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Delilah’s Family—New Discoveries in 2000 Delilah…that
great-grandmother who has been most known in the family for her babies who died
in infancy. Delilah…whose home we visited one hundred ten years after she
died. Delilah …whose name her granddaughter Fern wanted no part of ..... In all our unearthing of
our ancestral heritage, who would have guessed that it would be Delilah who
would provide us with our most solid link to American history? From the
beginning we had a small link through William Compton, whom we know died
fighting the American Revolution, but we know nothing more about him and have
had no success in connecting him to Spencer Compton, who was reportedly an
ancestor of his. The SearchIn 1994 I located Delilah’s
death record in the Ottawa County Courthouse in Grand Haven, Michigan. I was
delighted to discover on it the names of her parents—but puzzled to note that
they were listed as residents of Michigan. If they had lived and died in
Michigan, why didn’t we know about them and have their grave sites along with
the other graves and ancestor sites? In Mary Ann Porter’s
1923 Porter family history, she told us Delilah was born in Delaware Co., New
York. She also said that Delilah’s maiden name was Champlain, which fit the
family tradition that Delilah had been French. As it turns out, the Champlain
and the French parts were wrong, but the Delaware County fact would be a major
key in connecting Delilah and us to a family whose roots reached clear back to
the New England of the Pilgrims. Delilah’s parents’
names were Jeffrey and Ellis. The Ellis, though unusual, wasn’t surprising to
discover because Delilah named her first daughter (and only one to live) Mary
Ellis, and the name was used again for one of Mary’s granddaughters. We now
know their family name was Champlin and that Jeffrey was not only a 7th-generation
American but a 7th-generation Jeffrey Champlin (though
not all in a direct line). We also now know that Ellis (or Allis, as she is in
some of the records) not only descended from that first Jeffrey Champlin along
with her husband, but that she descended from him through two different lines! (That makes Delilah descend from Jeffrey the
Immigrant through three different lines.) And we learned all this
as a result of a note I left on an Internet genealogy message board saying I
was looking for information on Jeffrey and Ellis Champlain. Examining the Data
Before going further, it
is fair to ask how we made the connection between this historic family of
Champlins and our Delilah. When Bob Champlin responded to my message and gave
me preliminary information, at first I was incredibly excited, then skeptical.
But when I received the full write-ups on the seven generations of Champlins,
the following facts helped us forge the chain. First, there is the name
Ellis. Even if spelled Allis, it is still unusual. The fact that she was
married to a Jeffrey, even though Champlin rather than Champlain, was a good
start. Second, there was the
question of geography. The Champlins’ roots, we learned, were in Rhode Island,
from the days of Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson, generation after
generation. Jeffrey and Ellis were both born there and were distant cousins. Yet
according to our information, Delilah was born in an obscure county in New York
and her parents supposedly died in Michigan. Could these New England people
really be among our Michigan ancestors? In discussions of family history when I
was growing up, I never heard any mention of Rhode Island. So when I read, to my
amazement, that Jeffrey and Ellis Champlin both died in Walker, Kent County, Michigan,
the words almost jumped off the page! Walker is in the northwest corner of
Grand Rapids. But as I read Bob
Champlin's materials,
there remained a third
important matter, that of Delaware Co., New York, for Delilah’s birth.
When I began reading a paragraph about the places that Jeffrey and Ellis
lived, I immediately processed the fact that—if this connection was
legitimate—one of those places had to be Delaware County. And there it
was! Her family was in Delaware Co. at the time of the 1850 census, when
Delilah was eleven, while we know that she married George Porter in
Michigan in 1855.[1] A fourth confirmation,
though by itself it wouldn’t prove anything, are the dates for Jeffrey and
Ellis’s family. Their deaths in 1872 and 1873 are compatible with Delilah’s
life, and the birth dates of her siblings (1827, 1829, and 1831) are very
compatible with Delilah’s in 1839. Champlain, brothers, and
cemeteries
As for the
Champlin/Champlain discrepancy, Bob Champlin, who provided me with this
treasure trove of information, explains it this way: Many people contend that Jeffrey Champlin was a
descendent of the French explorer Samuel de Champlain. The only relationship
between the two is the similarity in the spellings of their respective surnames.
Samuel de Champlain's original surname was Complain - not Champlain. … To make
matters worse for those who claim him as an ancestor, Samuel had no children! Bob goes on to tell that de
Champlain married a 12-year-old girl 31 years younger than himself, but the
marriage was never consummated and she ended up founding an order of nuns. So
much for Champlain! Though we had never been
aware that Delilah had two brothers, we now know that both were well known in
their day. The older, Stephen Gardiner Champlin, was a general in the Civil War
and died sixteen months before the end of the war when Delilah was only 24[2].
The other brother, John Wayne Champlin, was a Chief Justice of the Michigan
Supreme Court and lived until 1901.[3]
We now know that the sister Mary, born 1829, lived in Grand Rapids and died
there in 1897. Bob Champlin knew that Jeffrey and Ellis had other children
because biographical information on the two brothers mentioned six children, but
Bob had discovered only three of them (my word of Delilah provided a fourth).
The other two may not have lived very long. Jeffrey and Ellis both
died about ten years before Delilah. They are buried in the Fulton Street
Cemetery in Grand Rapids.[4]
In April 2002 my husband and I visited the cemetery and found their graves, and
in 2006 I took three other family members there.
[1] Our first documentation on this date is from Mary Ann Porter, along with her report that George’s family moved to Michigan from Madison County, New York, in 1847. The 1855 marriage is further substantiated by the fact that their first child was born in 1856, a fact we know from his headstone in Lisbon Cemetery. [2] Bob Champlin tells me that he was wounded in battle, and the wounds eventually took his life, but not until some time later. [3] John Wayne lived until the summer of 1901 when Grandma Fern Hawkins was seven years old. Surely she would have known him? He was an uncle of Fern’s father, Grandpa Ferd Porter, who lived until 1945. Whether Grandma ever spoke of John Wayne or my mother knew of him, I cannot say. I never heard Mother’s sister Agnes nor her cousin Lyman Wood, who was very interested in this family history, mention Delilah having a brother, but that need not be surprising since John Wayne died 10-15 years before the Porter grandchildren were born. [4] At first I was surprised that the Champlins were buried in a cemetery in town, given that all other family members of that time were buried northwest of Grand Rapids towards Sparta. But now we know that is where their son Gen. Stephen Champlin was buried some dozen years before their deaths. |