Unveiling the Mystery of Charles E. Wellsby Matt Hoppe For many years we have
known little about Hannah Compton’s husband and our ggggrandfather,
Charles E. Wells. We had his name and marriage date to Hannah, as well as
death date and place, and we had visited his grave. We knew something of
his later life, but we knew nothing of his life before Hannah, nor
anything at all about his family.
After the coming of the
Internet, we made many online searches in all ways we could conceive, in
all places we could think of to search, and we did it year after year. We
found nothing. Searches for other documentation have also proved
fruitless. To date, we have not been able to locate his Michigan death
certificate. Either it was never filed, or the state of Michigan has lost
it, or it is just buried away somewhere, but repeated efforts to find it,
including a trip to the archives in Grand Rapids, have revealed nothing.
It would likely have revealed his parents’ names. And we have found no
trace of an obituary. He does appear in other people’s family trees
online, but nothing is ever revealed other than his death and marriage
date and the fact that he married Hannah. When the censuses came along, we
were able to finally learn that he was born in Pennsylvania. I thought maybe I was
onto something. I went back to the 1850
and 1860 censuses, this time looking for Henry and Jesse. I found them in
1850, but then I found them living as next-door neighbors in 1860 (by that
time, we know from our other sources, that Charles and family had moved to
Michigan). Now I had ages, and Jesse W. was 22 years younger than Henry J.
Yes, in later censuses Henry was also listed with his middle initial. It
would appear to be a family eccentricity, and another circumstantial piece
of evidence that I had found Charles’ family. The fact that Henry and
Jesse were neighbors in 1860 would indicate that they were related, and
their ages and names would mean they were most likely father and son.
Searching the list of graves in the town of Tyrone, kindly transcribed and
posted on the Internet, revealed graves for Jesse and Henry. Henry died in
1863, and his son died two years later in 1865. They were buried side by
side, and for me that pretty much is the proof I was looking for that they
were father and son. Their wives are not buried with them. I found that
Jesse’s wife, Roxana, remarried and moved away, but don’t know yet
what happened to Henry’s wife and our ancestor, Elizabeth. The 1850 and 1860
censuses also indicated that Henry, Jesse W., and Charles E. were all born
in Pennsylvania. So now I knew that there
was a good probability that Henry was Charles’ father and that Jesse was
his brother. To summarize, Charles was living next to Henry in 1840, and
Jesse was living close by (same page in the census). The three of them
were the only ones to use a middle initial. Henry and Jesse were father
and son for reasons listed above. The ages were consistent with that
theory as well. The probability was high,
but it was all still a bit circumstantial. I went back to the censuses. In
the 1825 New York census, Henry appears to have been the only Wells in
Tyrone (but with a number of males and females in his household). In the
1840 census there were five Wells in Tyrone—Henry, Charles E., Jesse W.,
Alfred, and William P. The
initial again. Another son? I have found no further trace of Alfred, and
he could well have died, but I did find William P. He moved to Wright
Township, Michigan, near Grand Rapids, around 1843. Ten years later, he
had a son he named Charles. Also at that time (ten years later) our
Charles E. with his family moved to within a couple miles of William P. in
Michigan. Following his brother? Was baby Charles his godson? And William
P.’s first son was named Henry
J.! It gets better. According to William P.’s death certificate, his
father’s name was Henry. Even though William P. died three years before
Charles E., his death certificate was readily available. So he was clearly
a son. So now we have Charles E. moving all the way from New York to the
same spot in Michigan. The total conglomeration
of facts linking Charles E. to this family, while still circumstantial,
are enough that to my thinking the only conclusion can be drawn is that he
is indeed Henry J. Wells’ son. Beyond that connection, further
information is sparse. We know his mother’s name was Betsy and that she
lived until at least 1860, but that she isn’t buried next to her
husband, who died in 1863. According to the censuses, in addition to the
three brothers named, Charles appears to have had five sisters. One was
named Marilla, who married Alanson Koon and migrated to Hillsdale, MI in
the 1840s. Her oldest son was named Henry J. and her second son Charles E.
Another sister appears to
be Asenath M. Her death certificate gives her mother’s maiden name
(Knapp). However she is also married to a man named Knapp, so it makes you
wonder. There are trees that connect to her on Ancestry, but some of the
information they have is clearly wrong, so it makes you wonder again.
However, some of the trees that connect to her take her through her mother
Betsy’s ancestors back to England, some as early as the 1300s, and lists
Mary, Queen of Scotts, among the ancestors. The
1850 census shows her in Dix, New York, close to Tyrone where her father
lived. In the 1860 census, she is in Wright, Michigan, where her brother
William lived. Tracking down the others will not be easy but may yield
more information about the family. We know that William came from Luzerne
County, PA, so Charles was likely born there. Ancestry trees give Pittston
in Luzerne County as the place for Henry and Betsy’s marriage. The search will continue, and there is still a lot of research to be done trying to sort out the ancestry of Betsy Knapp, as well as to try and find Henry’s parents. But I feel that with all that we have learned about Charles, he is no longer a mystery. Three months later: Imagine our surprise when a descendent of William P. Wells found and contacted us! She is a fourth-great-granddaughter of my third-great-grandfather’s brother. She found
us through this website after her search for her ancestor’s brother Charles began when she found him living next door to Henry J. in that 1840 census. She has already found the key to what
she believes started the migration of some Wells and Comptons to Michigan—William P. earned Land Bounty Rights when he fought in the Mexican War in the 1840s. |