![[Wheatley Family History Project]](banner.gif)
|
|
|
New: Search this site.
Introduction
1. Nottingham
2. Northumberland, County and Town
3. Virginia
4. Missouri: William and Mildred, 1857-1860
5. The Civil War
6. William's Montana Trip, 1865
7. Reconstruction
8. Altoona and Duncansville
9. Idaho and Washington
10. The End of the Third Generation
11. The Historians
Appendix: Handlist of the Papers
This project will, I hope, eventually add up to something like a book. Currently, Chapter 6 is roughly complete; Chapter 2 has all its documents but needs more introduction; and Chapters 1, 2 and 8 have a few documents. Links to these texts are provided below. For Chapter 2 and 6, there are also links to Microsoft Word 6.0 files in which the same material is presented in a book-like format, suitable for printing out. In addition to texts, a few photographs and documents have been scanned, and links have been provided below.
First, a Note on the Transcriptions describes what I've done to the texts to get them from the page to the Web.
These are outline genealogies, with dates of birth and death and names of spouses, but no other information about individuals. If you have information that ought to be here, please let me know!
Nothing written yet; see the home page (link at the top of this page).
John Wheatley and Elizabeth Wright came from the vicinity of Nottingham; they were forced to leave England about 1795, owing to their Jacobin sympathies; they may have had contact with Joseph Priestley, the scientist, theologian and dissenter; they maintained contact with John's brother in England after their emigration.
The Wheatleys settled in Point Township, Northumberland Co., Pennsylvania, and later moved into Northumberland town, where John Wheatley and his son John Wright Wheatley after him ran a shoe shop. Some background on the Withington, McCoy and Thornton families will be needed.
Odds and ends: Graves in Riverview Cemetery, Northumberland, Pennsylvania
John Wright Wheatley's signature (from his ledger) : picture
The Priestley House, Northumberland, probably 1890 : picture
| Wheatley Home | Front St AT Wheatley Ave Northumberland, PA 17857 |
| click map for more details Brought to you by MapBlast! | |
In 1858 William married Mildred Humes in Missouri. Her grandfather, John Hume (the "s" was added by Mildred's father William) was an ironmonger who, according to family tradition, prepared the iron frame for one of Lewis and Clark's boats at Harper's Ferry. The Humes family intermarried with other Virginia Scotch Irish families: the Gilmores and Rowlands. They settled in Missouri in the mid-nineteenth century, where they became slave-owning farmers and millers.
William and Mildred met and courted at her family plantation Val de Moulin, in Morgan Co., Missouri, in the summer of 1857. At first they kept their relationship secret from everyone but Mildred's brother Joseph, who carried letters between the lovers. William and Mildred were married in a double ceremony with Joseph in September 1858, and bought a farm in Johnson Co. In 1860, however, they moved to Pennsylvania.
The documents for this chapter are substantially complete. Read them on-line (last update: 27 Oct. 1997); non-frames version; download zipped Microsoft Word file
For more information about genealogical resources for Morgan Co., visit the Morgan County MOGenWeb site.
William and Mildred stayed in Northumberland through the Civil War, despite their southern sympathies. William ran the family shoe shop until 1863, when he bought a canal boat. Three of his brothers had moved to Americus, Georgia, in the 1850s, and served in the Confederate army.
In the summer of 1865 William and Mildred's brother Joseph shipped a steam sawmill to Confederate Gulch in Montana, intending to sell lumber to the prospectors who had flocked there after the discovery of gold the previous year. Their enterprise was delayed by the sinking of the steamboat Bertrand in the Missouri River with the mill, which had to be salvaged. (By a remarkable coincidence, the Bertrand was excavated in 1969 with its cargo otherwise intact.) With the Montana winter setting in before the mill was ready to operate, William and Joseph sold up and returned to Missouri.
This chapter is substantially complete. Read it on-line (last update: 29 Oct. 1997); non-frames version; download zipped Microsoft Word file.
Note: red dots mark the course of Confederate Gulch.
William and Mildred farmed in Missouri for eight years after the Civil War, ultimately purchasing Val de Moulin. During William's father's final illness, however, they sold the farm and returned to Pennsylvania in 1873. Meanwhile, William's brothers were coping with conditions in Reconstruction Georgia.
These letters are complete. Read them on-line (last update: 1 Sept. 1998); non-frames version.
On returning to Pennsylvania William joined the Altoona Iron Co., first as cashier and ultimately as superintendant and treasurer. In 1883 he and a partner purchased the Portage Iron Works in Duncansville. This period was the height of the family's prosperity. In 1889-90, however, they pulled up roots and moved to Idaho-a childhood dream of William's.
The diaries are complete: read them online (last update: 17 Mar. 1998).
Odds and ends: Interior shots, Northumberland, Altoona or Duncansville PA, probably 1890: some pictures (very large files)
William and Mildred, most of their children (including John Wright Wheatley III), and Mildred's brother Ed moved first to Post Falls, Idaho, and then to the Spokane area. They made a go at ranching. Their daughter Harriet married William Irvin Williams, whose family had moved to Washington from Iowa a few years before. Possibly at the time of the St. Louis Exhibition in 1904, some of the children made a return trip to Pennsylvania, Virginia and Missouri, and took a new portable camera with them.
William died in 1900; Mildred survived him by eight years. One by one their brothers and sisters followed, as their children established families of their own.
The papers and memorabilia of William and Mildred were preserved by their grown children, who also did some genealogical research (particularly into their Virginia forebears) and added items from their own lives. John Wright Wheatley III seems to have had most of the materials until his death; his sister Mary Wheatley McBride then took them in.
Odds and ends: Paul VanDevander Wheatley, in uniform : picture
A handlist of the papers on which this history is based. I have described them briefly in the order in which they have come down. Text (last update: 15 Mar. 1998).
