William Holden, my 2x great grandfather was born in 1858 in Ridgeway, New York to Charles and Deborah Cramer Holden, my 3x great grandparents. Charles ran an Inn in Schenectady with Deborah and his brother Aaron. He served in the civil war at the age of 42 with the NY 90th Regiment and then by 1866 the family came west to farm near Aurora Illinois for 5 years and, then in Oswego Iowa where they eventually died.
In 1880 at the age of 22 William was living in York Nebraska alone in a boarding house and clerking at the Drug Store. It’s likely he had decided to try his luck at claiming land from the 1860 Homestead Act. Eight years later at 29, he met and married fourteen year old Grace Mabel Webster, my 2x great grandmother in McCool, Nebraska.
Grace Webster came to Nebraska with her parents, Franklin Clark Webster and Susan Longwell Webster, my 3x great grandparents.
Franklin was born in New York, but served in the civil war, for 100 days in the Illinois 139th infantry from March of 1864 to October. After his discharge he went back to New York and met and married Susan Longwell in 1870 in Bath New York.
Susan’s mother Mary Catherine Woodruff, my 4x great grandmother had Susan at fourteen reportedly with a man named Alexander McIntosh and her husband James Longwell formally adopted Susan as his own after their marriage. I have DNA matches through Mary’s father Benjamin Woodruff, my 5x great grandfather, so there is no doubt Susan is a Woodruff. James was a farmer in Steuben County New York, his real estate valued at 3 thousand dollars in 1860 (about $114k today). Interestingly, after Susan married, and Grace had moved to Iowa with Frank, in the 1880 census 52 year old James is listed as insane. He died two years later.
3 years after Grace was born, Frank was working as a carpenter in Hammondsport New York. But by 1880 he had moved the family to Blanchard Iowa and then by 1890 out to York Nebraska. In Nebraska he claimed his 160 acres offered to all those who didn’t fight against the union in the civil war, but his claim was unsuccessful and he returned to Illinois, dying in Alexis Illinois on Halloween 1899.
William and Grace Holden had three daughters before returning to Illinois, Ina, Pearl and Mae. Ina is my great grandmother.
Ina W Holden Starr was born in York County Nebraska in October 1893. By 1896 when she was 3 they had relocated to Alexis, IL. Her father died when Ina was just 7 years old and Grace and the Holden girls went to Spring Grove Illinois to live with recently widowed, Susan Longfellow Webster who had opened a boarding house in Spring Grove, just north of Monmouth where she lived until her death in 1911.
Ina continued to live near Monmouth until she married Ernest Starr in 1914 in Monmouth. Grace lived with her and her husband in Monmouth and then Peoria, working as a dressmaker. Grace died a the home of her daughter Pearl in 1933 not reaching her 60th birthday.
Leave a Reply