Saturday Challenge- Where Were They in 1900?

A typical scene*

From an old GeneaMusings by Randy Seaver.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  Where were your ancestors in the year 1900?  Make a list with their ages and location (with the street  address if you know it).

This assignment shouldn’t be too hard I thought, I’ll only do my direct ancestors, not aunts, uncles, or cousins. Right. In the year, 1900, I had four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, nine 2-great-grandparents, and one 3-great grandmother alive! Well, here goes:

Grandparents

William Ward lived in Scipio with his parents at age 13. This undoubtedly would have been the Mapleton area.

Frances Ingalls Ward at age 11 would have been on the Fort Drum military base. No that’s not right. Fort Drum didn’t even exist yet. She lived near North Wilna on her father’s farm. Today the area has been absorbed into Fort Drum.

Marion Wooster was age 4. He had been born in Iowa, but in 1900 was living back east where the family had come from on the outskirts of the hamlet of Lysander in northern Onondaga County.

Alice Valentine Jennings Wooster would have been 7 and living on her father’s farmland in Ireland.

Great-Grandparents

Charles Ingalls at age 36 owned a farm in the town of Wilna Jefferson Co, New York, just north of the settlement of North Wilna. The previous year he had lost his first wife (my great-grandmother) in childbirth and had not yet remarried.

William Jennings at age 51 and his wife, Sarah (Damery) Jennings age 38 were living on their farmland in Keelinga, Leap, County Cork Ireland. This is a small community in southwest Cork not far from the sea. One of their granddaughters and her husband own it today.

John Ward was 46 and his wife, Maria (Titus) Ward was 42 that year. They lived in the town of Scipio on a farm that we believe was near the four corners of Mapleton.

Verner Wooster age 37 and his wife, Edith (Duff) Wooster age 36 would have been on one of their farms. This one was in Lysander, New York, but they still had a farm in Iowa that they would travel back and forth to over the years.

2-Great-Grandparents

John Brown age 65 and Anna (Wright) Brown age 64 were living in Antwerp not far from their son-in-law Charles Ingalls, recent widower of their daughter Achsah. Antwerp is the town next to Wilna and the homes were about 5 miles or so apart.

James Duff was age 64 and Nellie (Johnson) Duff was 53 this year. Their farm was in Hampton Township of Dakota County, Minnesota. This is south of Minneapolis.

William Ward was age 72 and his wife, Mary Ann (Blackwell) Ward was 74 in 1900. They lived in Scipio, probably on the property that Mary Ann owned at Manchester Road and Cork Street.

Mary Fay Ingalls was 60. A widow, she lived with her son Charles in Wilna, undoubtedly helping him with his children.

 

Elizabeth (Tift) Wooster, a widow at age 73, she is living in her son, Verner’s home in Lysander as mentioned above at the time of the census. She appeared to consider Verner’s home as her base while visiting her children for extended times. Seven of her ten children were surviving in 1900.

Lodema (Tobias) Titus, at age 69 lived in Ledyard, with her oldest son, Daniel. He is listed as the head of household on the census. However, this was the home she had occupied for many years not far from the Great Gully that separates Ledyard from Springport in Cayuga County.

3-Great-Grandmother

Mary (Aubin) Johnson was age 85. One of the two original white women to settle in Washington County, Minnesota, she was now living in her daughter Emma’s home in Castle Rock, Minnesota. Emma and her husband, William Duff, lived not far from their siblings Nellie and James Duff mentioned above.

Despite the number of people to account for, this was not hard to figure out. Prior research has made me aware of the general vicinity of the places that my ancestors had lived. The census for 1900 reminded me of where they were living; particularly for those that had, had different homes over the years or that were staying with children.

*The picture is from Lancaster Pennsylvania taken this year while on vacation. But as they all lived on farms in 1900, this would have been typical of what they might have seen out their windows.