Tombstone Tuesday ~ Ashbys in Rosehill Cemetery, Chicago

Mary Elizabeth (Gorin) Ashby is buried in Chicago at Rosehill Cemetery, along with her husband, Daniel Morgan Ashby, and several of her children.

I have linked the family members at Find-A-Grave, and the kind Find-A-Grave volunteer, Jim Craig of Under Every Stone (if you haven't checked out his blog - you must), notes on his Find-A-Grave page that he gives permission for his photographs to be used for any non-commercial purpose, so below are photos of my second great grandparents' gravestones, courtesy of Jim Craig.

Mary E. Ashby
1833-1891

Daniel M. Ashby
1828-1907

I appreciate the last photo which shows the gravestones of the family plot in relation to each other.

Amanuensis Monday ~ 1891 Death Certificate for Mary E. Ashby

An Amanuensis is a person employed to write what another dictates or to copy what has been written by another. Not only do the documents contain genealogical information, the words breathe life into kin – some we never met – others we see a time in their life before we knew them.

Mary Elizabeth (Gorin) Ashby, my second great grandmother, died on July 7, 1891, in Chicago, Illinois. FamilySearch.org (Free!) has Death Certificates for Cook County, Illinois, 1878-1922 which is where I found the following.

Illinois, Cook County Deaths, 1878-1922 (index and images, FamilySearch, https://www.familysearch.org,
from Illinois Department of Public Health, Division of Vital Records, Springfield, Illinois, accessed 5/8/2011),
Mary E. Ashby, died 7 July 1891. Citing Death Records, FHL microfilm 1,030,967.

Handwritten entries are in blue. My editorial comments are bracketed.

 1. Name: Mary E. Ashby
 2. Sex Female  Color White
 3. Age 58 years - months 7 days [Implies birth date of June 30, 1833; family bible has June 28]
 4. Occupation None
 5. Date of death July 7th, 1891 11:50 PM [I think]
 6. Married
 7. Nationality and place where born American  Glasgow, Kentucky
 8. How long resident in this State Residence Louisville [Kentucky]
 9. Place of death 455 Elm St, Chicago [Residence of her daughter, Mary, and son-in-law, who had only just married in the previous October]
10. Cause of death Hemiplegia [Paralysis affecting one side of the body]
11. Duration of disease Fifteen hours
12. Place of burial Rose Hill Cemetery
13. Name of undertaker Jordan [See their full page advertisement below.]
14. Dated at Chicago, July 7, 1891. G. E. Richards, M.D.
                                                 Residence 44 1/2 Bellevue Place [See his directory entry below.]

1891 Chicago City Directory, page 1918, Fold3.com

1891 Chicago City Directory, page 3045, Fold3.com

Matrilineal Monday ~ Mary Elizabeth Gorin, 1833-1891

More than a year ago, I participated in a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun blog post where I listed all 16 of my second great-grandparents. See Heritage Pie Chart for the basic details - names, dates, locations and parents of this generation of my ancestors.

I have blogged about 15 of these 16 second great-grandparents. The 16th of these ancestors I want to write about is Mary Elizabeth Gorin (1833 - 1891). I have written about her husband, Daniel Morgan Ashby, and shared an ambrotype of her father, Thomas Jefferson Gorin.

Much of what I know about Mary Elizabeth Gorin is found in the Gorin Family Bible that was passed down in the family and is now in my possession.

She was born on June 28, 1833, in Glasgow, Barren County, Kentucky, where Gorins had been for several decades. Based on the bible entries, Mary E. Gorin was the oldest of seven children born to her parents, Thomas Jefferson Gorin and Mary Ann (Bowman) Gorin.

Image from Gorin Family Bible, Births page

According to U.S. Census records and city directories, she spent just about all of her life in Glasgow, except for her last few years, when she lived in Louisville, Kentucky. In 1850, the first U.S. Federal census that lists the names of all household members, she is enumerated in her parents' household as 17-year-old Mary E. Gorin.

According to the family bible, Mary Elizabeth Gorin married D. M. Ashby on February 11, 1857.

Image from Gorin Family Bible, Marriages page

Sunday's Obituary ~ 1891 Sudden Death

Mary E. Ashby is one of my second great-grandmothers. It appeared that she died rather suddenly.

The following death notice is from page 3 of the July 8, 1891, Chicago Tribune, found at Fold3.

Mary's daughter, Mrs. Charles C. Adsit, is her younger daughter, Mary Bowman Ashby, who had married Charles Chapin Adsit the previous October 30, 1890.

I will be sharing more information about this second great-grandmother in the next few days.

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday ~ Hurstmont Photos

Thank you to a reader of my blog, whose great-grandfather, Rudolph Hermes, was superintendent gardener at Hurstmont when James Tolman Pyle owned it. Below are a few pictures that he shared with me.

The first two are mounted photographs that he found in his father's home.

One view of one of Hurstmont's gardens

Another view of the gardens. At the far right is the house.

A postcard of "Pyle's Residence, Morristown, N.J."

You can see more pictures and a description of the home in 1907 in the June 1907 issue of American Homes and Gardens, which is found at Google Books, searching for American Homes and Gardens Hurstmont.

Wells and Willis Family in Brookline in 1860

My 3rd great grandparents household in Brookline, Massachusetts as enumerated in the 1860 U.S. Federal Census. (Thomas' middle initial should be G not D.)

Ancestry.com, database online. Year: 1860; Census Place: Brookline, Norfolk, Massachusetts;
Roll: M653_514; Page 747; Record for Thomas D. Wells [sic]

Thomas D. Wells is 54 years old, no occupation listed, and incorrectly listed as being born in New York. (He was born in New Hampshire.) $10,000 represents the value of his real estate and $3,000 represents the value of his personal estate.

His wife, Elizabeth S. Wells, is 49 years old with $150,000 as the value of real estate owned. This was a lot of money in 1860 (assuming it's not an enumerator error)! (See an interesting online calculator at MeasuringWorth.) And, yes, she is correctly listed as being born in Maine.

Their children are listed: Eliza (age 21), Henry (age 19, and a sailor, who died in 1864 - see Forest Hills gravestone), and Louisa (age 12, and in school) were born in Massachusetts, and Benjamin (age 4) was born in New Hampshire.

Wordless Wednesday ~ Eliza May Wells

This branch (Willis / Wells / Greeley) of the family is one with quite a few photographs. Following are several of my second great grandmother, Eliza May Wells (20 Aug 1839 - 18 Sep 1880).

Eliza May Wells circa 1857

Eliza May Greeley
Wife of Samuel S. Greeley
almost 18 yrs. old

~~~~~~~

Matrilineal Monday ~ Eliza May Wells

Eliza May Wells, my second great grandmother, was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on August 20, 1839, to Thomas Goodwin Wells and Elizabeth Sewall Willis.

She spent her childhood in Merrimack and Walpole, New Hampshire, based on the fact that I find her father and family in Merrimack, Hillsborough, New Hampshire, in the 1840 U.S. Federal Census and I find the family in Walpole, Cheshire, New Hampshire, in the 1850 U.S. Federal Census.

Louisa May Alcott was a cousin who spent time with her "Wells cousins in New Hampshire."

By 1860, her family had moved to Brookline, Norfolk, Massachusetts and in 1866, she married, as his second wife, a first cousin of her mother, Samuel Sewall Greeley, in either Brookline or Cambridge, Massachusetts. (See their marriage record here.) See Samuel Sewall Greeley's obituary for more about him.

Eliza May (Wells) Greeley then moved to Chicago, where she gave birth to five children:
Elizabeth Sewall Greeley (1867 - 1868)
Ann Percival Greeley (1869 - 1876)
Henry Sewall Greeley (1871 - 1877)
Ethel May Greeley (1875 - 1931), my great grandmother. See a photograph of her.
Ruth Lyman Greeley (1878 - 1975), who deserves her own blog post one of these days.

She was also step-mother to three sons of Samuel and his first wife.

She applied for a passport application on September 25, 1879 in Chicago, Illinois. Her brother Benjamin W. Wells confirmed that she was who she stated she was.

Ancestry.com, U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925. Record for Eliza M. Greeley (1879)