Amelia Annette Billings was my 3x great grandmother, my paternal grandfather’s father’s father’s mother. We have cabinet photos of her and her family taken around 1890. It was trying to date these photos that inspired me to create a family tree on ancestry.com and so began the project that has brought me to creating this blog. I ended up writing a complete biography of her life that I will share here. I feel like I came to know her in a small way after piecing together the struggles of her life from census documents and newspaper clippings, and now I can introduce her to you.
Amelia was born March 16th, 1841 to Amos and Eleanor (Mott) Billings. She was the first of their six children, four girls followed by two boys. They lived near West Leyden, New York, which is east of Syracuse, located along the East Branch of the Mohawk River. Her father, Amos, was a farmer. Her mother, Eleanor, was originally from Oneida Castle New York, being born there the very same year it was first incorporated in 1815. Eleanor’s family were part of the Quaker community and are included in their meeting notes.
At the age of 23 Amelia married William Almaron Starr, a widower who had buried two wives and an infant son in the previous 10 years. He was 36, thirteen years her senior and had 7- and 10-year-old sons from the previous marriages. William was a blacksmith and a postmaster in the small community of Ava, New York about 3 miles north of West Leyden. William was also a recording officer in his Methodist church for over a decade.
Just thirteen months after their marriage Amelia gave birth to Emory Alfred Starr in Dec of 1864. In 1866 her first daughter, Marilla was born. She died just 13 months later. Then another son, Chauncey in 1868 who died after just three months. Then Susan arrived in 1869, Elmer in 1871 and their last child, Hattie in 1873.
A year later, just two days before their 10th wedding anniversary William died at the age of 46 and a month later Amelia’s stepson George died at the age of seventeen, likely of the same illness though it could have been a coincidence.
Amelia was just thirteen years older than her oldest step son, Henry. Twenty three year old Henry took over for his father as postmaster and blacksmith. Amelia gathered her young children and relocated to Warren County Illinois where her parents had moved ten years prior when they acquired their 160 acres from the Homestead Act. Today the journey would take you 14 hours in car. In 1875 a stagecoach would have traveled about 9 miles an hour at top speeds, thus taking at least 102 hours of travel time, plus stops along the way.
Upon arriving to Illinois in fall of 1875 things did not go well for Amelia. Her youngest daughter, Hattie, died within weeks of her arrival without ever reaching her second birthday.
Her sister Emma Billings who had moved to Kirkwood with her parents back in 1864 and married a fellow Oneida county migrant, Jesse E Lanphere, died in 1880. And the 1880 census shows us Amelia’s family has been scattered.
Amelia was employed as a servant in the home of Dr. JP Marsh. Fifteen year old Emory was working as a farm hand for Milton and Mary Jane (Hull) Shenberger in Kirkwood, IL. Ten year old Susan had been taken in by the Jacob Hall family; Jacob was a German immigrant and he and his wife were childless. The youngest surviving child, Elmer was living with Amelia’s parents in Kirkwood helping with their farming.
In 1881 Amelia remarried. Her second husband was Perine Holman, a widower twenty-two years her senior whose daughter was just seven years older than Amelia. He had worked in the fisheries in New Jersey up to 1850, as an oysterman and had been farming in Warren County since at least 1870. Sixteen months later, at the age of forty one, Amelia delivered one last child, Alida Holman.
We have many pictures of Alida, evidence Amelia doted on her.
In the following decade Amelia buried her father in 1888, her husband in 1892 and her mother in 1895. Emory’s wife, the mother of her grandson in 1896 died of typhoid along with two siblings and her father.
This time though, Perine had left a will, and Amelia inherited all her husband’s estate. To mark the birth of her first grandchild, Earnest Starr, she gathered her surviving children and had portraits made. For this I will always be thankful to her.
Unfortunately she did not have long to enjoy her new found independence, as she died ten years after Perine, in March of 1898 at the age of 56.
Her obituary noted she had been the vice president of the local Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the members of that group did readings at her funeral. She was also the treasurer of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary society and they attended her funeral as well. She had a “usual seat” at the Methodist church in Kirkwood which they draped in mourning at her funeral. Her cause of death is not listed, but there is a mention in the local paper that she was sick with “catarrh of the stomach” -what we would call gastritis- for 6 weeks prior to her death and both her sons having tonsilitis.
Just two years after her passing her step son who had remained in New York and ran a string of hotels in Rome, Chicago and Indiana, died at the age of 49. He had a stroke lifting a bag of potatoes. Susan married shortly after her mother’s death, had one child, but then died two years later after a surgery to remove a goiter. Emory was struck by lightning and killed in 1927 at the age of 62. Elmer lived until 1938 and died at the age of 67. Alida married twice, never bore any children of her own and lived until 1963, dying at the age of 80.
Amelia only had three grandchildren.
Amelia’s first grandchild is my great grandfather, he had 2 sons.
Susan’s son was raised by his aunt, Ella Ray and her family. He lived in Galesburg and had two daughters. He died in 1952 at the age of 48. Elmer married, had only one daughter, Lorena who died at just fourteen years old.
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