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- [S84] E-Mail, Ruth Wheeler Edwards [redwa96@aim.com], 6 Nov 2009.
In doing my tree, I have started with what I am certain of and worked backwards. What I know for certain is that I was born in Pueblo, Colorado, in the same hospital where my father, Nathan Luzerne Wheeler, Jr. and his twin, Edgar Wheeler, were born in 1912. My grandfather, Nathan Luzerne Wheeler, Sr., was born in 1885 in Chautauqua County, Kansas and is buried in Tucson, Arizona. His father, Edgar L. Wheeler was born in 1842 in Otsego County, NY and is buried in Roselawn Cemetery, Pueblo County, Colorado. His father, Nathan Wheeler was born in 1819 in New York and is buried in St. Charles Cemetery in Chautauqua Cty, Kansas. His father, Nathan Wheeler, born in 1783, is buried in Wheeler Cemetery in Otego, NY along with his wife Sinai (I recently visited their graves and took pictures.) I can document all this with various census records, etc. I was ecstatic when I found your work because it appeared to link to what I knew and essentially took the tree all the way back to the 1500's. I spent my entire career as a social science researcher and since retiring have turned my energies to other areas, one of which is genealogy. I try not to put anything in my tree I can't verify with records, etc., and have continued to dig. I have most of the available ancestry.com subscriptions and have recently been to historical society offices in New York and Grafton, Mass. I have stacks of stuff to go through now that we're back from that adventure to attach to the tree -- land records, birth records, etc.
Based just on the Wheeler book information, I am wondering if perhaps the Nathan Wheeler who was born in Rowe, Mass. in 1783 may not be the right one for our line. The reason for my concern is that in the 1880 Kansas census which includes Nathan (1819) and his wife Hannah, it says that both his parents were born in Connecticut. This would not be consistent with the Nathan (1752) being born in Massachusetts. I have the CDROM of the Wheeler Family in America book (isn't that an amazing document???) and did a string search for 1783 and found one other Nathan Wheeler born in 1783 in Connecticut. He is of the Moses Wheeler line.
You are an expert on this stuff and I'm just an amateur. What do you think about this? Is there other documentation that Nathan (1783) was actually born in Massachusetts?
While we were in New York recently, in addition to spending some time at the local historical society office, we went to the office where land records for the Otego area are kept and found literally dozens of transactions involving Nathan Wheeler and his son Isaac during the early 1800's. They were surely busy buying and selling property! There's also an interesting little tidbit in the History of Otego (Blakely, 1907, p. 88) in a section that is talking about settlers along Otsdawa creek -- which is where the Wheeler Cemetery is -- that says "Captain Wheeler once followed and killed a bear that had gotten a kettle over his head." That made me figure that there might have been some military service, so I'm looking into those records.
Although it's not hard evidence, all other things being equal, something that might be a clue that Nathan (1783) belonged to the line that went back in Massachusetts comes from the Kansas Wheelers. When Edgar and Nathan (1819) came to Kansas from New York, they settled in a place they called "Grafton". It's interesting since it would appear that the Nathan (1783)'s father was born in Grafton, Mass. Grafton, KS, is now a ghost town, but a cousin a couple of times removed lives in the area and showed me where the old Wheeler house was (some of it is still standing because it was built of stone). Her grandmother told her stories about what would have been her grandfather, Edgar, who was apparently the judge, postmaster, and just about everything else for the area.
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