♀Elcy Graves

Elcy Graves (25 August 1818 – 4 July 1896) was a New York-born farm wife who went west with her husband, Nicholas Walrath, through Ohio and Illinois and, by the family record, died in Texas. Her recorded marriage to him took place in Ohio in 1847, about nine years after the first of the children the family record gives the couple was born. She was the great-grandmother of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through her son Nicholas Walrath (1850–1895) and her grandson Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934).

Marriage and family

On 27 March 1847 she married Nicholas Walrath in Champaign County, Ohio, before Charles Thomas, a minister of the gospel; the register spells her name Elcy. Some years earlier, in June 1840, a household headed by “Nicholas Walroth” in Liberty Township, in neighboring Logan County, included one woman in her twenties, of an age with her; the census names only the head.

The family record attaches ten children to the couple: five born between about 1838 and 1844, in New York and then Ohio, and five born between 1848 and 1865, in Ohio and then Illinois. The records do not explain how the elder five fit a marriage of 1847. Index entries for the later marriages of several of the children in Illinois, in 1878, 1882 and 1885, are attached to her as their mother under her maiden name, Graves. Two Champaign County, Illinois, marriage records for their daughter Manerva, of 1878 and 1894, apparently give her mother as Nancy Peeler and then Nancy Pealer, not Elcy, which raises the possibility of an earlier wife.

When the census was taken in Liberty Township in August 1850 she was thirty-two, and her husband was recorded as the tender of a saw-mill. The family moved to Illinois in the 1850s: in 1860 they were farming in Blue Ridge Township, Piatt County, and by 1870 in DeWitt Township, DeWitt County. In June 1880 she was living in the town of DeWitt with her husband and their youngest son, Francis, with her son Nicholas and his young family in the next dwelling. In December 1873 her daughter Eliza took out a license in DeWitt County to marry Theodore Hoover.

Texas and death

The family record places the deaths of both Elcy and her husband at Montague in Montague County, Texas, a county where Eliza and her husband had been living since at least 1880: hers on 4 July 1896, his four months later, on 11 November 1896. No death record is known for either, and no record of when the couple moved to Texas is known. A family note of 2009 gives her age at death as 78, a year more than the dates allow.

Notes

The censuses and registers spell her given name as Elcy, Elcie, Elsie, Elsa and Eliza. All five can be short forms of Elizabeth, but no record found so far calls her Elizabeth. The 1860 census index reads her as “Eliza Walworth”, a misreading of her married surname, not a maiden name.

Many online family trees make her a daughter of David A. Graves and Lavinia C. Letton, who married in Lafayette County, Missouri, on 1 April 1845. That cannot be right. Lavinia Letton’s obituary of 1908 gives her birth as 21 December 1829, eleven years after Elcy’s, and the 1880 census places Elcy’s father’s birth in Massachusetts, while David Graves is recorded as born in Kentucky. The entry reached FamilySearch from an Ancestry member tree, and its own contributor noted that no document for the parentage had been found.

Manerva’s marriage records

The 1878 entry, which writes her as Minerva J. Walrath, records her marriage to Augustus L. Brown and names her parents as “Nancy Peeler, Nicholas”. The 1894 entry, under her later name of Minerva J. Brown, records her marriage to Barnart A. Salisbury and names her parents as “Nancy Pealer, Nicholas Walworth”. Both come from indexed county marriage collections, FamilySearch’s “Illinois, County Marriages, 1810-1940” for 1878 and Ancestry’s “Illinois, U.S., County Marriage Records, 1800-1940” for 1894. No record of a marriage of Nicholas Walrath to a Nancy Pealer or Peeler is known, and the family record still places all ten children with Elcy. Whether Nancy was an earlier wife is not settled by these two entries alone.

Early life

The family record gives Elcy Graves’s birth as 25 August 1818; no birth record has been found. The censuses of 1850 and 1880 give New York as her birthplace, and so does the 1880 census of her daughter Eliza’s household in Texas, the only one of the daughter’s censuses taken in her mother’s lifetime; her age of thirty-two in 1850 fits the year 1818. Her parents are not known. In 1880 the census gave her father’s birthplace as Massachusetts. No record of her first twenty-eight years has been found.