♂Nicholas Walrath Sr

Nicholas Walrath (10 September 1810 – 11 November 1896) was a New York-born saw-mill hand and later farmer who moved west by stages through Ohio and Illinois and died in Texas. He married Elcy Graves in Ohio in 1847, when the eldest of the children in his household was already about ten. He was the great-grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his son Nicholas Walrath (1850–1895) and his grandson Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934).

Early life and Ohio

He was born on 10 September 1810 at Utica, Oneida County, New York, according to the family record; nothing is known of his childhood. By June 1840 he was in Ohio, heading a household of four as “Nicholas Walroth” in Liberty Township, Logan County, where the family was still living ten years later. One of its members worked in manufactures and trades, none in agriculture, which fits his later saw-mill work.

On 27 March 1847 he married Elcy Graves in Champaign County, Ohio, before Charles Thomas, a minister of the gospel; the register gives only their names and the dates. In August 1850 he was thirty-nine, the tender of a saw-mill in Liberty Township, owning no land. With him were Elsa, as the census spells her, aged thirty-two; Amenzo, twelve, born in New York; Lydia and Manerva, nine and seven, born in Ohio; and Nancy, two. The census states no relationships, but the three elder children were born years before the recorded marriage.

Illinois

The family moved on to Illinois in the late 1850s. In June 1860 he was farming in Blue Ridge Township, Piatt County, without land of his own and with personal property worth $100; the enumerator wrote the surname as Walworth. By August 1870 he had moved to DeWitt Township in DeWitt County and owned land valued at $3,200, in line with his farming neighbors. Fourteen dwellings away lived the Bosler household, whose daughter Anna Lucy later married his son Nicholas. In June 1880, at sixty-nine, he was still farming in the town of DeWitt with Elcy and their youngest son, Francis, while Nicholas, his wife Anna and their two small sons, Clarence the elder, lived in the next dwelling.

Marriage and family

The family record attaches ten children to Nicholas Walrath and Elcy Graves: five born between about 1838 and 1844, in New York and then Ohio, before the 1847 marriage, and five born between 1848 and 1865, in Ohio and then Illinois. No record explains how the elder five fit a marriage of 1847, but when the daughter Manerva married in Champaign County, Illinois, in 1878 and again in 1894, her mother was entered as Nancy Pealer, which raises the possibility of an earlier wife. The eldest, Amenzo, seems to be the man who drew a Civil War pension from Illinois, worked as a painter at Little Rock, Arkansas, and died there in 1923; his obituary names Eliza among his sisters. Eliza married Theodore Hoover in DeWitt County; the marriage is said to date from December 1873.

Death

Some time after June 1880 he and Elcy moved to Montague County, Texas, where Eliza and her husband were already living; no record shows when or why. Elcy died at Montague on 4 July 1896 and he followed on 11 November 1896, at the age of eighty-six; both dates and the place come from the family record alone.

Notes

Birth and death

The censuses of 1850, 1860 and 1880 give his birthplace only as New York, and his age of sixty-nine in June 1880 fits a birth in 1810 or 1811. No death record is known for him or for Elcy, and no obituary appears in the indexed newspapers of 1896, none of them a Montague County paper. Texas records do place his children nearby. His daughter Nancy died at Bonita, Montague County, on 2 March 1945, and her death certificate names her father as “N. F. Walrath”, born in New York, the only record to give him a middle initial. A Francis Allison Walrath, born in Illinois on 12 January 1865, died in neighboring Cooke County in 1952 and is probably the youngest son, though his certificate names no parents; Amenzo’s obituary of 1923 had already placed a brother, Frank A. Walrath, in Texas.

Parentage

No record names his parents. Many online family trees make him a son of Johannes Walrath (1783–1850) and Leah Bradt (1785–1845), of the Mohawk Valley and later Clinton County, Iowa. That link rests on a comment posted to a memorial website, which quoted a family typescript compiled in 1942 and identified this man with the typescript’s son Nicholas, “bn in 1811, last heard of at Sleepy Eye, Minn.” The typescript itself gives no more than that, and a 1939 typescript of Iowa family records drawn from the same family circle lists only “Nicholas 1811”.

Nicholas Walrath of Montague is found in Ohio or Illinois at every census from 1840 to 1880 and never in Iowa or Minnesota, and the 1880 census gives his mother’s birthplace as Vermont, while Leah Bradt was born in New York. Another Nicholas Walrod, born in New York in about 1811, lived in Fillmore County, Minnesota, from 1857; he too had married in Ohio and had a son named Francis, and in 1880 he gave both his parents as born in New York, so the typescript’s entry fits him at least as well.

No baptism is known for this Nicholas. The German Flatts church register, which has no baptisms between 1796 and 1810, has no Nicholas Walrath in 1811, and the Herkimer register has no Walrath birth on the dates in 1807 and 1809 that the typescript gives for two of Johannes’s elder children. The Clinton County probate entries of 1850 for a John Walrod, which most likely concern Johannes, record only letters of administration granted to his son-in-law Jacob Lepper, an inventory and an order to sell the personal property; they name no heirs. Small DNA matches with descendants of four of the typescript’s other children are consistent with the link but too slight to test it.

Nancy Pealer and the elder children

Online family trees give two of the elder daughters, Lydia and Manerva, a mother named Nancy Pealer, and a relative’s note of 2009 records a family tradition that Nicholas Walrath married a Nancy Pealer, though as a second wife rather than a first. No record of such a marriage is known. But two Champaign County, Illinois, marriage entries for Manerva, in 1878 to Augustus L. Brown and in 1894 to Barnart A. Salisbury, name her parents as Nicholas and Nancy Peeler (1878) or Pealer (1894), the later entry giving the father’s surname as Walworth; both are known from indexes. Lydia’s marriage in 1863 names no parents. No record of any of the five elder children names Elcy Graves as mother, while the marriages of the younger sons Martin and Francis, between 1878 and 1885, name her. The family record still places all ten children with Elcy.

The children born before 1847 are the least certain part of the family. Two of them, Amenzo and a child recorded only as “M.”, are both given a birth in New York in about 1838, but the 1840 census household holds only one child under five, a boy, beside a man and a woman in their twenties and a boy of ten to fifteen who has not been identified. Amenzo’s own records give his birth as 1834 (the 1880 census), 6 September 1836 (the index to his obituary) and about 1838 (the 1850 census). His identification with the Little Rock man rests on indexes: his obituary names a Mrs Eliza A. Hoover and a Frank A. Walrath of Texas among his relatives.