The brother with the large family was Isaac, the eldest. If the dates we have are accurate, he and his wife Jane may have had three or four sets of twins. Eby says all but three of the eighteen lived to maturity. I have traced nine of their eleven sons and two of their daughters in Michigan (daughters are harder to trace because their names change). It looks as if at least one of their older sons made the move before Isaac and Jane did.  A number of their children and grandchildren are found in  Kent County in the 1860 and 1870 censuses. It is possible Isaac and Jane did not make the move until after 1870, which would have been rather late in their lives, after their brother Abraham had moved to Chester Township and even after he died. In the 1880 census two years after Isaac's death, Jane is listed as head of the household to eight other family members. Her daughter Eliza Jane Hillock and her four children are said to be visiting from Ohio (I found them also in the Ohio census, so they got counted twice that year). Son Alexander (#15) was 27 and daughter Mary Ann, youngest of the eighteen, was 22. She never married, lived till 1933, and died still in Caledonia.
		Isaac G. Stauffer (Lakeside Cemetery, Caledonia, Michigan)
		Note that Jane, who bore 18 children, outlived her husband by six years.

SUSANNAH 
The oldest sister in the family, Susannah, had married Jacob Kinzey, younger brother to the Susannah Kinzey who had married her Uncle Daniel. (Yes, Susannah Kinzey became Susannah Stauffer, and ten years later a Susannah Stauffer became Susannah Kinzey.) Their oldest apparently remained in Canada. Of their seven children, a son and a daughter married sister-and-brother grandchildren of George and Esther Stauffer Clemens. One of those couples ended up in Ontario and the other in Michigan, so we can surmise that connections remained between the family branches in Canada and Michigan. Communications and travel would have improved a great deal during the first half of that century. Jacob and Susannah lived only until 1862 and 1868. Both died before reaching 60. We're told that a Stauffer/Kinzey family reunion was held in Kent County in 1903.

SARAH
According to the Stauffer booklet and some Internet records, the youngest sister in the family was Sallie who married Enos Janzen. Censuses and cemetery records, however, give the name as Johnson, and her headstone shows her as Sarah Johnson. It is possible she went by Sallie while growing up but at some point began using Sarah. Both Janzen and Johnson mean "John's son," so that change is likely a result of Americanizing their name when or after they moved to Michigan. Whatever, Enos and Sallie's first six children were born in Canada and the last four in Michigan, so they apparently made the move around 1852 or 1853.

Of ten children, Enos and Sallie had only three sons. Abraham, the oldest, was born in 1842. That would have put him going on 20 when the Civil War broke out. We don't know when he joined up or whether it caused trauma in a family whose mother at least had been raised Mennonite. We don't know where he fought or how long. All we know is that he died in the War. We have no trouble imagining the pain and grief his death brought to the Stauffer community back in Michigan.

Enos lived to 75 and Sallie to 72. In their household at the time of the 1880 census, daughters Esther and Mary (ages 27 and 25) were school teachers still living at home, along with son Henry with wife and baby and youngest sister Sarah. Also buried in Blain Cemetery with Sallie and Susannah and their husbands is Jacob, the Johnsons' second son who died at nineteen, two years after the War was over. For unknown reasons, the old headstones in Blain are mostly sandstone and are already difficult to read, compared to the ones at Lakeside, which appear to be made from much harder stone, including some of marble.

JOHN 
The youngest member of the family, brother John, moved to Gaines Township, Kent County, long enough for four of his children to be born and then returned to Canada, where his last two were born.  

I CAN SEE IT, CAN'T YOU?
When I see how much fun my six grandchildren have together, I can't help think about those Stauffer families who settled there south of Grand Rapids together. Sallie had ten children, Susannah had seven, Abraham had at least three with him in Michigan, John had six the years he was there, and when you factor in Isaac's close-to-a-dozen that we know made it to Michigan, plus grandchildren already being born to the oldest ones, you have somewhere between two and three dozen cousins, in ages ranging up and down a scale of thirty years.

Can't you just imagine the family get-togethers, whether they were helping build each others' homes, celebrating a wedding and whatever other occasions Stauffers celebrated in those days--or gathering in a cemetery to grieve the loss of one of their own? Can't you see the men speaking in measured tones about the Civil War, women sharing news and advice as they cooked together, half-grown girls lugging the little ones around on their hips, and little boys dashing around and shouting to each other? 

I can.