♂Nicholas Walrath

Nicholas Walrath (20 June 1850 – 5 February 1895) was an Ohio-born farmer of DeWitt County, Illinois, who married the girl who, when she was ten and he was twenty, had been counted fourteen dwellings down the road from his family, and died at forty-four, leaving a widow with eight children. He was the grandfather of Ora Emogene Walrath (1925–2014), through his son Clarence Eugene Walrath (1878–1934).

Early life

Nicholas Walrath was born on 20 June 1850 in Ohio, by the date on his gravestone, probably the son of Nicholas Walrath (1810–1896) and Elcy Graves (1818–1896), both natives of New York. When the census was taken that August the family was living in Liberty Township, Logan County, where his father was recorded as the tender of a saw-mill; he himself is not listed, since the count was as of 1 June, before he was born. By 1860 the family had moved west to Blue Ridge Township in Piatt County, Illinois, where he appears as a boy of ten. In 1870 he was twenty, a farm laborer in his parents’ household in DeWitt Township, DeWitt County; his father by then owned land valued at $3,200.

Marriage and family

The same 1870 census, taken by one enumerator on one day, lists the Bosler household fourteen dwellings from the Walraths; its daughter Anna Lucy Bosler was then ten years old. The Boslers had come to the Farmer City neighborhood from Louisville, Kentucky, in 1864. Nicholas Walrath and Anna Lucy Bosler were married on 6 February 1877 in DeWitt County, when she was sixteen. In 1880 the young couple were farming in the town of DeWitt, in the dwelling next to his parents, with two small sons. They had eight children, born between 1878 and 1894; the eldest was Clarence Eugene.

Death

Nicholas Walrath died on 5 February 1895 at his home on Phil Weedman’s farm, just west of Farmer City in DeWitt County, the day before his eighteenth wedding anniversary; his youngest child had been born the year before. He was a tenant there, and one notice said he left his family “without any means of support”. The funeral, on 6 February, the anniversary itself, was held at the Parnell Methodist Episcopal church. The records found so far do not give the cause. He is buried in McCord Cemetery at Farmer City, under a joint stone that reads “Nicholes Walrath, June 20, 1850 – Feb. 5, 1895”, beside “Anna his wife”.

No second marriage has been found for his widow: the censuses of 1900 and 1910 record her as a widow, and she made her will in 1910 as Anna Walrath. A local newspaper had her still in DeWitt County in January 1902, and she moved to Clay County, Iowa, some time after; the census of April 1910 records her there as a farmer and an employer, working the place with four of her sons and a daughter. She died in October 1910 and was brought back to Farmer City to be buried beside him.

The family

Augustus Leroy Walrath (1882–1986) married for the first time on 17 September 1958 in Martin County, Minnesota, at the age of seventy-six. His bride was Leona A. Eads, who was born in 1909.

Notes

No record found so far names his parents outright. The link to Nicholas Walrath and Elcy Graves rests on his place in their household in the censuses of 1860, at ten, and 1870, at twenty (neither census states relationships), and on his farming the next dwelling to theirs in 1880.

Other men of the same name have been confused with him. An Iowa death record from after 1904 and an Iowa old-age assistance file belong to a different Nicholas Walrath, since this man died in Illinois in 1895. Minnesota death records that name a Nicholas Walrath and Anna Bosler as parents are his children’s own death records, filed after they had moved there, not evidence that he lived in Minnesota.