township in the late 1790s.

There is one other scenario to explain Lois getting to Worcester Township, i.e. she may not have been part of the migration that George C. White and family belonged to. In the 1790s, Otsego County saw an influx of people not only from Dutchess County, but from various parts of New England. Some of those arrivals originated from Litchfield County, CT, including members of the Wickwire clan, a family that had been associated with Connecticut since the founding of its various sub-colonies. Specifically, a young man, Ichabod Wickwire, III and his wife, the former Submit Ford, committed to establishing themselves with their small children in Worcester Township. Along for the ride was Ichabod’s bachelor brother, John Wickwire. The two young men seem to have been drawn to the spot because it had already become home to cousins with the surname Gilbert. Their father’s sister was a woman whose name is preserved to posterity as Elisal Wickwire. This is an unusual name, so unusual as to suggest it is a mis-transcription, perhaps from a no-longer-extant marriage register entry. I am inclined to think her actual name was Elisa Lois Wickwire. Her husband was John Gilbert, a Revolutionary War soldier. Elisa was deceased by the time of the migration to Otsego County, having passed away in 1790. Her husband appears to have died as well during the same time period, which would have left any daughter of theirs born in the late 1770s an orphan in need of a home. If my hunch is correct, they did have such a daughter, and she was Lois, the future Mrs. George C. White, and the one-day Mrs. Aaron Warner. She would have come to Worcester Township with either her Gilbert cousins or her two Wickwire cousins, or in a shared journey made by all of them at once.

This theory does not have direct evidence to prove it. It may never become possible to prove it in a dead-certain way unless the marriage record of Lois to George C. White turns up, showing her maiden name to have been Gilbert. But many sorts of circumstantial evidence point to Lois having been part of the Wickwire clan, and being a daughter of Elisa would be the most straightforward explanation.

One of the biggest clues is the story of John Wickwire, born in about 1777 in Connecticut. As mentioned, John came to Worcester Township with his brother Ichabod III. In the 1800 census, John is enumerated two lines below Ichadod, and the two Wickwire households are in turn found just three pages before the household of newlyweds Lois and George C. White. Proximity alone would be no particular indication of kinship, but it doesn’t end there. The proximity between John and Lois was later reestablished. John and his wife Rhoda Hubbard, after spending much of the early part of their marriage elsewhere in upstate New York and then in Ashtabula County, OH, migrated westward with their five sons (George, Ely, Henry, Josiah, and Ezra), and and became pioneers of Winslow at precisely the same time that Lois and a subset of her children, consisting of John Warner, Cynthia White Mack, and George C. White, Jr., likewise became pioneers of Winslow. So after a break of more than four decades, John and Lois ended up living right next to each other once again, just as one might reasonably expect of a pair of close cousins -- particularly if we suppose that Lois may have spent some of her adolescence in the household of her uncle Ichabod Wickwire, Jr., and was therefore not just John Wickwire’s cousin, but his foster sister as well. Moreover, in Winslow they were not just neighbors in the sense of occupying the same county and the same township and the same village. They lived almost elbow to elbow. Parcel maps show that the Wickwire parcels were clustered with the White-Warner properties on the northern and western edges of the village of Winslow. The 1850 census shows the dynamic particularly well. The enumeration of Winslow village and its immediate vicinity take up ten census pages. Page six contains the households of Cynthia Mack and George C. White, Jr., page seven the households of Ely Wickwire and John Warner (where Lois was residing at that point), and page eight the household of Ezra Wickwire. The togetherness would extend even to the matter of final resting places. The Wickwire graves at Winslow’s Rock Lily Cemetery are not far from the graves of various Warners and Whites. The photo at right shows that quite well. The two headstones in the center foreground are those of John Wickwire -- a new stone commissioned in the early Twenty-First Century to replace the lost original one -- and of his wife Rhoda Hubbard Wickwire. Immediately behind is the half-sunken headstone of Cynthia White Mack, and in the near background, in the shade of the trees, are the headstones of George C. White, Jr. and John Warner.

Naming patterns also support the Wickwire-origin theory. The name Seba for Lois’s eldest son, Cynthia and Deborah for her daughters, and Clifford and Frederick among her grandchildren, as well as Lois’s own name, would seem to have come from Wickwire older generations. These names do not have any other apparent genealogical source except for Seba, a name also to be found among George C. White’s kinfolk, but Seba is so unusual a moniker (presumably short for Sebastian) to slap on an eldest son that it must have special relevance, such as stemming from both the maternal and paternal heritages and therefore Lois and George may have found it irresistible as a choice. Yet another indicator is that Ely Wickwire’s son William Hicks Wickwire and Lois’s grandson Harvey Belford Mack joined the Union Army together and served side-by-side throughout the Civil War. When Cynthia’s daughter Kate Mack wed Josiah Hilliard in 1854, the wedding reception was held in the back yard of Ezra Wickwire. A new bit of evidence is that a DNA match turned up in February, 2018 between a descendant of John Wickwire and a descendant of Cynthia White Mack. Really, when it comes to the possibility that Lois’s mother was a Wickwire, there is nothing that says otherwise except by omission.

One glaring issue does require discussion, though. Lois is not mentioned in the most comprehensive of the pre-internet-era genealogical works devoted to the Wickwire clan of Connecticut and New York. That source is the 1909 book, Genealogy of the Wickware Family by Arthur Manley Wickwire. (Note: Wickware is one of the frequently-seen variations of the Wickwire family name.) Not to worry. Though this volume was an admirable example of a genealogy, the author clearly was having to make do with fragmentary sources. He lists no children for “Elisal” Wickwire Gilbert at all, even though there must have been a number of children. He also omits the existence of Ichabod Wickwire, III, and casts Submit Ford as a later wife of Ichabod, Jr. Yet a variety of evidence shows Ichabod III existed. He apparently became a “lost” figure because he died in about 1804 in Worcester Township. In short, Arthur Manley Wickwire’s book is not definitive in determining whether or not Lois was -- or was not -- part of the clan.

Whether Lois was Lois Gilbert or not, she was part of a family who chose to make their home in Worcester Township, a family that arrived there before the close of the 1790s, in time for her to wed George C. White. (The 1798 date of the wedding is a guess, but a logical one based on the timing of the birth of the couple’s first child). Worcester then continued to be their home throughout the whole span of their marriage. Documents recorded throughout the 1800-1813 time period consistently place them there, from the 1800 census to an 1802 deed transferring property from George White, Jr. to George C. (this document being the prime source of the middle name of Chapman), to the elder George’s 1804 last will and testament, to the 1810 census, and finally to the 1813 last will and testament of George C. White himself.

The latter document, George C. White’s will, was written in April, 1813. Though he was not even thirty-five years old, George must have had cause to believe he was dying, and that it was prudent to arrange for the disposition of his estate. He was correct in his assessment of his health. He passed away that year, probably no later than the end of June, and definitely by mid-October. In a sense, it is a lucky thing for those of us looking back that the Grim Reaper began swinging his scythe at George at that point. Had it been otherwise, we would not now have the key piece of evidence that allows us to have a reasonably clear picture of the family he sired. The will was among the many documents transcribed decades ago by genealogical researcher William A.D. Eardeley, who systematically went through original documents on file in various vital records offices in order to create an abstract of late 18th Century and early 19th Century New York state wills. The scans of his handwritten notes are now available at NewEnglandAncestors.org, the website of the New England Historic Genealogy Society. In the will, Lois is mentioned as George C. White’s widow-to-be and is designated as the primary heir. Their five surviving children are named, along with what their shares of the estate were to consist of. The estate attorney was Silas Crippen. The latter individual was a local miller and one of the heads of household who had come with the Whites from Albany County to Cherry Valley Township in the 1790s. He had also served as the estate attorney for George White, Jr. in 1804.

Eardeley is not the only early researcher whose work helps make clear the saga of the White family of Worcester Township. Another was Ethel Conger Heagler, author of the 1938 book, The History of Nathaniel White, Hannah Finch White and Their Descendants. Nathaniel (aka Nathanial) White was the eldest brother of George C. White. Page 53 of the Heagler book is devoted to George C. White. The text mentions Lois, son George C. White, Jr., and then goes on to describe the latter’s family and the fact that he settled in Winslow, IL.

It is good to have Heagler’s corroboration that there was a George Chapman White, Jr., because that is not one of the children mentioned in the will. That’s because he had not been born yet. When Lois’s husband composed his will in April, 1813, his final child had barely been conceived. Even if Lois and George were aware of she was expecting, there was no way to be sure the pregnancy would come to term. So when it came time to list heirs, George mentioned only the five children who already existed. These were were Seba, Isaiah M., Cynthia, Deborah, and Amos.

In December, 1813, Lois gave birth to George C. White, Jr., having managed not to let her grief jinx the pregnancy. She was now a single mother with a baby -- a single mother with five other kids as well, the eldest of whom was barely entering his teens. Naturally, she needed to reestablish a secure situation as soon as possible. And so, within eighteen months of becoming a widow, she married Aaron Warner.

Where did Aaron come from? That is not an easy question to answer. Aaron’s story was lost and it has only been possible to reconstruct a fragment of it, with only the period from the the mid-1810s to 1830 coming into somewhat clear focus. His given name was not even recalled by his great-grandchildren. The only reason we even have the name to go by is because knowledge of him was preserved among the descendants of his stepson Amos White. In particular, major thanks should go to Amos’s granddaughter Ethel Glen White. Ethel (shown at left in her youth) spent most of her adult life as a spinster Iowa schoolteacher. She retired to San Diego. In the late 1960s, as she was approaching eighty years of age, and having already joined the Daughters of the American Revolution by virtue of her descent from Solomon Willard, a Revolutionary War veteran in her maternal ancestry, she took it upon herself to distill the genealogical information contained in various mementoes and records she had preserved so as to establish George White, Jr. as a qualifying ancestor for any of her White kinfolk who might want to apply for membership in the D.A.R. She filed her report on the George White, Jr. clan to the D.A.R. archives in 1971 as Descendants of George White of Rochester, Massachusetts. (The George White referred to in this title was the father of the veteran, i.e. he was George Chapman White’s grandfather.) In more recent years, her work has been furthered by Dale Dean White, a great great grandson of Amos.

Alas, even Ethel did not know where Aaron came from, nor does her material provide a birthdate or a death date for him. The censuses of 1820 and 1830 permit us to know Aaron was born before 1770, making him a decade or so older than Lois. It is also safe to assume he was a member of one of the Warner clans who dwelled in upstate New York during the early decades of the 19th Century. These clans include Warners who drifted west from New England, and it is one of these that Aaron may have been part of. His parents may well have been John Warner and Sarah Temple of Westmoreland, Cheshire County, NH. One of their children was an Aaron Warner, born 3 April 1768 in Westmoreland. While it is not yet possible to declare this son and “our” Aaron Warner were one and the same person, some of the circumstantial evidence is persuasive. For one thing, John Warner and Sarah Temple’s eldest son, Cyrus Warner, along with his sons Aaron Warner and Cyrus Warner, Jr., are known to have moved to Onondaga County by 1814. They went on to finish their lives in Clay Township, only a few miles from the Oswego County farm where “our” Aaron spent his final years. And a descendant of Cyrus possesses matching fragments of DNA with yours truly.

Another possible reference to the right Aaron is contained in accounts of the history of Onondaga Academy. This educational institution was founded in Onondaga Hollow, also known as Onondaga Valley, where Aaron and Lois are known to have spent the early years of their marriage. The accounts say the trustees of Onondaga Academy -- the local area’s first non-religious college-level institution -- requisitioned the construction of a building in which to hold classes. The first instructional program had been initiated in 1812, but the faculty and students had to made do with temporary quarters. The contract for the new structure, which was to have stone walls, was awarded in 1813 to a pair of brothers, Moses and Aaron Warner. This Aaron Warner appears to have been too old to have been the Aaron Warner who was a son of John Warner and Sarah Temple, but he might have nonetheless have been “our” Aaron. The building took until 1816 to complete. By about that time, Lois and “our” Aaron are known to have been either living in Onondaga Valley, or were on the brink of arrival. It is not a stretch to assume “our” Aaron and the stone mason were one and the same man -- especially when we consider that two stepsons, Seba White and Amos White, worked as masons at various points in their adult lives. The problem is, that assumption is still an assumption. The name Aaron Warner was not unique in the area. It is easy to see from census records that three distinct individuals named Aaron Warner resided in Onondaga County in the 1820s (one of them being the son of Cyrus Warner), and there could have been others whose presence was not documented.

Let’s drop the speculation and focus on what is solidly known about Lois and Aaron’s life together. The wedding date was among the few stats saved by family members -- though by the 1960s, when the information was exchanged among Warner descendants, some thought it was John Warner’s birthdate. The wedding occurred 12 January 1815. The place is unknown. While it would make sense that Lois remained in Otsego County in her early widowhood, and did not leave until married, there is no proof she did in fact stay. And while Worcester Township was home to its share of Warners, some of whom are enumerated on the same page of the 1810 census as George C. White and household, there is no way to confirm whether or not Aaron was connected to them genealogically. Unfortunately Warner is such a common name that Warners of completely separate lineages often end up living near one another. (An example is the 1870 census, where John Warner’s son John appears on the same census page with a totally unrelated John Warner from Pennsylvania.) The 1820 census shows Aaron and Lois and their household in Onondaga County, NY. There is plenty of reason to assume they had been there several years by that point, but was Aaron already in the county in 1813? Was he the man who built Onondaga Academy? Did Lois move to the vicinity and marry him there? Those questions at this point cannot be definitively answered.

If the place where the wedding occurred is debatable, so too is the birthplace of John Warner, except that it seems reasonable to limit the choices to Worcester Township or Onondaga Valley. Happily, the date is firm as 13 November 1816. It should be pointed out, though, that this certainty was not always the case. When John’s descendants compared notes in the mid-20th Century, they did not have a consensus on that stat, one of the red herrings being the 1815 wedding date. However, the true date can be derived by calculating back from the age-at-death inscription on his gravestone at Rock Lily Cemetery, Winslow, IL. You can see this gravestone in the image in the upper left of this essay. On this webpage you may not find details legible due to the darkness of the moss stain on the front, but if you were to stand in the cemetery looking at the actual stone, or if you had a high-resolution version of the photo to study, you would be able to make out the particulars just fine aside from the bit of scripture along the bottom. The inscription says that John died 5 January 1858 at age 41 years, one month, and 23 days.

A birthdate of 13 November 1816 means John was a child of the Year Without Summer. In 1815, the Tambora volcano in Indonesia went off. It was the biggest volcanic eruption of the past 10,000 years. It sent ash far into the stratosphere all across the globe. The summer of 1816 over the northern hemisphere was so cold it snowed in Washington D.C. during the Fourth of July celebrations. Frost, ice, snow, and floods wiped out entire crops in many locations across the northeastern United States, eastern Canada, and in huge portions of northern and even southern Europe. In upstate New York and New England, only perhaps a quarter of the corn crop was edible. Shortages of essentials such as oats and wheat drove the price of those commodities to many multiples of their normal level. The winter of 1816-17 -- John’s first winter -- was likewise inordinately severe, the only saving grace being that the folk of the region were accustomed to dealing with potentially-lethal cold at that time of year. One way or another, Aaron and Lois and their young ones made it through -- though it is worth wondering if the ordeal accounts for the demises of young Isaiah and Deborah White, who do not turn up in any records after that point.

John was one of two known children of Lois and Aaron. The other child was Albert Warner. John’s great-granddaughter Ruth Warner Gustafson of Sac City, IA supplied this detail in the 1960s in a genealogy chart she made. Ruth must have had some sort of record or correspondence to refer to. However, aside from the name, she had no real details about Albert. She speculated that contact with him was lost after he went to Nebraska. However, Albert never did move to Nebraska. It was John Warner’s sons Frederick (Ruth’s own grandfather), Clifford, and Charles who did so. Fortunately Ethel G. White’s material had more detail, including that he was Albert D. Warner, born about 1820, who in the course of time became a husband and the father of at least one child, a daughter named Eva. Ethel’s information turned out to be imprecise -- for example, the daughter’s name was Ella, not Eva -- but her clues, including that Albert spent his whole life in New York, have made it possible to identify him as the Albert D. Warner who settled on the outskirts of Fulton, Oswego County, NY, where he became a wheelwright, i.e. a maker of carriages and wagons.

Albert was born in 1818 or perhaps in 1819, in time to be included in the 1820 census as a “male under five years old” in Aaron Warner household in Onondaga Township. The 1855 and 1875 New York state censuses confirm Albert was a native of Onondaga County. What brought the Warner/Whites to that place? That part is easy to understand. During the late 1810s through the mid-1820s there was a great tropism in play in upstate New York, drawing all sorts of young families to the Mohawk Valley. It was the economic boom associated with the building of the Erie Canal. Not only could settlers find land on which to farm, but there were limestone formations suitable for quarrying in order to generate building materials of several types. There were brine springs that would go on to be the foundation of a robust salt industry. There were ample chances to earn income through hauling, construction, and selling of goods. Aaron and Lois found a spot they liked in an area south of where the city of Syracuse would rise. This was where John spent his early boyhood.

At some point in the 1820s, probably in the middle of the decade, the Warner/Whites moved on to Hastings Township, Oswego County, NY, a relocation some two dozen miles north of the farm in Onondaga Township. There may have been better land available there -- the Mohawk Valley region is noted for containing some areas not well suited to agriculture and Aaron may not have been able to obtain the sort of parcel he wanted back in Onondaga County. By the time of the relocation, Lois’s elder children were coming of age, or already were grown. Seba appears to have chosen to remain behind in Onondaga County, or even moved slightly east into Madison County. If Deborah and Isaiah were still alive -- there is reason to think they had died -- they departed to begin their independent lives and nothing more is known of them. Cynthia, though, came to Oswego County and took title to a Hastings Township farm in her own name in 1827, prior to becoming the wife of William B. Mack. By the time of the 1830 census, even Amos White had spread his wings. Judging by the census stats, the only kids remaining at home with Lois and Aaron appear to have been John and Albert Warner. George C. White, Jr., it would seem, was part of his sister Cynthia’s household.

Aaron probably died in the early 1830s. The year 1831 is a likely juncture. He does not appear in any public record after the 1830 census. Certainly by the summer of 1832, signs indicate his absence. For example, in July of that year, Amos White purchased fifty-three acres of Hastings Township land from his brother Seba White. Amos may even have been purchasing the parcel that had belonged to Aaron and Lois; some of the $350 he paid for it may have come from his inheritance. Regardless of whether that particular transaction was a matter of the kids arranging who-got-what of the estate, the absence of the patriarch of the clan is apparent in the way the family split up over the course of the 1830s.

In the long term, the Mohawk Valley region remained the bevy of only two of the White/Warner kids (leaving aside Isaiah and Deborah because their fates are unknown). While even today there are a small number of descendants of Aaron and Lois living in the vicinity, of the original generation, only Amos White and Albert D. Warner finished their lives there. For the others, the bond with Oswego and Onondaga Counties dissipated. They heard the westward call that would eventually bring them to the spot that would become the community of Winslow, IL.

John Warner may have been the forerunner in coming to Winslow. Certainly, he is the one member of the clan whose name turns up in a Stephenson County, IL record earlier than any other. His marriage to Marancy Alexander occurred 17 May 1841. (The precise location of the wedding has not been discovered, but it is extremely likely to have been Winslow. The Methodist pastor who officiated at the ceremony was Asa Ballenger, who had settled in Winslow in 1837 and still served locally as a clergyman, though he and his family had moved away in 1839, preferring instead to put down roots a few miles to the north in southern Green County, WI.) There is good reason to think John arrived in Illinois in tandem with his half-sister Cynthia White and her husband William B. Mack and their kids, with half-brother George C. White, Jr. as part of the package. If he did come west alone, he was joined by those same relatives in 1843.

John does not appear in Illinois in the 1840 census. This is an indication he did not arrive until later in that calendar year. Chances are he was there by the end of summer, though, or there would not have been much time to court Marancy and then marry her by the end of the following spring. So the obvious question is, where was John between coming of age in Oswego County in the mid-1830s and his arrival in Winslow at age twenty-three or so? Two clues suggest where he might have been. First, he does not seem to be part of any household of family members back in New York in 1840, so he must have moved on. The second clue comes from the birthplaces of the youngest three of his sister Cynthia’s five children. Her eldest two kids, Harvey and George Mack, were born in Oswego County, as confirmed by the nativity entries of their Civil War records. But the younger three, Robert Emmett, Catherine, and Harry, were born in Canada. Robert, the first of the trio, was born in 1834, and Harry, the last, was born in late 1839 or early 1840. Given how closely Cynthia, John, and George C. White, Jr. merged their lives from the early 1840s onward, it is extremely likely that John was with Cynthia during the second half of the 1830s as well. George was (apparently) part of Cynthia’s household as early as 1830; John must have chosen to follow suit in the wake of his father’s death. If John was in Canada through the first half of 1840, naturally this explains why he does not appear in a U.S. census that year.

There is a slight chance John may have been acquainted with Marancy Alexander as a minor back in Oswego County. Hastings Township is only about twenty miles south of the spot where Marancy is known to have been living as a small child in 1830. But this proximity was probably just coincidence. John and Marancy appear to have ended up in Winslow as part of separate personal journeys, as described in more detail in her section of this essay. It is almost certain they met as neighbors in Illinois in late 1840 or early 1841. Given that they were married by 17 May 1841, they must have taken an immediate liking to one another.

Winslow was very much a frontier community in the first half of the 1840s. Stephenson County had only been created in 1837. Winslow Township -- named in honor of Governor Edward Winslow of early colonial Massachusetts -- had come into being as part of that process, but things were in flux for a few more years to such a degree that the 1840 census describes the locality as Brewster Precinct, after Lyman Brewster, who had been the first permanent white settler, establishing a ferry across the Pecatonica and erecting the area’s first store. The following year an early attempt at a village, under the name Ransomburg, was initiated, but it failed to thrive. By the time of John’s arrival, about all Winslow could boast of was a handful of log-cabin homes, a sawmill, a shingle mill, a blacksmith forge, a wheelwright shop, an incomplete flour mill, and a two-story, ten-bed hotel. The only reason there was any “there” there at all was that William S. Russell, the local representative of a group of Eastern land speculators operating under the name Boston and Western Land Company, had identified this spot along the Pecatonica River as being particularly well-suited to the establishing of a village. The company had acquired much of the land in the vicinity and hoped to sell it at magnificent levels of profit once incoming settlers realized what prime acreage it was and coughed up money accordingly. This was a fantasy on their part. Winslow wasn’t a bad spot to settle, but it was not particularly better than other places, and most of the incoming settlers did not have cash to spend, in part because transactions along the frontier were often done bartering, and in part because the nation was still in the midst of a struggle to shake off the deep recession of the economy that had been begun with the so-called Panic of 1837. Boston and Western’s next representative, Cyrus Woodman, who arrived in Winslow in January, 1840 and made it his home for the next five years, realized William Russell had been overly optimistic. Even to get back the investment money would require carefully developing the area, selling parcels over a much longer period of years than anticipated, and being willing to extend credit to buyers. Woodman was a young, honest, hardworking fellow and did his best to make this happen. It was he who succeeded in getting Winslow officially platted and named, which when the process was completed in 1844 provided the community with an actual bureaucratic existence. History has labelled him the founder of Winslow, and there is no question he deserves this distinction more than William S. Russell, though it was Russell who first suggested that the place be called by that name.

Bit by bit, the community developed. In 1841, the first public school class was held. It was taught by nineteen-year-old Hannah Hammond, who would later in the decade become John Warner’s sister-in-law. Hannah had come to Winslow in the spring of 1840 with her sister Esther and brother-in-law Daniel Sanford, who had been hired by Cyrus Woodman to operate the hotel. The classes that term were held in the wagon shop of Edward Hunt. The first actual schoolhouse, consisting of one room, was not completed until 1847. Church services were held in homes until the completion of a community meeting hall, Wright Hall, which served all faiths until the Presbyterians of the area built the so-called “brick church” in 1855. A shred of society life began to take hold within the village with the formation of the first acapella quartet in 1840. It was made up of a pair of men and their wives, but soon John Warner was added to their number, transforming the group into a quintet. This reference to his vocal skills is one of the few glimpses that survive that shed any light whatsoever on the sort of pastimes John might have enjoyed.

Given all the hard work necessary to establish farms out of virgin woodlands and build the initial infrastructure of the community, prosperity was in short supply and the prospect of better times ahead was still only a hope. This uncertainty may be why John and Marancy did not have children during the first three and a half years of their union. Or at least, they do not seem to have had any. It is extremely likely Marancy was pregnant at least a couple of times during these years. Perhaps she suffered a miscarriage or two that subsequently went unmentioned in family lore. More likely, she and John lost babies to illness. One of the scourges of early Winslow was malaria. While this disease is virtually unknown in America today it killed many thousands on the American frontier in the 1800s. Until homesteading efforts resulted in better drainage and eliminated the worst of the swamps, malarial mosquitoes were rampant in Winslow. Cyrus Woodman’s surviving letters (preserved in the Wisconsin State Historical Society archives) make many references to local deaths from fever, which Woodman attributed to polluted water, a reasonable guess given that science had yet to demonstrate the link between mosquitoes and malaria. (One of the babies to die during that period was Cyrus’s own first son.) Adding to the turmoil of those early years was the weather. The surviving letters of neighbor Joseph Rogers Berry reveal that the winter of 1842-43 was unusually cold and snowy. In the spring, the flooding at Winslow was severe, ruining crops in the low-lying fields, and wrecking the mill pond dam. The sad fact is, we will probably never know if John and Marancy had any children prior to their five known offspring, whether it was due to hard times or not. All we can say is that their first known child was their daughter Araminta, whom they welcomed into the world in late 1844.

Meanwhile, John’s siblings and mother went through a similar period of transition. Cynthia was widowed in 1846. Husband William B. Mack was among the first people buried in the main town graveyard, now known as Rock Lily Cemetery. Cynthia still had young children in tow, yet she chose to remain single for more than two decades, not remarrying until well into her sixties. Her son Robert Emmett Mack managed the farm for her and helped support her and his younger siblings as a blacksmith -- he would put off founding his own family until this obligation had ended. Cynthia had ceased having kids with Harry Mack’s birth, before ever reaching Winslow, which meant Cynthia was done producing kids before her brothers even started siring theirs. (Some of that is a natural consequence of them being eight to twelve years younger than she.) George C. White, Jr. married Hannah Hammond in Freeport 28 June 1846; the couple produced several sons -- Albert White, George C. White III, Frederick White, and John Benton White. John Warner, Cynthia Mack, and George C. White, Jr. had separate households and acreage, but they all lived in close proximity to one another. By the mid-1850s, Seba White also moved to Winslow, where he bought a home lot in the village no more than a few minutes’ walk from the homes of his siblings.

John farmed, of course, as did almost every head-of-household of his era, but his cash income came from mill work. This means sawmill work for the most part, though he may have operated flour mill equipment as well. He is almost certain to have worked at the main Winslow sawmill, which was a Boston and Western Land Company asset when he first arrived and then was sold to John Bradford and Thomas Loring, two of the men William Russell had brought in to improve the mill in late 1838. Thomas Loring moved away from Winslow in 1846. John appears to have taken his place -- at least to some degree. Material written by Cyrus Woodman in the spring of 1850 mentioned the partnership of “Bradford & Warner.” (On the same page, it reveals that John’s mother-in-law Olive Littlefield Alexander had some type of business in Winslow as well.) This leaves open the question of whether the partnership consisted of sawmilling or flour milling -- because there was one of each type of mill. The 1850 census also leaves the question open. John and family are enumerated right after John Bradford and family on the same page. Both men are shown with the occupation of “miller” in that source. When his probable first cousin Ezra Wickwire established a sawmill in Winslow in 1854, John may well have worked there, too. He would have been well known to Nathaniel Martin, another Bradford-Loring employee who, with Cyrus Woodman’s encouragement, co-founded a huge sawmill in 1850-51 a mile north of Winslow at the site that would become the village of Martintown, WI. This professional connection was the beginning of an acquaintance between the families that would in 1869 result in a marriage between John’s eldest son and namesake and Nathaniel’s eldest daughter Eleanor Amelia “Nellie” Martin. Robert Emmett Mack was also associated with Nathaniel Martin and probably worked on the mill’s equipment and helped found Martintown’s first blacksmith shop, which is believed to have first opened in 1869. (That would be the first blacksmith shop actually within the boundaries of the village. It was a partnership with John Dunn, who had apprenticed with Ely Wickwire in Winslow in the 1850s and whose older sister Cordelia was the wife of Henry E. Wickwire. The blacksmith shop is therefore another example of how the Warners, Whites, and Macks were linked to the Wickwire clan.) Cynthia’s eldest son Harvey B. Mack lived right in Martintown in the early 1870s and served as the justice of the peace who married two of Nellie’s siblings to their spouses.

By 1853 John and Marancy’s family was complete at five children -- Araminta, John, Frederick, Clifford, and Charles A. Warner -- the births, once they began, coming approximately every two years. Throughout this phase from the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s, all indications are that the household was stable and relatively secure, though as mentioned above, the pioneer nature of the environment did not allow for luxury. A venture as ambitious as Nathaniel Martin’s mills was a big deal at the time. The real key to the success of the Warner family was that they had arrived in the region when land was empty and could be had essentially for the price of agreeing to homestead it.

Marancy’s mother Olive Littlefield was widowed in 1843 and thereafter lived in John and Marancy’s home. So did Lois Warner for a while. Lois had arrived some time during the 1840s -- the 1840 census indicates she was not part of the initial migration west, instead spending the early part of her widowhood in the household of her son Amos White in Oswego County. Both Olive and Lois had other children residing locally that they might have taken shelter with. The fact that they chose to stay with John and Marancy is an indication the young couple were prospering at least to some degree. In 1853, when final child Charles was born, John was still short of forty years old, Marancy was shy of thirty, and both were no doubt anticipating a long, happy life in Winslow, during which they would get to watch their fine, healthy brood of children come of age. It was not to be. John died 5 January 1858. It is not clear if his health declined over time -- the lack of births during the mid-1850s is a hint this might have been the case -- or if he perished suddenly. Either way, he was gone. His remains were buried at Rock Lily Cemetery in Winslow, probably not far from his parents-in-law Joseph Alexander and Olive Littlefield. (Olive had died in 1853.)

Lois outlived her son by at least eight years, a demonstration of remarkable vitality given she was nearly eighty at the time of his death. She had moved out of John's household and joined her widower son Seba White in the 1850s -- she appears in his household in the 1855 state census. Upon John’s death and Seba’s 1859 marriage to Hannah Womeldorf Ballenger, Lois moved in with Cynthia. She appears in Cynthia’s household in the 1860 Federal and 1865 state censuses. Her son Amos White’s last will and testament mentions Lois as an heir and grants her a bequest of one hundred fifty dollars (in the mid-1860s, this was enough to live on for a couple of years). It is assumed Amos was in regular contact with his mother despite the Illinois-to-New York separation. Amos must have had cause to assume she was alive as of 22 June 1866, the date his will was created. Since Lois does not appear in the 1870 census, she is assumed to have died in the late 1860s. (She lived long enough that the photograph of her shown at left was taken -- this being a sort of thing that was not routine among frontier families until the 1860s. Ethel G. White’s notes confirm that in the 1970s, Ethel was still in possession of such a photograph, probably another copy of the tintype that was scanned for this webpage, a tintype now owned by Dave Smeds. Alas, the copy Ethel referred to was thrown away not long after her death in 1980.)

The fates of John’s brother and half-siblings are as follows:

Albert D. Warner was about thirteen years old when his father died. He was still a bit too young to go along with the siblings who headed to Canada in the mid-1830s, so he -- along with his mother -- is almost certain to have spent the late 1830s within the home of Amos White. Albert’s middle name may have been Dedenia. His nephew Albert D. White, son of Amos White, had the middle name Dedenia, and may have been named in honor of his uncle Albert. The 1840 census indicates Albert was no longer under Amos’s roof by that year, but his bond to Oswego County had become cemented, and he ended up only five miles to the north in Volney Township. He wed his wife, Margaret, some time in the 1840s, probably toward the end of that decade. Ethel G. White’s notes do not provide Margaret’s first name, but do state her maiden family name was Babcock. This was almost right. She was Margaret Carrier, daughter of Harvey Carrier of Lenox, Berkshire County, MA, a pioneer of Volney Township, and his wife Phoebe G. (perhaps for Glendorah) Babcock of Rhode Island.

Albert bought land in Volney Township in 1847 and it would appear he and Margaret remained there for the rest of their lives. If Albert had ever been tempted to head west like his brother and half-siblings, he probably was unsuccessful in talking Margaret into it. The Carrier clan, i.e. the descendants of her grandfather Levi Carrier, were extremely well established in Volney Township, and it is a safe bet she appreciated the local prominence of her family, and the emotional bonds, too much to want to leave the area.

The Warner home was on Emery Street on the eastern outskirts of Fulton, a community which later expanded and incorporated. The spot where Albert and Margaret lived is consequently now inside Fulton. However, in Albert’s lifetime he would have said he lived in Volney Township, though he probably would have rendered this as “the Town of Volney.” Some time in the early 1850s Albert added a wheelwright shop to his property and began making carriages and wagons for a living.

(The sketch shown at right appeared in History of Oswego County, New York, with Illustrations and Biographical Sketches of Some of Its Prominent Men and Pioneers, published in 1877 by L.H. Everts & Company of Philadelphia. The drawing portrays the home and farm of Ira and Mayette Carrier, who are both profiled in the volume. Ira was an uncle of Margaret Carrier Warner and this farm was within sight of the Albert Warner property. If the artist had been rendering Albert and Margaret’s land, the result would have looked similar, though the view would surely have prominently featured the wheelwright shop facing Emery Street. The wide lane shown in the right portion of this drawing probably is, in fact, a section of Emery Street.)

Albert exhibited the Warner curse of limited longevity, though his lifespan was not as short as his brother’s. He at least got to see his daughter fully grown, and may have lived long enough to give her away as a bride at her wedding. Albert appears in the 1875 New York state census, but in the 1880 Federal census, Margaret is shown in the same house as a widow. Albert’s precise date of death has yet to be discovered. Margaret would spend over thirty years as a widow. She did not pass away until 1910.

Albert and Margaret’s only child was Ella Glendorah Warner, born in April, 1851. Ella, often known by her middle name and sometimes simply as Glen, married Charles Hewitt, son of a clergyman from England who had brought his family to Oswego County in the late 1840s. Charles had been born 20 April 1844 in Boston in Lincolnshire and therefore had been a small boy at the time of his immigration. Accordingly, his loyalties were firmly American and he had eagerly served in the Civil War. He would go on to be active for many decades in Civil War veterans’ organizations. The wedding occurred in about 1876. The young couple did not establish a home of their own. Albert may have already died. If not, he soon would. Charles became the new male head of the household, and Ella got to continue occupying the dwelling in which she had been raised. This meant Margaret was not left there on her own as a widow.

Charles Hewitt and Ella Glendorah Warner had two sons, Harvey Carrier Hewitt, born 31 January 1879, and Roy Louis Hewitt, born 2 November 1883. Some time in the late 1880s or early 1890s (one source says 1888, another 1890, and a third 1891), the Hewitts moved to Colorado Springs, CO. This was a permanent relocation for Charles, Glendorah, and Roy -- all three of these family members spent the majority of the remainder of their lives in Colorado Springs and their graves are in the city’s Evergreen Cemetery. It was unusual for them to be absent. One of the few exceptions was a period of perhaps only a few months when Ella Glendorah and Charles came back to Fulton while Margaret Warner was on the verge of death. Roy was away during his military service in World War I and did spend a work stint as an electrician -- his lifelong occupation -- at the Portland Mine in Victor, Teller County, CO immediately following the war, during which time he met Nellie Catherine Stipe, the woman who became his wife. Otherwise his main absence was from the late 1940s to the brink of the 1960s when he and Nellie retired to Arvada, CO, purchasing a 1½-acre portion of the ranch of Nellie’s brother George. Even then, they came back to Colorado Springs before the end of their days.

(Ella Glendorah Warner Hewitt is the elderly woman on the platform, and her husband Charles is the man in the background, facing away from the camera. The plump woman Glen is looking at is her good friend Sarah Doonan Hayes, mother-in-law of George Harold Stipe, a brother of Glen and Charles’s daughter-in-law Nellie.)

Charles Hewitt died in August, 1932, Ella Glendorah 21 May 1939, and Roy 3 August 1968. Roy and Nellie (who died in 1970 at age eighty-seven) did not have children. She perhaps was barren as she also had not had children with any of her three previous husbands. Harvey Carrier Hewitt returned to Fulton before he reached age twenty-one. He boarded with his grandmother until her death 14 June 1910. (There is in fact no record that places Harvey in Colorado at any point. Presumably he spent the bulk of the 1890s in Colorado Springs, but in theory it is possible he remained with his grandmother all along.) Harvey worked as a gardener and landscaper as a young man. He briefly became a farmer after his 1912 marriage to Zelah Elida Loomis -- a change of career made possible by the money and property he had inherited as Margaret’s main heir, and no doubt influenced toward that occupation by his father-in-law Willard R. Loomis, who farmed his whole life in Volney Township at Ingalls Crossing right on Emery Road, which was the rural portion of Emery Street -- so one could say Harvey married a girl from just up the road. Zelah came to the marriage at only sixteen. Harvey was nearly thirty-four. This was not a good recipe for a lasting union and indeed, it went sour within a few years. By 1916, Harvey left the state for good. He went to Chester, PA, just south of Philadelphia, and became a steelworker. He does not appear to have played a meaningful role in the lives of the two daughters he sired with Zelah. He continued to reside far from them and his ex-wife. He was still in place in the southern Philadelphia area when he filled out his draft card in 1942, at age sixty-three. Zelah married George A. Donaldson in 1921. This marriage did not last long, either, though it resulted in another couple of children. (In addition, Zelah became a stepmother of one daughter George had sired with previous wife Florence Townsend.) The main difference was that George Donaldson continued to live quite close to Zelah and the kids. The pair may have eventually reconciled. Zelah lived out her life in Oswego County and died in 1981. The two daughters Harvey and Zelah produced were Viola Elida Hewitt and Ruth Glendorah Hewitt. The surviving descendants of Albert Warner all flow from these two great-granddaughters, both of whom were raised in Oswego County, including chunks of time spent on their Loomis grandparents’ farm. Ruth, who married and had kids with Elden Cook, remained local to the Oswego County region her whole life, dying in 1981 (slightly predeceasing her mother). Viola came west in the late 1930s to join her relatives in Colorado Springs. She married and had offspring with Dallas C. Larson. They spent the World War II years in San Diego, CA, but returned to Colorado Springs, where they resided within the city itself and also in the suburb of Security. Dallas died in 1982, Viola in 1995.

Deborah White, though she was still alive in 1813, is believed to have died before adulthood. Isaiah M. White has not been tracked. In general, these two are only known from being mentioned in the 1813 will.

Seba White (whose name may have come from “Sebee” White, one of his father’s brothers, or if we grant the Wickwire connection, may have come from Seba Wickwire, a great-grandson of Ichabod Wickwire, Sr. who shared a childhood with Lois in Litchfield County, CT) was the eldest of the family, born in late 1799 or in early 1800. Because he was so much older than the other kids, Seba had the chance to become closely acquainted with the overall group of families who were neighbors in Worcester and then migrated more or less en masse to Onondaga Township in the 1810s. These families included the Marbles, the Capels, the Olmsteds, and the Lowers. The bonds lingered. Coming of age about 1820, Seba probably acquired his wife Sarah from among those families, the wedding date being unknown but probably being some time early in the decade. At this point in the genealogical research, it is looking like his bride may have been Sarah Lower, daughter of Richard Lower and Rachel Beeman, but this so far has been impossible to verify. Sarah’s middle initial -- presumably the first letter of her maiden name -- was “L.” Seba and Sarah began life together in Onondaga County. There is a hint they came along with the rest of the family to Oswego County, but this may be a false impression. The hint is the aforementioned July 1832 deed transaction, which transferred the fifty-three acre Hastings Township parcel from Seba and Sarah L. White to Amos White. The natural inference is that the parcel was home to Seba and Sarah, but there is no way to be certain of that. Seba could have acquired legal control over the parcel as part of the dispersal of the estate of Aaron Warner, perhaps having title to it mostly as a function of being the executor. Other indications suggest Seba spent his twenties, thirties, and forties among the Marbles and Lowers, a group that could be found in the 1820s in Manlius, Onondaga County and helped found Sullivan, Madison County, NY -- these communities both being slightly east of Syracuse. Seba appears as the head-of-household in the 1840 census essentially in the latter locale, designated as Lenox Township, Madison County. Unfortunately the names of the other occupants of that home were not recorded. They consisted of a woman under thirty (if this was Sarah, she was younger than supposed), a girl under five, and a girl between five and ten years old.

Some of the Lower clan, including Leander Lower, who may have been Seba’s brother-in-law, moved to Raymond Township, Racine County, WI in the mid-1840s. Seba went with them. He appears among them on the same page of the 1850 census enumerated simply as “S. White.” He is the only White in the household. The logical assumption is that he was a widower. Inasmuch as marital status was not one of the stats collected in the 1850 census, this must remain a guess. The fate of any children is unknown. Seba’s occupation is mason, a trade he may have picked up as apprentice to his stepfather Aaron.

Eventually Seba gave in to the lure of Winslow and joined his siblings there. Ethel G. White’s material mentions that Seba lived in Winslow but gives no details of when he arrived; however, other sources confirm it was in the early 1850s. He is listed as Zeba White, a grocer in Winslow on page 295 of Sketches of the History of Stephenson County, a book published in 1854 containing data that must have been gathered during the preceding year. He is shown in Winslow in 1855 Illinois state census. Finally, a deed dated 6 October 1855 that shows he acquired a home lot in the heart of Winslow, just a couple of football-field-lengths north and east of the homesteads of John and Cynthia, and a similar distance north of property belonging to George.

Seba married second wife Hannah Womeldorf 2 November 1859. A daughter of (John) Frederick Womeldorf and Barbara Bierly, Hannah had been born 8 April 1818 in Brush Valley, Centre County, PA. She was the widow of Oratia N. (aka Horatio Nelson) Ballenger, whom she had married in 1844. Oratia in turn was a son of Asa Ballenger, the M.E. pastor who had officiated at the wedding of John Warner and Marancy Alexander. Hannah and Oratia had made their home in the part of Clarno Township, Green County, WI that the Ballengers had pioneered beginning in the late 1830s. As mentioned above, this land was only a few miles north of Winslow. At least four children, born in the late 1840s and early 1850s, had sprung from the union of Hannah and Oratia before he passed away. At least three of those kids were were still alive at the time Hannah married Seba. One of these was Aquilla Nelson Ballenger, who at not quite seventeen years old in May, 1864, ran off along with Seba’s nephew John Warner to join the 142nd Illinois Regiment and serve in the Civil War. Both boys lied about their age in order to be recruited. Such documentation as the boys’ Civil War files is proof that Seba remained in Winslow through the first half of the 1860s, but strangely, his household is not enumerated there in the 1860 census. This is probably just an error on the part of the local censustaker, whose submitted pages leave much to be desired. (In addition to atrocious penmanship, he would only indicate first names by initials if he could get away with it.) Seba does appear as a head-of-household in Winslow in the 1865 state census, on the same page as his sister Cynthia (as was the case in the 1855 census).

In the second half of the 1860s, Aquilla Ballenger settled permanently in Schuyler County, MO, a place where he would spend the next sixty years and more, finally passing away in early 1930 at nearly eighty-three years of age. Seba and Hannah came along. Seba undoubtedly spent the final fragment of his life in Schuyler County. He and Hannah are enumerated there in the 1870 census in Salt River Township, as part of Aquilla’s household. By then, Seba was seventy. He did not live long enough to appear in the 1880 census. His widow Hannah is known to have remained in Schuyler County near the village of Lancaster until the latter part of the century, but by no later than the mid-1890s returned to the vicinity of Cedarville, Buckeye Township, Stephenson County, IL, where the Womeldorf family had settled in the early 1840s. Her sister Barbara Yeagle was still living there, which was no doubt the lure that brought Hannah back even though the option existed to stay in Missouri with her sons Aquilla and Millard. She brought back with her her firstborn son, whose name was probably Aram. (The name Aram looks like Aaron, Hiram, and Abram when written by hand, and references to him can be found under those variations, making it hard to determine his correct name.) Aram was feeble-minded and was institutionalized in the early summer of 1896 at the Stephenson County Poor Farm. Hannah was admitted to the same facility seven weeks later. The poor farm was the era’s version of a convalescent home and mental hospital, and quite a few of the county’s decrepit elders ended up there. At 78, Hannah might well have been at the point where she had no choice but to be admitted, but one has to wonder if she simply couldn’t bear the distress she saw on Aram’s face at being left in such a place without his mother, and used her age as an excuse to get in where she could keep him company. The pair spent their remaining days there, Hannah passing away 5 April 1900, and Aram dying 18 March 1902. They were buried next to one another at Cedarville Cemetery. A “Mother & Son” monument was placed at the gravesite. The location of Seba’s gravesite is not known, but is probably near Lancaster, MO.

Cynthia White Mack, as mentioned above, acquired Oswego County land in her own name in 1827. Her marriage to William B. Mack probably occurred in 1828. As newlyweds, the couple set themselves up near the farms of her kinfolk -- an Oswego County bill-of-sale confirms that William B. Mack sold grain to his brother-in-law Amos White in May, 1833. By that date, Cynthia had recently given birth to -- or was just about to give birth to -- the second of her known children, George C. Mack. (Undoubtedly his middle initial stood for Chapman). Before Robert Emmett Mack was born on 24 September 1834, Cynthia and William moved to Canada. This must surely mean just over the border in Ontario Province. From there, probably in late 1840 or early 1841, it was on to Winslow. Or at least, that’s one theory. They may have gone from Canada back to Oswego County for a few years. Amos White bought seventy acres of Hastings Township land from William and Cynthia in August, 1843. However, this transaction may mean that by 1843, William and Cynthia were confident that Winslow would remain their long-term home, and they chose to liquidate property they had held on to for ten years but had not personally farmed. Assuming they did not handle the paperwork by mail, their trip to Oswego County to take care of the transaction, and their return trip to Winslow, might have been the occasion when Lois came west.

Cynthia was widowed in 1846 and forged on as a single woman for many years -- albeit with most of her sons and later her mother in her household during much of that span. One way she accomplished this was to sell pieces of the original homestead, which probably consisted of 160 acres. She sold forty acres in 1848 to Otis Eddy, and then another forty acres to Nathaniel Martin in early 1850. This, along with help from her grown sons, was enough to keep her going. She did not marry again until the late 1860s. By then, her two surviving sons and her daughter were independent and she no longer had to worry about her mother, who must have finally passed away. Cynthia’s new husband was Harvey Bancroft, whom she wed 5 February 1868. Cynthia became part of his household, which included three of his adult or near-adult children from his previous marriage, plus one younger child, eight-year-old Albert Bancroft. The latter, sadly, would perish eighteen months later before turning ten. The couple’s home and farm was in Clarno Township several miles north of Winslow and Martintown. Harvey Bancroft would survive until 1888, but Cynthia was not so fortunate. The surviving bottom half of the headstone of her grave (shown above left) fixes her date of death as 27 August 1870, but unfortunately the stone is too weathered to determine whether or not the inscription included an age-at-death, so we are still deprived of her precise date of birth. She was buried between first husband William B. Mack and Katie Mack, a granddaughter that died in 1864 at nine months old. The inscription identifies Cynthia as “Wife of H. Bancroft” but given how briefly she was a Bancroft, she is noted in cemetery records under the name Mack as well. If a given name was originally included on the stone, it was on the portion lost to vandalism long ago. The remains of second husband Harvey Bancroft were interred at Greenwood Cemetery in Monroe with his first wife and the sons that predeceased him.

Cynthia had at least five children. The relatively low number may mean she lost offspring in childhood whose names are undiscovered. The known five, all of whom survived to adulthood, were Harvey Belford, George C., Robert Emmett, Catherine L., and Harry A. Mack. The younger four appear in her household in the 1850 and 1860 censuses. Harvey, the eldest, was already grown by 1850 and was not even in Winslow -- he may have been off chasing gold in California. Harvey did soon return to Winslow, though, and married a local gal, Aurelia Celestia Tyler, in 1853. They had four children, including two born in Winslow and one in Martintown. Harvey (shown at right in his old age, scanned from a portrait in an advertisement) served in the Union Army through most of the Civil War, but was unique in the family in that he survived to resume his civilian existence. (He developed kidney disease during his hitch that would plague him lifelong. Even during the war the condition kept him from the battlefield for a long stretch. He was eventually able to get up from his sick bed, though, and he served as a teamster during Sherman’s March to the Sea.) Some time in the late 1860s Harvey and Aurelia moved to Martintown. His main occupation was carpenter, though while in Green County in the 1870s, he supplemented that income by serving as a justice of the peace. It was he who signed the marriage records of two of John Warner the younger’s siblings-in-law, Elias Martin and Emma Ann Martin. (Harvey often went by H.B. Mack, and it must be noted that he is not the same person as W.B. Mack, also a Green County justice of the peace in the 1870s. It can be an easy mistake to make. Wescott B. Mack, a Green County pioneer profiled in the famous 1884 history of the county, had a wife named Ophelia, whose name, age, and birthplace are all strikingly close to those of Aurelia Tyler Mack.) By the end of the 1870s, Harvey and Aurelia moved to Norton County, KS (where among other things he was the local enumerator for the 1885 state census), then in the second half of the 1880s on to Saguache, CO, where he operated a business that was a combination of saloon, pool hall and cigar shop. Harvey passed away in 1893. Even after the departure from Wisconsin and then after Harvey’s death, the family connections continued to be active -- for example, Aurelia’s brother Dayton Tyler was the partner of John Warner the younger in the Martintown area in the 1890s, operating a custom hardwood lumber business, Tyler & Warner, and Dayton’s daughter, Jennie Tyler Steere, was the teacher at the school John Warner’s kids attended in the mid-1890s. Harvey’s descendants were associated with southern California through the 20th Century, including San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Bernardino.

As mentioned above, Cynthia’s blacksmith son Robert Emmett Mack -- the only one of her sons not to become a soldier -- remained a prominent part of Winslow and Martintown for many years. In 1861, he married Emily Amelia Smith. They had nine children. (Ten if you count another that died as a baby.) Robert appears to have been the senior partner in the blacksmith shop he and John Dunn founded in Martintown, but for some reason, it is remembered today as John Dunn’s operation and Robert is not mentioned in most references to it. Robert and family relocated to Iowa in the 1880s. His clan and members of his uncle Amos White’s clan continued to associate in Iowa for decades. Robert has many descendants alive today.

George C. Mack joined the 92nd Illinois Infantry in the late summer of 1862 (signing up two days after Harvey, and about a year after his kid brother Harry) and died in February, 1865 in Aiken, SC. His passing was the second such blow Cynthia endured during the war. Her youngest son, Harry, died in 1862 of an illness contracted while in the army. He is one of the relatives whose grave is near Cynthia’s at Rock Lily Cemetery (gravemarker shown at left, photo taken in 2010), Harry having died in Winslow despite having been a soldier for nine months. (It may have been his passing that inspired two of his older brothers to head for the recruiting station, which they did as soon as the 1862 harvest was dealt with.).

Catherine L. (probably for Lois, though it is Louise in one not-quite-reliable source) Mack, born 19 March 1838, known as Kate, married Josiah Hilliard, a tailor and farmer, on the Fourth of July, 1854, going up to Green County for the legal aspects but returning to Winslow to participate in that evening’s combination wedding reception and big holiday celebration held in Ezra Wickwire’s back yard. Kate and Josiah had three children, but this tally includes a baby who died young. The two kids who survived were Charles O. Hilliard, born in the mid-1850s, and Hattie, born at the end of the 1860s. Kate and Josiah lived in Winslow until the early 1880s, then they and their kids moved to Sioux City, Woodbury County, IA, where Josiah became a partner in a hardware store with son Charles and Charles’s new father-in-law William Stidworthy. Kate passed away 24 November 1904, and Josiah in 1912.

Kate and Josiah’s line never expanded to large numbers but there are descendants alive today. Hattie was a lifelong spinster, remaining in the Sioux City home with her widower father and mother’s cousin Loren White until her death in 1911. Charles and his wife Josephine Stidworthy had three daughters counting a baby who died. The two who survived were (Elsie) Olivia and Charlotte (sometimes called Lottie), who were raised to adulthood in Sioux City and then as young women accompanied Charles and Josephine when they relocated in 1909 to Tripp County, SD, where Charles was a pioneer businessman (as a tinner) of Winner, the county seat, and in 1926 was elected mayor of that village. Both Charles and Josephine appear to have finished their lives in Winner, she dying in 1926 and he in 1938, though he may have moved away for the final small fragment of his life. The graves of Charles and Josephine are back in Sioux City, though, where their infant daughter was buried in 1894. Charlotte was one of Winner’s first school teachers. She may have taught the grandchildren of Cliford Warner, her father’s second cousin. Clifford and his son Claude Dee Warner resided in that part of Tripp County in the 1910s and 1920s, so it is reasonable to suspect Claude’s children may have had Lottie as their teacher. Charlotte, who remained unmarried for many decades, finally moved on from Winner in the late 1930s. Finally in the 1940s, by which time she was in her late fifties or early sixties, she became a wife. Her husband was Van Morse, whose parents had been neighbors of the Hilliards back in Winslow in the 1870s. Charlotte and Van both died in the early 1970s, finishing their lives in Oakdale, Stanislaus County, CA. Having married so late, naturally they did not have children. Olivia Hilliard married Martin Paul Buol in 1910, leaving Tripp County behind in the process and never again living near her parents. Early into their marriage the couple settled among other Buol kinfolk in Randolph, Cedar County, NE, where they raised two daughters, Josephine and Margaret Buol. Both Josephine and Margaret and their husbands, along with Olivia and Martin, eventually settled in Cedaredge, Delta County, CO, where they each passed away in their turn over the final few decades of the Twentieth Century.

Amos White looms large in the family history because Ethel G. White was in a position to preserve many of the essential facts about him and his life, something that cannot be said to the same degree of the rest of Lois’s offspring. For example, whereas Seba, Cynthia, John, and George, Jr. probably all lost offspring at birth or in early childhood, it is only with Amos that we have some names to go with those sad occurrences.

Like Seba, Amos appears to have picked up the trade of stone mason from his stepfather, and it would appear he headed out in his late teens to build up his nest egg plying that trade in the construction boom going on in the Syracuse area as the Erie Canal was completed and began to support a robust merchantile corridor. (The salt industry also surged.) Amos appears to have done well for himself. Various land purchases, and the value of his holdings as shown in censuses, demonstrate that he became a well-to-do man, reaching a level of prosperity his siblings did not match. The money he accumulated in his early career surely was his means to buy the fifty-three acres in 1832, though some of the $350 may have come to him as part of his inheritance.

The purchase of the Hastings Township land was the beginning the life Amos would establish for himself as an adult. He may not have lived there full-time at first. He probably continued to work many months out of the year in the urban areas of Onondaga County, while his mother and other kinfolk lived on the farm. His presence would have become more year-round upon his 28 April 1836 marriage to Catharine Britton, whom he brought back with him from the village of Onondaga.

Catharine was one of eight known children of Israel Britton and Magdalanah Huffman. The latter couple spent the initial portion of their married life in the border area of Dutchess County and Columbia County, including an interval on acreage near Pine Plains, where Catharine was born 24 July 1816. The family moved to a home on what would become South Salina Street in the village of Onondaga in the mid-1820s. The family would retain the same house for the rest of the century -- it became the home of Catharine’s younger brother Matthias Britton with the death of Israel Britton at the end of 1849.

The fifty-three acres bought in 1832 may have been the Aaron Warner estate. It is described as Hastings Township land. But later in 1832, Hastings Township was rearranged and much of its territory became part of the new Schroeppel Township. (Pronounced like the word scruple, as in a concern of morality or conscience.) It would seem that the fifty-three acre parcel was in the new township and ceased to be Hastings Township land. Amos’s home is described in all later records as being in Schroeppel Township. The nearest village was Caughdenoy. In 1835, Amos purchased another, smaller property near Caughdenoy, and then in 1843, bought the seventy-acre Hastings Township farm of his sister Cynthia. However, these latter purchases appear to represent investments, not places Amos and Catharine moved to. In fact, the former Mack farm may have soon been sold to Catharine’s brother Darius Britton, and would stay in the hands of Darius, his widow, and then his niece/adopted daughter Alice Britton Matteson until the 1920s. As near as can be determined, the original fifty-three acre property was where Amos and his wife Catharine chose to make their home throughout the whole of their marriage.

Amos and Catharine became parents of a daughter, Amanda Malvina White, 18 November 1838. Her identity is known thanks to Ethel G. White’s material. She was one of three children lost young. However, surely there were other, unknown siblings. The next known child was Henry Anson White, not born until 4 August 1844. A seven-year-gap in births for a young couple who later demonstrated ample fecundity, as well as a span of nearly two years between the wedding and the conception of Amanda? It isn’t likely that these years were entirely bereft of pregnancies. A number of babies must have been lost at birth or in early infancy. Ethel’s material does not address the matter. She includes only three children who passed away in early childhood. Amanda survived to 1845, dying at just short of seven years old. Richard White would be born in late 1850 and would live five months. Another child, Mina White, is mentioned by Ethel but without dates. Mina is shown at age one in the 1855 state census as “M. White,” and does not reappear in the 1860 census.

Amos White is shown at right. No photographs have been found of any of his generation -- a curious state of affairs, given that we do have a photo of his mother -- but at some point in middle age, Amos and Catharine posed for an artist, who created a set of watercolor portraits. These were preserved in frames and were inherited first by son Henry, then his son Arthur, and then his daughter Ella Mary White Duckworth (1920-2006). This was scanned from a snapshot of the original, taken by Ella in the 1980s.

The four children who grew to adulthood were the aforementioned Henry Anson White along with Albert Dedenia White, born 7 January 1847, and twins Loren, a male, and Lois, born 11 November 1857.

By 1860, other than the lingering grief from the loss of children, circumstances were good with Amos and his family. The 1860 census paints a portrait of a prosperous middle-aged couple with four healthy children, at home on land they had lived on for decades. Amos was well thought-of in his community and served on the local school board. But the 1860s brought one ordeal after another. Catharine passed away 11 August 1862 at only forty-six years of age, of causes not recorded. Amos was left to try to raise two young children left motherless at less than five years of age. Amos had to attempt this while coping with a son, Albert, who was not well-behaved and failed to make much of himself, and while worrying about eldest son Henry, a soldier in the Civil War.

Coming to the rescue was Catharine’s sister Margaret Keeler, who had come back to the region as a widow, having spent about fifteen years in Wisconsin and Illinois with husband Kendrick Keeler (1807-1860) and their kids. Margaret became surrogate mother to Lois and Loren, even as she was completing the raising of her own youngest daughter, Linda.

The 1865 census shows Amos on his farm with his kids (one of whom, Henry, was actually not there, but off serving as a soldier) and Margaret and her son Heman (another soldier, and like Henry almost sure to not actually have been present in the home). The following spring, Amos bought a farm on South Salina Street near the homes of his brothers-in-law Matthias Britton and Almon Britton, and moved his household there. Amos must have decided to take advantage of the prospect of childcare help from his in-laws, and perhaps was thinking the more urban circumstances might give the twins a better chance for an education. And, too, he might have decided to reinvent himself, perhaps envisioning the resumption of his stone mason career closer to the places where major contracts could be obtained. Unfortunately, he personally did not get to fulfill whatever plans he had. He was deprived of that potential chapter of his story by the kick of a horse.

The kicking occurred 16 June 1866. Amos was not killed outright, but must have received internal injuries that resulted in sepsis. Had he lived in an age of modern surgery and antibiotics, he surely could have been saved, but as it was, he was doomed, and he knew it. He made out his last will and testament on the 22nd of June. He died a few days later -- the 26th according to newspaper accounts and estate paperwork, the 25th according to Margaret Keeler’s entry in her family Bible. His remains were soon interred with those of Catharine at Old Rose Cemetery in Onondaga Township, in a grave right next to that of his father-in-law.

Amos made his brother-in-law Matthias Britton his executor, charged with the responsibility for using the estate resources to the benefit of young orphans Lois and Loren until they came of age, and then bequeathing what value remained among all four surviving kids. Matthias was a steady sort of person, a leading citizen of the village of Onondaga, and was probably the ideal choice, but it is probably no coincidence that it was the year 1867 in which Matthias suddenly bought a stone quarry and within a few years installed a lime kiln (for the processing of limestone into cement). In so doing, he created the firm that would soon be known as Britton & Son, which he owned and operated with his only son, Israel E. Britton. Matthias and Israel would spent the rest of their lives deriving the bulk of their wealth from this venture. It was surely Amos’s money that made it possible to buy the quarry and kiln -- either money that Amos had possessed in cash, or in the form of a loan using the White farm on Salina Street as collateral. (Judging by an 1875 property map of the neighborhood, the estate retained ownership of the farm for many years, probably until Lois and Loren White came of age.) Giving Matthias the benefit of the doubt, he probably saw this investment as the natural way to do his fiduciary duty and ensure that funds were available for the care of Lois and Loren, and if he did borrow money from the estate, he may well have paid back every cent. However, it is reasonable to point out that it was Brittons, not Whites, who derived the longest-term benefit from the creation of the lime kiln business. The White siblings may have found this development suspicious or at least unsatisfactory, which would help explain why they eventually departed New York and let the bonds with the Britton side of their heritage fade, even though it was their Britton relatives with whom they had been raised. Instead, they got to know their Warner/White relatives, whom they must have barely known during their father’s lifetime.

Henry Anson White (shown left) was the first to join his paternal kinfolk. This occurred no later than 1868. Perhaps his grandmother Lois was still alive to plead with him to come see her. Perhaps it was his aunt Cynthia and/or uncle George C. White, Jr. who extended the invitation. Whatever the lure, to Winslow Henry came. Though he made at least one extended visit back to New York, Winslow was otherwise his home until 1879, and his bride, Ellen Amelia Gamber, daughter of James Hunt Gamber and Mary Cox, was a Winslow girl who had grown up as a close neighbor of the Whites, Warners, and Macks. The wedding occurred 17 November 1875.

Lois and Loren White were undoubtedly on-hand for those nuptials as witnesses, having turned eighteen six days earlier. They had come of age within their uncle Matthias’s home. The 1875 New York census, a survey taken in June of that year, shows them still there, but their move to Winslow happened soon after that. Earlier in their childhood Matthias and wife Frances had left the twins in the care of Margaret Britton Keeler, either on the White farm, or in Margaret’s own nearby home. This home was shared wtih Margaret’s daughter Linda, six years the twins’ elder. After the twins left for Winslow, Margaret remained in Onondaga/Syracuse lifelong. (And it was a long life. She died in 1909 as she was approaching ninety-five years of age.)

Loren got to know the tinsmithing trade in Winslow at the side of Charles O. Hilliard, son of Cynthia White Mack’s daughter Katharine L. Mack and her husband Josiah Hilliard. Lois got started on married life on schedule, marrying a young man of Winslow, Floyd Fowler Peters, son of Orsamus and Susan Peters, on 12 June 1878. (Orsamus’s sister Cynthia was a daughter-in-law of John Bradford.) The 1880 census shows both of the twins in Winslow, Loren with the Hilliards and Lois with Floyd and their newborn baby Ena. Ironically, at this point, their brother Henry was back in Onondaga. Henry had decided to return home in the spring of 1879. He and Ella and their growing family remained there for four to five years. Henry worked for his uncle Matthias. Perhaps he was trying to position himself as the eventual boss of Britton & Son. If so, he must have eventually conceded that his cousin Israel was the heir apparent. Henry gave up his experiment and came back west, probably in 1883 or 1884.

But not to Winslow. Henry and Ella became part of a large migration of Winslow folk into Iowa. This exodus seems to have been a case of the “Manifest Destiny” urge taking hold. The pioneers of Stephenson County had arrived in the period from the late 1830s to the early 1850s; now their kids wanted to find their own empty spaces. The Macks and the Gambers were among the families who headed off in the early 1880s, so it was only natural that Henry and Ella followed suit as soon as they had given up on Onondaga. By the mid-1880s they had reached Wright County, IA, where they would stay until the kids were grown. In their mature years, they went on to greater Oskaloosa, Mahaska County, IA, where Henry passed away 20 February 1945 at one hundred years of age.

Henry and Ella had four kids -- Charles, Arthur, Albert, and Ethel, the latter being the genealogist, Ethel Glen White. The greater portion of the descendants of Charles, Arthur, and Albert (Ethel had no children) lived their lives -- or are still living their lives -- in the Upper Plains states, including Iowa, Minnesota, both the Dakotas, and Colorado. Some settled in San Diego, CA. The latter group includes Ethel Glen White at the very end of her life -- but only in retirement. Before that retirement, much of Ethel’s long career as an educator was spent in Storm Lake, Buena Vista County, IA, where much of the family of her father’s cousin Robert Emmett Mack could be found.

Henry Anson White and Ellen Amelia Gamber and their clan, a family group shot taken in the couple’s twilight years. The venue is probably their home in the Oskaloosa suburb of University Park, where the couple finished their lives, or it is possibly the home of their son Arthur. Ethel Glen White is the middle-aged woman in the center with her elbow on her father’s chair.

Loren White practically became an honorary Hilliard. When Kate and Josiah moved to Sioux City, IA in the early 1880s, Loren came along. He lived with them and their spinster daughter Hattie until he was the only one left, Kate passing away in 1902, Hattie in 1911, and Josiah in 1912. He appears to have inherited title to the house even though there was one actual Hilliard left, that being Charles, but the latter was firmly ensconced in Winner, SD and did not seem to pursue any ownership stake he may have had in the house. Instead the residence was left to Loren and to his sister Lois White Peters. Lois joined her twin either shortly after she was widowed in late 1911, or arrived just after Josiah’s death a few months later.

Over the course of the thirty-three years of her married life, Lois moved a number of times, sometimes to quite some distance away. Floyd Peters had become an ostepath and it would seem that he and Lois went where his career opportunities led them. For example, the 1900 census shows the household in Kirksville, Adair County, MO. The roaming phase came to a close just after the turn of the century when Lois and Floyd moved to Monroe, Green County, WI, where Floyd’s parents had settled in their old age. Floyd died 2 October 1911, and then as mentioned above, Lois soon went to live with her twin brother. It was a permanent reunion.

By the time Lois got to Sioux City, all three of her kids -- Ena, Lola, and Bessie -- were grown and on their own, though Ena, still unmarried in her late forties, came back “home to Mother” in the late 1920s, about the time Loren suffered a paralyzing stroke. As a result of that stroke, Loren’s final five years of life were an ordeal. He passed away 30 November 1932. By dying in his mid-seventies, he fell far short of the mark that would be set by his surviving siblings. Henry, as mentioned, reached a hundred years of age. Lois White Peters lingered until 23 April 1962, finally going to her grave at Graceland Park Cemetery in Sioux City (where Loren had been buried thirty years earlier, and where the various Hilliards are also buried) at the age of one hundred four. Lois actually outlived two of her three daughters. As for those daughters, all did become wives, even Ena, but only Lola had kids, both of whom eventually finished their lives in California.

Albert Dedenia White does not seem to have associated with his siblings much, and it is not known what he did with himself after leaving the Onondaga home in the 1860s. Ethel G. White’s notes have nothing about his later life except his death date of 24 December 1902.

George Chapman White, Jr. does not seem to have done as well materially as his siblings. He is listed as having a chair shop in the 1854 Sketches book and was a Winslow landowner during the pioneer era, but the 1870 census strongly suggests he and Hannah were renters at that point, and neither is listed as a property owner in the 1871 Winslow parcel map. Late in life they did have some land, but were so destitute the local powers-that-be granted them a charity stipend from the village treasury. However, in the sense of longevity, George was the luckiest of the original family, making it into his late eighties. He and Hannah finished the raising of their kids and then raised granddaughter Nellie White after their widowed daughter-in-law Leah Bobb White chose not to take her White offspring with her when she married John Aungst 11 February 1880 and moved to Whiteside County, IL. George survived all the way to 7 September 1900, dying just after sunrise that day at his home in Winslow. Hannah donated their property to the village in consideration for the financial help the couple had received. The land was subsequently used to create Woodman Park, named for Cyrus Woodman. Hannah did not linger on the farm, but went to stay with son Fred White in Milwaukee, WI. She passed away there 5 September 1902. By the time of their deaths, the couple had outlived a number of descendants, including son Albert as a young child in the 1850s and son George C. White III, who had passed away 14 February 1878 at the age of twenty-six. The latter and his daughter Mary J. White, who also died in the 1870s, were buried in Rock Lily Cemetery. On 22 February 1892, Nellie White died at age fifteen and was buried there as well. These three family members share a square-pedestal style headstone with George and Hannah. The names are arranged by generation on three of the four sides, meaning George and Hannah are on one face, their son on another, and their granddaughters on a third. (The side showing George and Hannah’s names is shown at left in a photo taken by Dale White in October, 2010.) Cemetery records describe George as George, Sr., and his son George III as George, Jr. -- the “real” George, Sr. had never been a resident of Winslow and so he was not “counted.”

None of George and Hannah’s other descendants enjoyed lives nearly as long as theirs, but they had better luck than poor Albert, George III, Nellie, and Mary. Both of the remaining sons survived into their early seventies. Today there are surviving descendants in many parts of the nation. The last of George III’s three daughters with Leah Bobb, Edna Belle White, was taken in as a foster child by Marancy’s sister Mary Alexander Francis as a baby. Unlike her sisters, she would manage to come of age and marry, though not without another bump in the road -- as described below, her foster mother was struck by a locomotive when Edna Belle was fourteen. The collision left her with brain damage so severe she had to be carefully looked after and certainly could no longer play a maternal role. Edna Belle wed at age seventeen-and-a-half to August Ferdinand Welt, with whom she raised a family in Stephenson County.

One of the sturdiest lines of descent is through John Benton White (1860-1936). Along with relatives on the Hammond side of his heritage, John moved in early adulthood to Iowa, where he married Clara Louise Blackman. John and Clara produced four children while residing first in Ida County and then in Polk County. Like so many members of the family, John was a blacksmith. In the early years of the 20th Century, he and Clara moved to the Pacific Northwest, spending a number of years in Washington before finishing their lives in Oregon. Appropriately enough, John died in Benton County.

Fred White also ended up in the Pacific Northwest after leaving Milwaukee, with a stopover for a number of years in Utah. Fred had no biological descendants. In the early 1880s he married Mary E. Houghton, the divorced wife of George W. Pinney. She was fourteen years Fred’s senior and by the time of the wedding most of her four children were grown, so Fred did not have a lasting role as their stepfather. His one real chance to be a parent was when he and Mary adopted a daughter, Clara, born in 1886. The latter might have been one of Mary’s granddaughters.

Marancy was born 7 February 1824. Her given name was a rare one in her era, generally turning up only in upstate New York and upper New England, likely as a relic of the days of the French fur trappers. It is even less common today. Because of its rarity, it was not well recalled by all of Marancy’s grandchildren, and some of them were left unsure how to spell it. Census enumerators and county clerks had trouble coping with it as well, and this in turn caused mis-transcriptions when public genealogical databases were created. A case in point are two Illinois Marriages indices, which list her as “Muraney Elexander” and “Morency Elexandre.”

Marancy was the sixth of the eight children of Joseph Alexander and Olive Littlefield. In birth order, the eight children were Leander Joseph, Mary Ann, Gorham, Martha Jane, Almeda, Marancy, Sophronia, and Ozias. The births began in 1816 and ended in 1829.

Marancy was probably born in Henderson, Jefferson County, NY. Her uncle Robert Alexander had been one of the original settlers who founded Henderson in 1802. Marancy’s father Joseph had probably reached the community later, probably in 1808 when his father, Jonathan Sartle Alexander, arrived. Jonathan’s arrival date is documented in a description of his life preserved in his Revolutionary War veteran’s pension application of 1832. The pension-file biography goes on to say that Jonathan left Henderson in 1824, moving to Mexico Township, Oswego County, NY. Joseph and Olive are also known to have moved to Oswego County. Their household appears in the 1830 census in Richland Township, meaning that Joseph was no longer within walking distance of the home of his father and stepmother, but could still be said to be somewhat local to them, residing no more than about ten miles from them to the northeast, closer to the boundary with Jefferson County. The precise timing of Joseph and Olive’s relocation is unknown, nor is it known whether Joseph and family might have first gone to Mexico Township before establishing the home in Richland Township. Historical within-the-family notes do say that Marancy was born in Jefferson County, so the odds seem good that the family was still in Henderson when she arrived in the world.

Marancy was an Oswego County girl for at least some of her childhood, but probably not a lengthy span. According to an 1882 history of Greenfield Township, LaGrange County, IN and other LaGrange County records, Marancy’s uncle Edmund Littlefield, after a brief stopover in Adrian, MI, settled in Greenfield Township in the mid-to-late 1820s. In 1832, LaGrange County formed its first governing body. Edmund was one of the founding commissioners. His status as a mover-and-shaker appears to have lured Joseph and Olive to LaGrange County some time in the 1830s, probably in the early part of the decade. In 1838, Joseph followed his brother-in-law Edmund’s example yet again by purchasing land in Steuben County, IN. Neither man appears to have ever dwelled on the Steuben County parcels, but the purchases are genealogically important because they describe both men as residents of LaGrange County. Joseph and Olive’s presence in LaGrange County is difficult to confirm and so a trace such as this is valuable evidence.

Assuming the Alexander household got to LaGrange County in the early 1830s, Marancy spent as much of her childhood in Indiana as she did in New York. Possibly more. She was still a teenager, though, when the family made its next move and arrived in Winslow Township, getting there in 1839, a bit ahead of John Warner. Olive and most of her children appear in Winslow (described as Brewster Precinct) in the 1840 census. The head of the household in that source record is Leander Alexander, who was by then an adult. Joseph was back in LaGrange County, apparently having gone back (or lingered) to dispose of the LaGrange County property. He appears there in the 1840 census as a lone head-of-household. He would soon complete his business and proceed west to rejoin his family. The 1840 census is a snapshot of the changing family dynamic. Winslow would be Joseph and Olive’s final stop. Both would ultimately be buried in Rock Lily Cemetery, Joseph in 1843 and Olive in 1853. It appears that all of their surviving children (Sophronia being the exception, having perished in infancy in the late 1820s) all were part of the migration from Indiana to Stephenson County. However, by the time of the census, Gorham had already proceeded on to Grant County, where he would eventually marry and sire a family. Martha Jane was still in Stephenson County in 1840, but having married Abraham Johnson in 2 January 1840, had moved out from under her parents’ roof. Leander would soon follow his brother to Grant County. With the exception of Gorham and Leander, the Alexanders as a whole treated Stephenson County as their home base for the next thirty to fifty years. A number of descendants are there to this day.

The nature of Marancy’s life as a married woman can be easily inferred from the account of those years in John’s portion of this essay. With her widowhood, things changed radically for her. Suddenly she was left with five small children. Her mother was dead. Her mother-in-law was too elderly to be much help. In fact, Lois was in need of care to the degree that she represented an additional burden, and she moved into the home of her daughter Cynthia. While the farm provided some of the basic household necessities, there would not have been a lot of cash money generated from its crops given the need to hire a grown man or two to work it. The backbone of the household prosperity had been John’s income as a miller. That was now absent, and as a woman, Marancy had no comparable means to be an earner. So within a year of John’s death, John, Jr. went to work at the age of twelve to help support his mother and siblings.

Marancy must have considered remarriage as soon as she finished mourning. But Winslow being lightly settled, she did not find anyone suitable at hand for a few years. Finally after a neighbor, Nicholas Balliet, lost his wife, Marancy was met with a proposal to her liking. She and Nicholas were wed 7 August 1862, creating a large combined brood of children -- the five Warner kids and up to five Balliet ones. The eldest of the latter group was David M. Balliet, sixteen at the time of the wedding. The youngest was Stephen Balliet, then only a matter of weeks or months old, his birth perhaps having been the reason the previous Mrs. Balliet (Leah, second wife of Nicholas) was dead.

The marriage resolved certain domestic challenges, but these years were not untroubled, thanks to the Civil War. The greatest concern for Marancy and Nicholas were their eldest boys, who were both eager to join the fighting. In May of 1864 John became tired of waiting and ran off, along with Seba White’s stepson Aquilla Ballenger, to join the Union Army. This no doubt made Marancy frantic, no matter how proud she may have been at John’s bravery. It helped that John and Aquilla only signed up for the 100-day hitch, rather than the standard three-year option. As a result, they were mustered out that October, and came home safe. However, a couple of weeks before John received his discharge, David Balliet “filled his place,” as it were. David at least was already eighteen, and did not have to lie about his age to enlist, as John and Aquilla had done.

Nicholas Balliet was just past fifty years old when he married Marancy and he appears to have died in the second half of the 1860s. (He appears in the 1865 Illinois state census, but Marancy is a widow again in the 1870 census.) Given the brevity of the marriage, Marancy would seldom be referred to under the name Balliet in subsequent public records, the only known exceptions being an 1875 land transaction and the 1900 census. She would not marry a third time. As the decade wound down, the need for her to be a mother wound down as well. The oldest of her Balliet step-children (offspring of Nicholas’s first wife, Catherine) headed out on their own. For example, David, who had married Nancy Reber a year after his return from the war, departed for Waterloo, IA. The younger pair (offspring of Nicholas and Leah) were taken in by blood relatives. As for Marancy’s own kids, John and Fred both married in 1869 and immediately became the heads of their own households. Minta found work as a domestic servant in a nearby home. Charles, despite being only a teenager, accompanied neighbor Charles Macomber (aka McOmber, McComber, McCumber) and family to Washington County, NE. By the time the 1870 census was recorded, the only person residing in the house besides Marancy herself was her son Clifford.

In 1872, Fred Warner and his wife Penina Shreckengost, who had been farming only a little to the southwest of Winslow near the village of Lena, moved much farther away. Along with Penina’s parents and siblings, they went to Butler County, NE, where they founded homesteads. Clifford Warner apparently went along or else joined them within a year or two. In 1875 Clifford would marry Ella Shreckengost. The couple would raise their children in Nebraska. By the time Clifford left Winslow, Charles A. Warner had returned. Marancy shared a home with him. Their quarters probably consisted of a cottage or secondary house on the eighty acres belonging to John Warner and his wife Nellie Martin Warner, acreage a mile north of Winslow on the outskirts of Martintown, Green County, WI -- land which had come into their possession as Nellie’s dowry from her father Nathaniel Martin, the wealthy founder of Martintown. This arrangement lasted until 1875. At that point Marancy sold the Winslow homestead to Charles Macomber, he and his family having decided to give up on Nebraska in favor of relocating to the bevy of old friends and neighbors. The transaction was probably a trade, with the Macombers giving up their land near the town of Blair so that Charles could farm it as owner rather than as an employee.

When Charles headed off to his new land, Marancy may have gone with him. It is more likely, though, that she moved in with her daughter Minta, who had married John Ladd in 1872 and had settled with him in Green County somewhere near Martintown. Minta had given birth to two children in the period from 1873-1875 and Marancy’s assistance caring for the babies would have been welcome. This phase ended in 1879 when the Ladds also moved to Nebraska. They acquired a parcel that put them near the property where Charles had established himself. Charles by this point had married Mary Elizabeth Maurer, a young woman with whom he had grown up in Winslow, and with whom he was now launching a family. If Marancy had not already come to Nebraska earlier, she made it there in 1879 as part of Minta and John’s relocation.

For a span of five years, 1879 to 1884, Charles and Mary Warner and Minta and John Ladd tended to their Washington County, NE farms. Both parcels were somewhat in the vicinity of the town of Blair, and lay not far west of the Missouri River. Minta lodged with Minta and John at first. The 1880 census lists her as a member of their household. However, she probably put in a quite a bit of time staying with and helping out Charles and Mary, because that couple produced three daughters in rapid succession during those five years and Marancy was needed as a grandma nanny figure.

Though Winslow had been her home for over thirty years, Marancy does not seem to have been tempted to go back. The only one of her children remaining behind in Green County/Stephenson County was John. By 1880 her siblings were all dead except Mary Ann. By going to Nebraska, she was able to be a daily part of the lives of at least two of her offspring. For the rest of her days she would maintain the connection to Minta and Charles and their families. Winslow would be part of her past as New York and Indiana had become part of her past.

In 1884, Charles and Mary and Minta and John pulled up stakes. There are no surviving documents that explain why Washington County had lost its appeal. Perhaps by relocating, they were able to expand their holdings at low cost. For whatever reason, they chose to homestead in Miller Township, Knox County, NE, at a spot about eight miles west of the hamlet of Creighton. This time the two family farms were literally side by side, sharing a boundary and probably even sharing a yard and perhaps a barn. Marancy’s contribution to the childcare was a prime asset. Minta gave birth one last time that year, and in the next few years Charles and Mary would become parents twice more (sadly, the last baby died at only a few months old).

Once settled in Knox County, Marancy did not move again for the remaining seventeen years of her life, not even after the death of Charles in 1898. In the census of 1900, she is listed as a member of the household of her widowed daughter-in-law Mary Maurer Warner. Marancy passed away just three years after Charles’s untimely demise. Her date of death was 11 June 1901. She was buried in what would later come to be called Olcott Cemetery. This little graveyard, originally created by neighbors, the Ausman family, in order to bury a small child of their family, was situated a mile southeast of the Warner and Ladd properties, closer to the heart of Miller Township. Olcott Cemetery is where Marancy’s little granddaughter had been buried in 1888. Neither Marancy’s grave nor Charles’s possesses a marker, but the locations of their resting places is relatively easy to determine, because mother and son were buried next to the baby girl that Charles and Mary lost in 1888, and that grave does have a headstone.

In brief, here is what happened to Marancy’s brothers and sisters:

Leander Joseph Alexander, born 5 August 1816, is surely the “L. Alexandria” mentioned in the 1840 census in Stephenson County. He moved on to Grant County by no later than 1842. He spent approximately the next quarter century farming near Patch Grove, Grant County. Toward the end of his life he moved to a spot just north of Grant County near Marietta, Crawford County, WI. His grand niece Mabel Duncalf Waldmann indicated in a 1968 letter (when she was elderly) that Leander had never married, and it does appear true he was a bachelor most of his days, and did not have offspring. However, an 1857 Grant County marriage record between an “L.J. Alexander” and widow Mrs. S. Menhenet suggests he may not have spent all his life unmarried. Mabel’s notes also specify the cause of Leander’s death was malaria. Leander was nursed during this final episode by his sister-in-law Emily Ward Alexander. He succumbed 13 December 1871. His body was interred at Dyer Cemetery in Lancaster, Grant County, WI. It was later reburied in Hillside Cemetery in the section that contains the graves of Emily Ward Alexander and many of the offspring of Emily and her husband Gorham Alexander. (The picture at left was taken 8 November 1864.)

Mary Ann Alexander was born 15 December 1817. Though she was the oldest of the girls, she was third to become a wife. She wed Thomas Lathrop Francis 29 April 1843 in Stephenson County. Thomas was another of the early settlers of Winslow. The two probably first encountered one another as neighbors. Thomas was a dozen years older than Mary Ann, having been born 23 May 1805 in western Vermont, probably in Burlington. He was the sixth of the seven known children of Daniel Francis and Abigail Lathrop. The family had left Vermont during Thomas’s childhood, and he had come of age in Norfolk Township, St. Lawrence County, NY. St. Lawrence County is adjacent to Jefferson County, so as denizens of the “Far West” at Winslow, the couple might well have regarded themselves as originating from the same context, even though back home they might not have felt that sort of shared identity -- St. Lawrence County is associated with the St. Lawrence waterway, and Jefferson County with Lake Ontario. Just when Thomas left the family home in Norfolk Township is unconfirmed, but the profile of his brother Hiram G. Francis published in the 1889 book Portrait and biographical album of Jo Daviess and Carroll Counties, Illinois reveals that Hiram came out to Galena in 1836, spent two years in Savanna, Carroll County, IL (not far southwest of Winslow), and then after going home for three years, came back out in 1841 to settle permanently in rural Mt. Carroll, also in Carroll County. Another brother, Hezekiah Francis, also settled in Carroll County. It is likely Thomas came out with one or both brothers, either in 1836, or in 1841 when Hiram left home for the second time. Thomas did not put down roots in Carroll County, though. By the latter half of 1840 or the early part of 1841, he was in Winslow. He is mentioned in three letters that survive in the Joseph Rogers Berry collection, from which we can know Thomas managed the Berry farm all through the summer of 1841 while Joseph was gone to visit his parents and other relatives in Cortland, NY, leaving his wife and son in place in Winslow. Thomas probably did not have a farm of his own yet, and boarded with the Berry family until his marriage to Mary Ann, meaning that Sarah Kneeland Berry cooked his meals and did his laundry. (This is the sort of arrangement implied by the letters, though the matter is never quite defined enough to be absolutely sure Thomas did not have his own piece of land and log cabin.) Sarah’s 14 July 1841 letter to her husband mentions that Thomas had hired Daniel Sanford for a week to hoe corn. Daniel had just finished his one-year term as the proprietor of the Winslow hotel, and needed other ways to earn money. (Joseph and Sarah would themselves operate the hotel from 1847 to 1854, during which time it was known as Berry House.)

Judging by the censuses of 1850 through 1880 -- and as confirmed by family notes -- Mary Ann and Thomas never had biological children. However, they are known to have alleviated their loneliness by repeatedly taking in fosterlings. There is, in fact, a young child of one sort or another in their household for several censuses running. In 1850, it was Morris Johnson, Mary Ann’s nephew, son of her late sister Martha Jane. In 1850, Morris’s new stepmother was coping with a new baby, so it helped that Morris could be handed off to his aunt and uncle. One instance of near adoption cited by Mabel Duncalf Waldmann is that after Gorham died in the Civil War, leaving his widow Emily with a home chock full of young children, Mary Ann and Thomas accepted custody of Gorham and Emily’s eldest daughter Josephine, then eleven years old (1863). Several months or a year later Emily made a horse-and-wagon trip from Lancaster, WI to Winslow to see her daughter, who expressed homesickness to the degree that Emily took her back.

Thomas apparently served in the Civil War. This is indicated by the presence of a G.A.R. emblem on his gravemarker, but his war record has not yet been found, which may be in part due to the fact that it is hard to sort out from the records of all the other men named Thomas Francis who served. If it is true that he was inducted, he was an unusually old soldier, being nearly sixty. After his return -- assuming he ever departed -- he and Mary Ann moved a few miles southwest of Winslow to the village of Lena, Stephenson County. While there, as shown in the 1880 census, they took in what was probably the last in the series of fosterlings, Edna Belle White, orphan granddaughter of Marancy’s brother-in-law George C. White, Jr.

Mary Ann and Thomas finished their lives in Lena, but gave up their own home when elderly and lodged with Alfred and Emma Bostwick and family. This relocation probably was a consequence of a serious injury to Mary Ann. She was struck by a locomotive in the early 1890s. Eventually her body recovered, but her mind did not. By the time of the accident, Thomas was well into his eighties and surely needed help to care not only for her, but for himself, so the Bostwicks came to the rescue. Mary died 11 November 1896, having survived by many years all of her siblings except Marancy, and even Marancy would not in the end live as many years in total. Thomas Francis died 5 June 1899. Both deaths occurred at the Bostwick residence. Their graves are at Lena Burial Park.

Gorham Alexander was born 19 August 1818. If that date and the birthdate of Mary Ann are to be trusted, he came into the world precisely nine months after his older sister. This is possible -- particularly if Gorham was a bit premature -- but probably means the records have been confused and the date is wrong for either Mary Ann, Gorham, or both. Gorham, whether he took a detour through Stephenson County or not, ended up Beetown, Grant County, WI by the early 1840s. (He appears in western Grant County in an 1842 state census.) He married Emily Sheldon Ward 28 April 1848 in Grant County. Emily, born 4 May 1827 in Underhill, Chittendam County, VT, was an even earlier pioneer of southwest Wisconsin than Gorham -- her father Salmon Ward had been one of the soldiers of the Black Hawk Wars of the early 1830s that cleared the last Indian tribes from the region. Gorham and Emily met because his farm was next to that of her sister Clarinda Day. (Clarinda and Emily were two of the eighteen children of Salmon Ward and Susannah Proctor.) Gorham and Emily rapidly produced nine children -- Charles Gorham, Albert Gordon, Josephine Clarinda, Katherine Matilda, Phedora Emily, Almeda Julia, Joel Littlefield, George Washington, and Eleanor Amy Alexander. (Joel and George were twins. Among Emily’s many siblings were two sets of twins.) In September, 1861, Gorham joined the 10th Wisconsin Regiment of the Union Army and left to serve in the Civil War. Final child Eleanor was conceived the month of his enlistment and it is not clear he ever got to hold her in his arms. He contracted dysentery and perished in a military hospital at Louisville, KY 3 January 1863. His grave is located at Cave Hill National Cemetery, the resting place of many Civil War dead.

Emily spent the next forty years in Lancaster as a widow. Most of the children and many of the grandchildren went on to farm and/or reside in Grant County for the whole of their lives. This groundedness in one place, along with the interest this branch of the clan maintained in their Alexander-surname heritage, eventually proved critical to helping Marancy’s descendants confirm where she had come from. The Ward family had an appreciation of genealogy, and Emily inherited this trait. She had inherited a 1792 Bible from her maternal grandmother that contained a wealth of information on her birth family. Emily likewise made sure to preserve the Bible that had belonged to Joseph and Olive Alexander, which she ended up with apparently because it had been given to Leander Alexander and passed into her possession when he died. She gave this to her eldest son Charles Gorham Alexander, who used it as his main source in 1891 when writing a family history of the Alexander family. Charles’s history is now the primary source of names and birthdates of Joseph, Olive, and their eight children. (A copy of this essay was passed along in the 1960s to some of Marancy’s descendants when they came calling in search of tales about her and her heritage.) Unfortunately none of Charles Gorham Alexander’s children had offspring of their own and the Alexander/Littlefield Bible probably no longer exists. The Emily Ward Bible does survive, though. It was passed down from eldest daughter to eldest daughter and is now -- still valid as of 2015 -- in the keeping of one of her great great great granddaughters.)

Martha Jane Alexander, born 17 March 1820, was the first of the family to marry. She wed Abraham M. Johnson 2 January 1840 in Stephenson County. His family origin is unknown except that he was born in Virginia in the mid-1810s, probably in 1816. Martha and Abraham immediately became parents of a girl who was named after her mother. (In some family notes, such as those of Mabel Duncalf Waldmann, the daughter, Martha Jane Johnson, has been confused with her mother Martha Jane Alexander Johnson.) Martha and Abraham also had a son, Morris (who appears in a minority of records as Maurice), born 14 March 1844. They may have had an older son, Martin (or Marton), born about 1842, but he is known only from his appearance in the 1850 census, and he is enumerated last after a number of non-relatives, as if he is not actually a member of the family -- and since he does not appear in any other source, he may well not have been a family member.

Martha Jane Alexander Johnson died at only twenty-eight years of age 19 August 1848. The family was probably by then residing in Silver Creek Township, Stephenson County, where the survivors would linger for another fifteen years or so. Abraham spent only a short period as a widower before he married Harriett Matilda Savage, a Canadian born 10 August 1823. She had previously been married to Louis Morrison, and came to the new union with two sons, Edward Louis Morrison and James Albert Morrison, who were comparable in age to young Martha and Morris. Together Abraham and Harriett had two more sons, William and Albert Harrison Johnson, thus creating a mixed brood of step, full, and half siblings. Harriett presumably died in the 1850s, though this is not perfectly clear; certainly she is not with Abraham in the 1860 census. Abraham went on to finish raising his biological children, but his Morrison stepsons did not come of age in his household. Abraham did not marry again. After lingering in Silver Creek Township, by no later than 1880 he went to live in Charles City, Floyd County, IA with his daughter and her family. He passed away in Charles City 7 August 1898.

Martha Jane Johnson married Owen D. Lindaman 14 November 1860 in Stephenson County. The couple dwelled at first in Silver Creek Township or in nearby Freeport. Their move to Charles City occurred in the mid-1860s. Once there, they stayed for good, Owen passing away there in 1911, and Martha in 1914. They had five children, all male -- Charles, Alva, Walter, Viva, and Guy, the first three born early in the marriage and the other two much later. The fourth son, Viva Alexander Lindaman, spent an interval as a sports celebrity. He was a pitcher in the major leagues, spending four years (1906-1910) with the Boston Beaneaters and the Boston Doves. If you search hard enough through baseball card collections or on eBay, you may still encounter his card. In addition to the five biological children, Martha and Owen raised two granddaughters, Alta and Rose, because their mother, Margaret Sheridan Lindaman, wife of Alva, died when the youngsters were both just tots. The Lindaman clan remained firmly rooted in the Charles City area for many decades, some on farms, and others in town. Some descendants can still be found in Iowa, though others live in places as far away as California.

In 1865, Morris E. Johnson married Eliza Jane Lizer, a native of Centre County, PA and a daughter of pioneer Stephenson County settler Peter Lizer. She came to the union with a three-year-old daughter, Emma. Morris and Jane -- as she was known -- established themselves on a farm just outside Winslow. Morris’s only biological child was Amanda Augusta Johnson, born 27 December 1871. In 1878, the household was reestablished in Gage County, NE. The county would eventually become home to Morris’s first cousin Henry Boynton and family (as described below), but there is no indication Henry chose to settle there because Morris had done so, nor even any confirmation the cousins were aware of the proximity. Morris -- who by this point is most often shown in sources as Maurice rather than Morris -- and Eliza farmed acreage in Rockford Precinct near the village of Holmesville. They completed the raising of Amanda, who married John Henry Coleman in early 1891 in Holmesville. Amanda and John would remain in the immediate area, including in Beatrice, the seat of Gage County, and would ultimately pass away in Beatrice in 1956 in the case of John and 1957 in the case of Amanda. Meanwhile, Morris (Maurice) and Eliza were finally on their own as a couple, something that had never been true before given that Eliza had come into the marriage as the mother of a young child. Alas, the pair would only have a few years to enjoy that private time, because Eliza passed away in 1896 at only sixty years of age. And then bad luck climbed on top of bad luck. Morris had been transformed into an “eligible widower of means.” As near as can be determined, that was the ruin of him. He met Minnie F. Adcock, also known as Minnie Adair. She is often shown in business directories and censuses as the operator of a boarding house, and it may have been in this context that Morris became acquainted with her while on a visit to Omaha. Her background was probably less savory than that, but even if we grant her the benefit of the doubt and assume she was not a prostitute, she was unquestionably the sort of woman who would marry men she had only recently met, and then very soon afterward leave them in the dust, taking a chunk of their wealth with her, or even taking their entire estates after their sudden and unexpected deaths. She also had a habit of fabricating details about her background, went by a series of names that were the equivalent of aliases, and she moved often. The label “black widow” might not be an unwarranted one to apply to her. She and Morris wed one another 14 May 1898 in Beatrice (the seat of Gage County). Ten weeks later, Morris was dead. (Death date 25 July 1898.) Was this a coincidence? Did Minnie who set aside her typical mode of behavior and make a good-faith attempt to be a loving, devoted farm wife to Morris for those ten weeks, until he happened to pass away of natural causes? Or did she help him to shuffle off the mortal coil in order to enrich herself? He was only fifty-four years old. You make the call. One way or another, his body was soon interred at Brethren Cemetery in Holmesville, while Minnie moved on to new stomping grounds. She eventually went to a remote part of Montana, where her paper trail vanishes after the early 1920s.

Almeda Alexander, born 6 November 1822 (this according to family records -- public records suggest 1820 was the actual year), married John Boynton 12 November 1848 in Stephenson County. (The surname tends to appear as Boyington in many records through 1870.) The wedding occurred the same year that John had been granted title to his homestead in the locality then known as Waddam (and even as Wadam) after an early settler. Eventually there would be a community in the general vicinity known as Waddams Grove (with an “s”), but the location of the farm is better described now as rural Lena. As a married woman, Almeda would never know any other dwelling place but that homestead, and would live there twenty-seven years until her somewhat untimely death in her mid-fifties. Almeda and John had five known children, Mary, Benjamin, Martha, Joseph, and Henry. Benjamin died as a small infant, possibly the same day he was born. (Almeda is shown at left, picture probably taken during the 1860s, when she was in her forties. Her sons Joseph and Henry are shown below right as juveniles, in a photo possibly taken the same year.) Almeda passed away 18 September 1875 at home. (Her obituary was published on the 24th in the local newspaper, the Lena Star, and unfortunately this led to her death date being entered in family records as the 24th, a mistake that was not corrected for the next 135 years.) Soon after Almeda’s death, John moved to Hamilton County, IA, where he resided with his daughter Martha Shinkle and her family. He died 9 June 1892 on the Shinkle farm, which was located near Webster City.

Eldest daughter Mary Boynton also put down roots in Webster City -- in the town rather than an outlying farm. She remained single until 20 July 1880, when at thirty years of age she married Louis (aka Lars) Peter Christensen, a recent immigrant from Denmark who was fifteen years her senior. Louis’s kids from his earlier marriage were nearly grown, so he “started over” with Mary. Despite her advanced age at first motherhood, she went on to have a total of seven children, the last born when she was forty-five years old. By 1900, she and Louis had moved from Webster City to Independence, Buchanan County, IA. Both Mary and Louis must have died before 1910 because six of the seven kids appear in the 1910 census sharing a home in Waterloo, Black Hawk County, IA, and their parents do not seem to be enumerated anywhere. It is unclear if Mary ever had any grandchildren -- none have been found yet in public sources. Daughters Berta, Elmira, and Ivy definitely did not have offspring.

Martha Marancy Boynton married James W. Shinkle 21 January 1875 in Stephenson County. The couple made their move to Hamilton County while they were still newlyweds. They had four children during the first decade of their union and then a fifth, Clara, in the early 1890s. James passed away 13 August 1893, not much more than a year after his father-in-law. A year and a half later Martha married John T. Knudeson. By then she was past childbearing age and did not have further offspring with him, but thanks to her five Shinkle children she stands at the top of an impressively long list of descendants. For example, her eldest daughter, Almeda Mae Shinkle, had eleven kids with her husband Robert Jackson Hefling after they settled in Reno County, KS, northwest of Wichita. John Knudeson died in 1903. Martha did not marry again. Even during the marriage, she had worked as a teacher. After being widowed yet again, supported herself as an artist in Ames, Story County, IA. She passed away 12 April 1914 and is buried in Webster City.

Joseph Alexander Boynton married Rosa Ann Stocks (a cousin of Nancy Reber, the wife of David Balliet) 3 December 1879 in Stephenson County. They farmed at first near Waddams Grove, probably having taken over the old homestead. Brother Henry was briefly part of their household. In the very early 1880s Joseph and Rosa moved to a farm in Grant Township, Wright County, IA near the community of Clinton -- whether by coincidence or not, John Warner, Sr.’s nephew Henry Anson White soon came to Wright County, perhaps because his wife Ellen Amelia Gamber, a Stephenson County girl, wanted to go to a place where the neighbors would include people she had grown up with. (Henry and Ellen had tried living back in the Syracuse area where he had grown up, and this must have left Ellen feeling isolated from her childhood companions.) Joseph and Rosa had seven children. Six reached adulthood. The one who died was the couple’s firstborn, Nathan Boynton (1881-1883), who only made it to age two and a half. Joseph did not live to see any of his kids reach their majority. He passed away 11 February 1900 while in his mid-forties. His remains were buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Clarion. Rosa, who was better known as Rose Ann in her later years, finished raising the children in Wright County on her own, never marrying again. She spent forty-four years as a widow before perishing 23 June 1944 in Hamilton County, IA. Joseph and Rosa’s clan is not large; they had only three grandchildren.

When his brother departed for Iowa, Henry Burt Boynton stayed behind in Stephenson County, where he wed Edith Ellen Slothower 24 September 1884. Within a few years the couple moved to Adams, Gage County, NE and raised a family of four kids there. Henry died in 1913. Edith stayed in Adams until the mid-1930s, then spent the last three years of her life in Warren, Jo Daviess County, IL, within a couple of miles of her birthplace. Her body was transported back to Adams for burial beside Henry at Pleasant Hill Cemetery. Henry and Edith’s two eldest daughters, Bernice and Mildred, spent much of their long lives in extreme northwestern Kansas, including Cheyenne County and Rawlins County. Robert, the only son, became a civil engineer and resided in various locales across the U.S., including sojourns in Minneapolis, Chicago, and Detroit before he landed in Marion County, OR, where he died in 1958. Youngest daughter Iris was a spinster who tended to live with her mother. She came with her mother to Warren, IL, and remained there for a period after her mother’s death. Eventually she moved to Bird City, KS, where her sister Bernice had long since settled.

Sophronia Alexander only survived two and a half years, all of it spent in New York in either Jefferson County or Oswego County or both. She was born 27 March 1826 and died 19 October 1828.

Ozias Alexander also had a short life, though considerably longer than that of Sophronia. Ozias was part of the big westward jaunts from New York to Indiana and then from Indiana to Illinois. He was born 21 January 1829. He drowned 29 June 1843 at the age of fourteen. Charles Gorham Alexander’s 1891 history states the tragedy occurred “near Freeport.” This was probably Charles’s way of describing Winslow. As mentioned above, the surviving letters of Winslow resident Joseph Rogers Berry reveal that 1843 was a tremendous flood year in Stephenson County. The high water levels may have been a factor in Ozias’s demise.

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