Ancestor Birthday - March 24th - Joseph Jewett 1765 - c1837

This is the day, March 24th, to celebrate the birthday of my 4th great-grandfather, Joseph Jewett. This Joseph Jewett had a 2nd great-grandfather also named Joseph Jewett, who was my 8th great-grandfather. Today's Joseph was born in 1765 in Hopkinton, New Hampshire to John and Hannah Jewett. When he was about 20, the family moved about 95 miles north to Lisbon.

A 1914 family history notes that Joseph was mentioned in the town records of Lisbon. Among these were that in 1785 his sheep mark was registered: "Hole in the left ear," and then in 1795 he was the chairman of a town meeting.

It was 10 Aug 1789 when he married Huldah Fenton from Landaff the next town to the south. They may have lived close to the line since he was recorded as of Landaff when he signed a petition for road in 1798. There are at least five children recorded at Lisbon from 1791 to 1802.

The family history lists a sixth child in Lisbon then goes on to say that the family moved to New York about 1805 and two more children were born there. Then it was about 1818 when Joseph moved to Mentor in Geauga (now Lake) County, Ohio, where he probably died around 1837.

I have some questions about the names of Joseph's children, so plan to write about that next week.

Ancestor Birthday - February 21st - Lydia Jewett 1793-1864

I find it interesting that my 3rd great-grandmother, Lydia (Jewett) Hayes lived nearly at the same time as my 4th great-grandmother, Nancy (Patton) Milligan who I wrote about a few days ago. This means we can't always predict how many generations will be within a certain number of years.

Lydia has also been very interesting to me because of where she lived. She was born in New Hampshire to Joseph and Huldah (Fenton) Jewett, married Seth Hayes in Ohio, moved to Indiana, then Iowa, and crossed the plains to Oregon where she died. Within her 71 years she traveled from coast to coast without the benefit of airplanes, trains or automobiles.

In 2015 I used an airplane to get to the East Coast and then traveled by motorcoach for a tour of New England. The tour materials told me that we would visit New Hampshire, but they didn't let me know that we would drive through the "town" of Lisbon. I was really excited to see the type of geography where my ancestor had been born. I wrote in my trip journal, "in a valley, harvested fields, ponds and marshy areas."

posted 21 Feb 2017