The Ancestry of Hannah Strader

Hannah Strader’s lineage is known back to the ancestors who came to the Colony of North Carolina about 1750. There is so much to say, in fact, that this is by far the most text-heavy of all the individual pages of the Nathaniel Martin/Hannah Strader website. Keep in mind that even though a great deal is mentioned here, this is still only a summary.

Much of the knowledge cited here comes as a result of the genealogical research of Howard Frame in the 1960s and early 1970s. Howard was descended from Elizabeth Strader, a sister of Hannah, who married Jeremiah Frame. The union of Jeremiah and Elizabeth was one of at least six Strader/Frame marriages, entwining the clans to such a degree that the Strader story was a natural focus of Howard’s investigations. Though Howard labored without the advantages of the internet era, he succeeded in finding enough documentation to pencil in a sketch of the family in early America. He found that Hannah’s bloodlines were thoroughly German, most or all of them qualifying as “Pennsylvania Dutch.”

The easiest way to structure a discussion of Hannah’s forebears is to to begin with the most ancient known and proceed chronologically. Below you will find three sections of text, each launching with one of three immigrant ancestors -- Johann Heinrich Strader, John Jacob Starr, or Heinrich Weitzel -- and proceeding down to Hannah. But first, it is useful to talk about the Pennsylvania Dutch migration in general.

The story begins in a region of Germany known as the Palatinate. This area, part of the Rhineland, lies just north of the Alsace-Lorraine region and up against the eastern borders of Luxembourg and Belgium. By the early 1700s this area was home to a population divided into three major sects of Christianity -- Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic. This division of power meant each group dreamed of becoming dominant, and no lasting stability could be counted on until such time as that happened. The prize was obvious. With the retreat of the plague years the land, a wonderfully fertile agricultural zone, had become prosperous. Among those who coveted it were outsiders, hoping to further their own interests by shifting the balance of control one way or another. The most infamous meddler was the French monarch Louis XIV, the famous “Sun King.” During his tremendously long reign (1643-1715) he repeatedly sent his armies over the border, ostensibly to support his Catholic brethren, but also for purposes of pillage. A crisis developed following a somewhat pointless invasion in 1707, a campaign apparently fueled by the ambitions of one of Louis’s field marshalls rather than by the king himself. The invaders withdrew almost at once. Some say that during the retreat of the French forces, the marshall gave the residents three days to flee, and then the army destroyed everything on their way home, a “scorched earth” military tactic. It is said that the fleeing people gathered eventually into refugee populations that had to fit themselves into the societies of neighboring countries. More objective histories say that the residents did not actually have to leave, but in the wake of an intensely cold winter of 1708-09 that destroyed orchards and vineyards that had stood for generations, the prospect of starting over elsewhere did not seem so daunting given that the families were going to have to replant fields and rebuild homes and barns and shops anyway. Moreover, even in peaceful times the Palatinate was too crowded, leaving few opportunities for the younger generations of agricultural families to obtain acreage sufficient to support a household. Soon pamphlets extolling the virtues of the colonies of Pennsylvania and North Carolina began circulating in editions in the tens of thousands of copies. Queen Anne of England, eager to help what she perceived as victims of religious persecution, and Parliament, eager to fill the American possessions with white, Protestant settlers but not wanting to deplete England to do so, approved a policy in 1709 that granted free passage to any “citizens of foreign nations” that wished to settle there, provided they swore allegiance to the Colonies when they arrived. Some, particularly a large surge of Lutherans, immediately took advantage of this offer. From 1709 through the early 1750s, as the queen continued to subsidize the voyages, many more followed, and the phenomenon began to draw more and more Germans from beyond the Palatinate as well.

One of the key groups in this mass exodus consisted of families who had at first sought asylum in the Netherlands. Perhaps some of them were biding their time hoping for the opportunity to reclaim their homes in Germany, but political unrest prevailed in the France/Germany border area for the remainder of the century. Eventually these families crossed the Atlantic. However, having spent as much as thirty or forty years in Holland, they had become “Dutchified” in speech and customs. As these later refugees crossed the Atlantic, many landed in Philadelphia and settled in eastern Pennsylvania. This is the group famous today as the “Pennsylvania Dutch.” Hannah’s forebears have been described as such here; however, strictly speaking the label only lightly applies, because the relevant individuals spent at most a dozen years, and some probably only a matter of weeks, within the bounds of Pennsylvania.

Hannah’s ancestors may well have rejected Pennsylvania as a long-term home because they were of somewhat different character than their co-travellers. Many of the latter, thanks to the decades spent in the Netherlands, had shifted their Lutheran or German Reformed religious affiliation to the Dutch Reformed Church. Hannah’s people had resisted this change. The sub-group naturally felt more comfortable cleaving to others like themselves, and one of the places they chose to gather was Guilford County, NC, where they were better able to preserve their way of life with less pressure to assimilate. Becoming speakers of English and having to use Anglicized versions of their names already represented a sea change in their identities; they didn’t want to give up all they had stood for. So down the famous Emigrant Trail came Johann Heinrich Strader, John Jacob Starr, and Heinrich Weitzel and the women who were, or soon would be, their wives.

Johann Heinrich Strader was a great great grandfather of Hannah. He is one of only two of that generation that has so far been identified by name, the other one being his son Henry’s father-in-law Nicholas Holstein. The rest of the immigrants who will be discussed below, including John Jacob Starr and Heinrich Weitzel, were one generation more recent -- great grandparents of Hannah.

Johann Heinrich was probably born in the early 1720s, though this is only an estimate. His birthplace was probably the Netherlands because he used Johann (sometimes rendered as Johannes) rather than Hans -- Hans being a “more German” variation of the name, which in English would be rendered as John, Jack, or Johnny. Having this first name does not mean he went by Johann, though. Many Palatinate households used naming traditions as an expression of religious faith. The name honors John the Baptist and/or the Apostle John. The practice was so common that -- as will be discussed below in the section dealing with John Jacob Starr -- the same immediate family might contain more than one son with the first name Hans/Johann/Johannes/John. You might think this would lead to confusion, but in that time and place, there was no problem, because the person would be identified by his middle name. The same phenomenon occurred with girl children named after the Virgin Mary. Sisters living in the same home might be named Maria Sofia, Maria Katarina, and Maria Anna. They would be called Sofia, Katarina, and Anna by everyone they knew. They would be expected to use the first name only on extremely formal occasions. This has bearing on genealogical research because the “formal occasions” protocol was often applied in cases of marriage records, censuses, deeds, and ships’ passenger lists.

The name Johann Heinrich Strader (rendered as Johann Henrich Ströder) appears on the ship captain’s list of the Ranier, sailing out of Rotterdam and arriving in Philadelphia on 26 September 1749. The same day, a “John Henry Streader” is listed as having made his oath of allegiance to the Colonies. The ship’s captain’s list also includes a Casper Streader and a “Johannes Ströder junge” or Johann Jr.

It seems probable that Johann Heinrich Strader of the Ranier is the same man who was Hannah’s great great grandfather, and that “Junior” was his son, who will henceforth be referred to in this essay as Henry Strader. If so, it would make sense that Henry was a child at the time, but the Ranier information does indicate that Junior signed his name, which implies he was old enough to write. The two Johanns might have been cousins or even brothers, or an uncle and nephew; the repetition of Johann as a first name doesn’t preclude any of these possibilities.

It is also possible there was some sort of relationship to Casper Streader. People with names that are the same phonetically, travelling on the same voyage of the same ship? It is tempting to connect those dots. However, no other evidence links Casper and Johann Heinrich. A Casper Stratter of Alsace Township, Pennsylvania -- very likely to be the Casper Streader who came on the Ranier -- left a will dated 1778 whose text survives, and that text makes no mention of Johann Heinrich or of any relatives living in North Carolina, where Johann Heinrich settled.

Deeds and other records from Guilford County establish that a Johann Heinrich Strader was living there from about 1750 onward. Whether this was the individual who sailed on the Ranier in 1849 has yet to be conclusively proven, but if “our” Johann Heinrich did not come on that particular ship, he came on one much like it, and was then part of a large migration of people like himself southward from Pennsylvania. It is generally known that Palatinate families with the surnames Albright, Clapp, Faust, Holt, Sharp (Scherb), Cortner (Goertner), Ingold, Brower, Keim, Staley, May, Amick (Ewigs), Smith, Stack, Nease, Ingles, Leinberger, Strader, and Wyrick established a colony of their folk in the period between 1745 and 1760 in the counties of Alamance, Granville, Guilford, Orange, and Caswell, NC. These were families who had kept to the German Reformed and Lutheran sects. Where genealogical uncertainty arises is in which deeds, tax lists, and church records refer to Johann Heinrich, and which refer to his son. On this webpage, the father and son pair are called Johann Heinrich and Henry for ease of identification, but in the records from the 1700s North Carolina, they would both have been Henry Strader -- Strader being rendered phonetically in most cases, by clerks who had to decide on the spot what spelling to use, clerks who perhaps were not entirely literate themselves. And to complicate matters further, spelling was not a standarized sort of thing in the first place in those pre-Noah Webster days.

When Johann Heinrich died is conjecture, because it is so impossible to distinguish him from his son in the extant records. We will leave that as a mystery and discuss Henry, the son, because some of the documentation from the later decades of the 1700s unquestionably refers to him and not to his father. Among those documents are various Granville County, NC court records. These include: 1) The will of John Holstein, dated May 1790, which granted “to brother-in-law Henry Streider land in Granville on Adock Creek.” Henry is also mentioned as one of two executors of that will, the other being Jacob Holstein, a brother of the author of the will. 2) A wedding record that links Henry Straiter (yet another spelling) to Catherine Holstein and gives a wedding date of 31 May 1773. John, Jacob, and Catherine Holstein were likely three of the children of one Nicholas Holstein (Hostine), whose own will is recorded in Granville County.

Neither Henry Strader nor Catherine Holstein were mentioned by name in the within-the-family records that survived into the 20th Century. Those records begin with the family Bible of Henry’s grandson, Jacob Strader, whose contents do not include details on Henry’s generation. The earliest forebears in that source are Daniel Strader -- son of Henry and father of Jacob -- and his wife, Elizabeth Wensck. However, public-source records establish that Henry and Catherine did exist, and they dwelled in the right place and right time -- and obviously had the right surname -- to have been Daniel’s parents. Henry and Catherine definitely had a son named Daniel, and only the strictest of genealogists would argue that it might be some other Daniel than the one who was Hannah’s grandfather. In addition to Daniel, the names of three other children of Henry and Catherine have surfaced. Those three were Henry, Adam, and Katy, with Daniel falling between Adam and Katy in the birth sequence. Three other children, all younger, are listed in the 1790 census, but their names are not mentioned in that source, only their genders (a girl then a boy then another girl) and age ranges. Henry was the eldest, born in 1774. More children may have been born after 1790.

One date mentioned for Henry’s death is 1792, but this does not agree with land transaction records. Again, the possible confusion with other Henry Straders is a factor, but it seems likely the “right” Henry bought and sold Orange County, NC land between 1787 and 1801, one tract deeded to Jacob Holstein in 1787 and another tract to his son Henry in 1794. The place of death for both Henry and Catherine is also unclear. By the end of their lives, a new migration had begun. North Carolina was now the “old country.” The “land of promise,” now that the Indian tribes were being pushed out of the region beyond the Appalachians, was Ohio. Henry and Catherine may have been content with the homes they had founded when young, and/or they may have died before the uprooting began. Their son Daniel, however, heeded the call westward.

Daniel’s life is firmly documented, and so we know his birth occurred 7 April 1777 in Guilford County. He was raised there as well. Six days after he turned twenty-one (i.e. 13 April 1798), he married Elizabeth Wensck, who had been born 22 August 1776, also in Guilford County. The bondsmen mentioned in the county marriage records is George Strader (rendered as George Steador), who was probably Daniel’s first cousin, son of the George Strader who fought in the Revolutionary War.

The first of Daniel and Elizabeth’s children, Jacob, was born 26 February 1799, about ten months after the wedding. Daniel and Elizabeth would go on to have many more offspring. The names of eleven children have surfaced. This may not be the full count, because these eleven names refer to children who reached adulthood. There may have been others who perished in infancy or in early childhood whose identities have been lost. Eleven may also be one too many names (see below).

Daniel and Elizabeth left North Carolina some time after the birth of their first four children -- Jacob, Polly, Susannah, and Mary, the latter born in 1804. Later census records of relatives hint that perhaps the family went next to Kentucky, but if so, it was a stopover of at most two or three years. Then it was on to Preble County, OH. According to the reference work History of Preble County, Ohio, 1798-1881, Daniel and Elizabeth arrived in 1809, but this does not agree with birth information concerning fifth child, named Elizabeth after her mother. She was born 25 March 1808 and her birthplace is listed as Preble County in a number of sources. Most likely the family had reached Ohio by the end of 1807. Their precise living place for the first few years -- during which time sixth and seventh children Daniel Jr. and Rosannah came into the world -- is unknown, but a county property transaction record reveals that Daniel purchased approximately 170 acres of land on 26 March 1813 from a Henry Strader -- this Henry probably being Daniel’s brother. The parcel, consisting of “the West half of fractional Section of No. 18 Town 8 Range 2 East,” was home to Daniel and Elizabeth for the rest of their long lives.

Daniel did not get to enjoy the experience of caring for and harvesting the first crop off his new land, though, because he left to fight in the War of 1812. The roll of Captain David E. Hendrick’s Company shows Daniel as serving May 1 to November 18, 1813. He had put in a tour of duty the previous year as well, and appears on the Roster of Ohio Soldiers of 1812, along with three other Straders.

Daniel survived the war and spent the next forty years as a leading citizen and prominent landowner of Preble County. The final four children, William, John, Levi, and Jane, were born by 1820 or not long after. The majority of the eleven kids lived in Preble County lifelong. Most were still local residents when Daniel passed away 11 February 1853. Elizabeth survived him only a brief while, expiring 30 August 1855. Husband and wife were both laid to rest in the Sherer Cemetery, Washington Township, Preble County. Sherer Cemetery had been established as a private graveyard of the Sherer family and then was expanded to include neighbors and in-laws. Two of Daniel and Elizabeth’s daughters had married Sherer men.

One of those Sherer/Strader marriages was that of Levi Sherer and Jane Strader. The best public-source evidence of the composition of the Daniel Strader/Elizabeth Wensck family happens to take the form of the records of the suit filed by Levi and Jane to force a partition of the family estate, described as 167 acres, so that the various heirs or their descendants would be able to get either get their fair share of the money or be able to obtain separate deeds to portions of the acreage, according to their wishes. Jane was the youngest daughter, and no doubt a suit was the only way she could get contrary older siblings to do right by her.

One puzzle brought up by the text of Levi and Jane’s petition is its reference to William Strader. This child of Daniel and Elizabeth does not appear in any other source. The most logical explanation is that William was an alternate name for John, who is known from other sources, and whose name does not appear in the petition. This would mean there were only ten known children of Daniel and Elizabeth, not eleven.

As mentioned, Daniel and Elizabeth’s eldest child was Jacob Strader, born in Guilford County before the migration, then raised in Preble County from the age of seven or eight onward. He would eventually become Hannah’s father. The first major step toward that development came with his marriage to Rachel Starr, daughter of John Starr and Catharine Weitzel. The wedding occurred 1 October 1818 in Preble County. Groom and bride were both eighteen years old and therefore had many decades together to look forward to. Before discussing length and breadth of that union, let’s shift back to the days when Guilford County was first being populated with its Palatinate settlers, and describe the lives of the grandparents and parents of Rachel Starr.

This individual’s life and identity are sketchy. His sons Adam, Jacob, and John -- all of whom married women of the same Weitzel family in Guilford County, must have had a father. The naming conventions of Palatinate families and the continuing use of the name Jacob in subsequent generations gives us the name John Jacob Starr by inference. The actual form of his name used in source material ranges from John Jacob to Jacob Starr to John Jacob Stohr -- Stohr probably being the “correct,” non-Americanized version of the surname.

John Jacob Starr’s father may have been Johannes Starr, age 38, a man who arrived 16 September 1738 in Philadelphia aboard the ship Elizabeth, which had sailed from Rotterdam via Deal, England. The passenger manifest of heads-of-families includes Johannes as well as three heads of Weitzel families -- Johann Werner Weitzel (or Weinard Weisell, age 27), Martin Weizel (or Weisell, age 30), and Henrich Weutsel (or Weitzel or Weisell, age 38). This is persuasive documentation that Johannes Starr might be the patriarch of the Starrs who settled in Guilford County, because these subsequent Starrs maintained a close association with the Weitzel clan. If the theory is correct, then Johannes was among the group of Palatinate German immigrants who stayed in the area of Berks, Lebanon, Schuylkill, or Lancaster Counties in Pennsylvania until about 1750, then travelled down the Emigrant Trail to North Carolina. However, whether Johannes personally made it to that destination is unknown. His name does not appear in North Carolina court records. Perhaps he was dead by 1750. Perhaps he stayed in Pennsylvania. Given the uncertainties, Johannes is regarded as a “maybe” ancestor at this time.

As for “definite” ancestors, the best available within-the-family source for the history of the Starr family is the material written by his great great granddaughter Mary Rachel Frame Webb, whom we will call “Rachel Webb” (the name she went by at the end of her life, Webb being the surname of her final husband) from here to the end of this document. Unfortunately, her account is not particularly reliable in the matter of John Jacob Starr. In fact, it serves to confuse matters. Rachel Webb states that Rachel Starr’s maternal grandmother -- this would be Anna Margaret Low, wife of John Jacob Starr -- arrived in America from Germany as a widow with four boys, landing at Baltimore. This would mean John Jacob Starr died young. This scenario does not agree with the timing of the children’s birthdates. An early death also contradicts a theory in the volume Fox Family History 1703-1976 by John F. Vallentine, a reference work that touches repeatedly upon Hannah’s Guilford County forebears and was used as a guide by Howard Frame in his research. This book points to a record of the baptism of Adam Starr’s son John Jacob Starr, performed at the Brick Reformed Church in approximately 1779. The baby’s “sponsors” were his grandparents John Jacob Starr and Anna Margaret Starr. This implies John Jacob was in attendance to participate in the baptism of his grandson, and therefore was alive in 1779. However, it is also possible the sponsorship was honorary, a token of respect for a deceased family patriarch.

Boiling down the available references gives us a birthdate for John Jacob at the end of the 1720s, probably in Germany rather than the Netherlands. Both he and Anna Margaret Low, who is believed to have been born in about 1731, came to North Carolina well before 1750, perhaps with the first influx of their people from Pennsylvania to Guilford County, which dates from 1744. Their wedding must have occurred in 1749, about a year before the birth of their first child, Adam. These nuptials probably took place in Guilford County. Altogether five children are known, the youngest born about 1760. Those five were John Adam Starr (known as Adam), Jacob Starr, John Starr (known as John), Barbara Starr, and Anna Maria Starr.

You will note that these five include only three boys, not the “four boys” referred to by Rachel Webb. Webb also stated that the “widow” caused two of her sons to learn the tailor trade, and two the blacksmith trade. This much may have been somewhat accurate. John Starr is known to have been a tailor.

These three Starr brothers came of age in North Carolina and appear to have played a meaningful role in their communities as young men, and are mentioned in various local records of the 1770s through the early 1800s. In genealogical terms their most noteworthy accomplishment was that they all, as mentioned above, married daughters of the same family, named Weitzel. (1) Adam Starr married Margaret Weitzel. They had at least eleven children. Many of this brood would be part of the migrations from Ohio into Vermilion County, IL. A few went on to Green County, WI. For example, Adam’s namesake son Adam Starr, spent the last years of life in Clarno, Green County, WI, no more than a few miles from the home of his cousin, Rachel Starr Strader. (2) Jacob Starr married Anna Maria Weitzel. They had at least two children. Jacob is thought to have left Guilford County about 1790, but his later life has not yet been tracked. (3) John Starr would marry Catharine Weitzel. This pair would become the parents of Rachel Starr. But before elaborating on their lives, let’s take one more short step backward, and examine the life of the man who was the father to those three Weitzel daughters, and father-in-law to the three Starr brothers, the man we will refer to at first as Heinrich Weitzel:

This man was probably the son of the “Henrich Weutsel” who travelled on the H.M.S. Elizabeth and would probably, as a child, have also been a passenger on that voyage. That was probably the very day he Americanized his name to Henry. From here on down he will be referred to as Henry Weitzel because it is more in keeping with the public records. Those records, from Guilford and nearby counties through 1800, variously render the surname as Witzel, Wetzel, Weitzell, Whitsel, Whitzel, Whitzell, Whitesell, Whetsel -- as well as Whitesell and Weitzel. This applies not just to Henry but to many residents of those counties, most or all of whom were likely to have been members of the same extended clan. What version Henry himself would give us were he alive to be interviewed today is hard to say. Weitzel has been arbitrarily chosen as “official” here, though in fact a number of his children appear to have endorsed the idea that they should make themselves appear more English than German and were strongly tending to use Whitesell in their later years.

A Brief History of Alamance County reports that the Weitzel family of that region came from between Nurnberg and Dusseldorf in Germany, resided for about five years in Pennsylvania, moved to North Carolina in 1750, and settled on Gun Creek. This source (quoted in turn in the Fox Family History, published by the Fox Family Reunion, Ashland, KS, 1976) goes on to say that, “This history also confirms (Fox) family tradition in that Adam Weitzel of Orange County (now Alamance County) was a brother of Henry Weitzel of Guilford County, the two actually residing only a few miles apart. This relationship for them is probably correct, even though it appears Adam was probably as much as ten to fifteen years younger than Henry. The area along both sides of the present Guilford/Alamance County line was settled beginning about 1745 almost exclusively by Germans. Alamance County was created in 1848, mostly from Orange County, but with a small portion coming from eastern Guilford County, with later additions from northeastern Chatham County.”

The above excerpt is the first of many that place Henry (or perhaps his namesake father) in this particular part of North Carolina. Below is a map from 1808 that is helpful. Note the place name Weitzel in the upper right, circled and highlighted in red. This may well have been Henry’s precise place of residence for much of his life, and if not, was the place other members of his family were living, and he resided close by, probably just to the east in what was at that time known as Orange County.

As Henry Whitsel, Henry appears on the 1755 tax list of Orange County, which at that time included an area extending several miles inside present-day Guilford County. By 1762 he was a property owner along the waters of Alamance in what is now Guilford County. On 22 September 1770 Henry Weitzel took the oath prescribed by Parliament for naturalization at Hillsborough, Orange County. Henry (name spelled Weitzell) is recorded in the Brick Reformed Church records as a donor and collector of monies for the church in 1772. In Guilford County records, Henry is mentioned at least two dozen more times, including as a juror (1783), an assessor (1783), a purchaser of land (1762, 1763, twice in 1784, 1787), a recipient of land grants (1779, 1780, 1784, 1787, 1790, 1794), a seller of land (1773, 1785, twice in 1788, 1791, 1792, 1793, 1795), road overseer (1788), an executor (1791), and as a deceased owner (1797, 1798, 1806). All three Starr sons-in-law appear in these records, especially Adam Starr. In particular, Adam’s name appears as administrator of Henry’s estate. The names of Henry’s sons Tobias Weitzel and Henry Weitzel, Jr. also appear more than once.

Many of the records cited above confirm that Henry was the owner and operator of a mill along the Reedy Fork of the Haw River, and that he was a property owner along Beaver Creek. This means he may well have been the owner of the 1770s version of the mill shown at left, which is located on the Reedy Fork near Beaver Creek. The photo is a modern-day picture of an existing structure, still in operation and selling its flour not only to the local community but to the tourist trade. The website of this business does not specifically mention Henry by name in the brief summary it provides of the mill’s history. (Click here to visit said website.) However, the possibility this is “the” mill -- rebuilt and slightly relocated -- is too tantalizing to neglect to include the photo here. That possibility aside, it is a fact that Henry's mill was the site of a colorful historical incident. A minor skirmish of the Revolutionary War, to become known as the Battle of Whitsell’s Mill, took place in 1781 on Reedy Fork, Guilford County. British troops decided to occupy and make use of the mill, and local men briefly -- and unsuccessfully -- tried to prevent the seizure of the premises.

None of the available references provide precise birth and death dates for Henry and his wife, nor the birthdates for the majority of their children, but the following stats seem to be accurate: Henry was born about 1728, probably in Germany. His wife was Anna Maria Fronich. Some references include the name Sophronia but this is probably a misrendering of Fronich. She was born about 1729. Whether she came from the same part of Germany as Henry is unknown. The couple were wed about 1748 in Guilford County. Their ten children, born from 1749 to 1762, were Petrus, John, Heinrich (Henry, Jr.), Margaret, Samuel, Catharine, Anna Maria, Elizabeth, Phillip, and Tobias. This is believed to be the birth order.

Intriguingly, Anna Maria Fronich’s name appears on some of the property transaction records mentioned above. Furthermore it is her maiden name -- or variations of it, usually the Americanized version, Mary Froney. These documents date from late in the marriage, and do not seem to involve property that came as part of her dowry, nor can it be explained by widowhood, because she pre-deceased Henry. Perhaps she took charge of her life more than the typical woman of her era.

Henry and Anna Maria finished their lives in Guilford County. She died in the early 1790s. Henry’s death can best be determined by letters of administration on the estate of Henry Whitezel, deceased, issued to Adam Starr, Esquire, in 1797. An estate sale was held and was reported to the February 1798 court.

The three Starr/Weitzel marriages occurred in the mid-1770s, during Henry’s prime as a landowner, miller, and man of his community. Adam and Margaret were married 22 April 1773. Jacob and Anna Maria were next, wed on 5 January 1776, followed less than three weeks later by John and Catharine on 25 January 1776. All three weddings took place in Guilford County. All three couples began having children immediately, and those offspring arrived at frequent intervals.

John and Catharine were said by Rachel Webb to have had twelve children, but Rachel Webb gave the names of only seven in her notes, and only three others have been identified from other sources. The missing two were probably lost at birth or while they were very young. The ten whose identities are known are: John Henry Starr, Mary Elizabeth Starr, John Barnhart Starr, followed by Sophia, Catherine, Naomi, Daniel, Margaret, Absalom, and finally Rachel. More than one source agrees that Rachel was the very youngest, born 23 June 1799.

Rachel was born before her family left Guilford County, but she was not more than ten years old by the time the household was reestablished in Preble County, OH. It was probably only after getting to Ohio that she became acquainted with Jacob Strader. Though both the Strader Family and the Starr and Weitzel families originated in Guilford County, they seem to have lived in slightly different areas and may not have directly known one another. In Preble County, however, they were in fairly close proximity. Jacob and Rachel probably met when they were nine or ten years old. As mentioned above, they wed at age eighteen.

Jacob and Rachel had ten children, the first born nine months after the wedding and the last coming when Rachel was at the extreme end of her fertile years. These ten, as they appear in the Jacob Strader family Bible, were Mary Ann Marie (“Polly”) Strader, (b. 20 June 1819), Susan Anna Strader (b. 29 July 1821), Elizabeth Strader (b. 25 Jan 1824), Anna Catherine Strader (b. 11 May 1826), Hannah Strader (b. 30 June 1829), Margaret Ellen Strader (b. 12 March 1831), Daniel Strader (b. 11 March 1835), John S. Strader, (b. 22 January 1838), Rhoda Carolyn Strader (b. 25 March 1842), and Jacob Strader, Jr. (b. 15 November 1844).

Hannah’s known ancestry tree therefore looks like so:

In Preble County, the families mentioned above -- the Straders, the Weitzels, the Starrs, etc. -- began to give in to the great American melting-pot phenomenon. The spouses chosen by the new generations of the family were often not of German and/or Pennylvania-Dutch extraction. However, this mingling continued to obey a familiar pattern. The weddings were not just unions of a given man and a given woman. They were examples of a whole community blending together. Whether the groom’s forebears had come from the fens of Ireland and the bride’s from the Rhine Valley farmlands of Germany, the two of them were most likely to have been neighbors for most or all of their lives. Their families probably all attended the same church. They were almost all dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods. They were all pioneer, frontier-dwelling settlers. Often multiple individuals of one immediate family would chose to marry members of another immediate family, just as the three Starr boys had married the three Weitzel girls. It was with this Preble County phase that the great mingling of the Strader and the Frame clan was initiated. The first instance was when Jacob Strader’s sister Polly married Silas Frame in 1821. Twenty-two years later John Strader (who was much younger than Jacob and Polly) would marry Rachel Frame. By then, the next generation had started to get in on the act, as will be described below. It is accurate to say that all these people were on a single journey. It was not individuals, but an entire community, that moved from the Palatinate to the Netherlands in the early 1700s. It was a mass migration from Europe to North Carolina in the mid-1700s, a common destiny driving the North Carolina-born generation into Ohio. And the journey was not done. By the late 1820s and early 1830s, the new generations of these interconnected families would head on Vermilion County, IL. Many would, in the 1840s and early 1850s, proceed north to the Pecatonica River region -- Stephenson County, IL, Green County, WI, and Lafayette County, WI.

Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr made the move to Vermilion County in the late 1820s, some time between the birth of Anna Catherine in the summer of 1826 and the birth of Hannah in the summer of 1829. Hannah, Margaret, and Daniel were born in Vermilion County, but after eight to ten years there the family gave in to the temptation to go north. In the wake of the Black Hawk Wars of the early 1830s, northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin were free of Indian aggression and there were plentiful opportunities to homestead farmland or dig for lead in the mines of Lafayette County. Jacob and Rachel reached Stephenson County some time between the birth of Daniel in early 1835 and the birth of John at the beginning of 1838. This means they were probably part of the large influx of settlers known to have arrived in 1837. The last three children, John, Rhoda, and Jacob, Jr. were born while they farmed near Waddams Grove. (In the 1884 History of Green County, Wisconsin, the Straders were said to have first come to the place known as Richland Timber, but this is unfortunately no longer a useful place reference, as the term has fallen completely out of use, and seemed to apply to a long stretch of woodland, rather than an individual settlement.) In about 1845, not long after the birth of Jacob, Jr., the family established a new farm over the border in Green County, WI near a hamlet the locals would call Jordan -- at that time probably little more than a crossroads where a church and/or social hall had been erected, and never to become much more than that, but for Jacob and Rachel, it would become “home.” Among the bachelors frequenting Stephenson and Green Counties in the late 1840s was Nathaniel Martin, who would soon take notice of Hannah, or vice versa. (For more on that, proceed to Hannah’s biography page. Click here to go straight there.)

Because Jacob and Rachel and their children established themselves in Wisconsin as a unit, Hannah’s kin were around her as an adult to a greater degree than her husband’s kin were around him. Several of Nathaniel’s siblings never came west from Virginia at all, and his parents only arrived when they were elderly. By contrast, all of Hannah’s siblings spent many years in or near Green County. Some finished their lives there. Parents Jacob and Rachel passed away in Green County as well, beginning with Jacob 28 February 1865. Jacob was buried in Kelly Cemetery (sometimes called Kelly/Franklin Cemetery) in Cadiz Township. Rachel thereafter lived with one or another of her children. The 1870 census shows her in the household of son John and his young family on his farm near Clarno. In 1880, she is with widowed daughter Rhoda and Rhoda’s two daughters in Cadiz. Rachel survived her husband by more than two dozen years, finally passing away in Martintown 8 March 1889, at just under ninety years of age. Her remains were also laid to rest at Kelly Cemetery. Jacob and Rachel share a grave and a tombstone. (The gravemarker is shown at left. Photo taken by Robert Carpenter 1993. Note that this gravemarker is relatively new. The original marker is nearby. It is not in good condition and some descendant -- identity unknown at present -- must have been motivated to commission a replacement that would remain legible into the 21st Century and beyond.)

The scope of this website is not great enough to dwell on the matter of the families of Hannah’s siblings, but because Hannah survived until 1919, she would have been aware of most of the following information, and it deserves some coverage here:

Mary Ann Marie “Polly” Strader married William Swearingen, either just before leaving Vermilion County or upon arriving in Stephenson County. They appear to have soon settled in Green County. William sired five children with Polly before he passed away in late 1853 -- Mary Jane, Lydia, Rachael, Sarah, and William Henry (who may have been a Junior). All five remained in Stephenson County, Green County, or places near there, except that Lydia and husband Robert Trickle, Jr. moved to Nebraska in the 1870s. The eldest of the five, Mary Jane Swearingen, born 1838 WI, grew up to marry Loren Devoe. Loren and Mary Jane lived in Martintown (where she died in her thirties); to this day descendants live in Stephenson County. Two years into her widowhood, Polly married Silas Frame. This union was one of the six Strader/Frame marriages referred to at the top of this page, and part of a trio involving three of Hannah’s sisters and a set of three Frame brothers. The marriage of Polly and Silas is not to be confused with one that occurred a generation earlier when Silas Frame, an uncle of the three Frame brothers, became the husband of Jacob Strader’s sister Polly Strader. Yes, that means that for two generations in a row, a Silas Frame married a Polly Strader! Sorting out which is which is sometimes a genealogical challenge. Silas and Polly (the younger pair) made their home in Lafayette County (in or near Argyle, which is just west of the part of Green County where Jordan used to be). Though she came to this second marriage at over thirty-five years old, Polly had nearly as many children with Silas as she had had with William Swearingen -- a total of four. She died 27 June 1905 in Monroe, Green County, WI, having survived Silas by eleven years.

Susan Anna Strader -- whose name is rendered as Susanna in all censuses and as Susannah in cemetery/death records -- married Peter P. Hughes, who like her was Ohio-born. Peter caught a case of California gold rush fever and left Wisconsin, probably in 1849, and definitely by early 1850. The June 1850 census confirms that Susanna and children Elias Hughes and Peter P. Hughes, Jr., age five months, were living at the home of Jacob and Rachel Strader in Jordan without the presence of Peter P. Hughes, Sr. The latter must have returned after a year or two or three, because daughter Rachel (Richarda in the 1870 census) was born in Wisconsin in about 1853. The whole family went to California in the mid-1850s, and younger children David, Jacob, and Catherine were born there. Of all Hannah’s siblings, Susanna is the one who spent the least time in Wisconsin -- only about fifteen years. Due to the large geographic separation from the middle of the century onward, less is known about her than some of the others. The 1860 and 1870 censuses place her and her family in Cosumne, El Dorado County, CA. She died 10 November 1878 in Sacramento of typhoid fever, a disease which would claim the life of her daughter Katie in 1886. Peter Hughes, Sr. died 25 August 1875 of septicemia. Peter, Susanna, and Katie are all buried in Lot 1222 in the Sacramento City Cemetery. It is uncertain whether Susanna’s line persists today. The one child who can be tracked to a late point in life is Rachel Anna Strader Nusbaum, who did not marry until she was past childbearing age and so left no descendants. There may be descendants stemming from one or more of her brothers, but family notes do not address this matter and the lines cannot be tracked through public records -- the common surname of Hughes is too little to go on.

Elizabeth Strader married Jeremiah Frame 18 May 1842 in Jordan. Jerry, born 23 April 1812 in Bourbon County, KT, was a Lafayette County lead miner. The couple spent about three decades residing in the border region of Lafayette and Green Counties and their ten children were all born in one county or the other -- several of them in Martintown or its outskirts. In the early 1870s the household shifted to a farm in Iowa, where the younger children finished coming of age. In 1880, Jerry and Elizabeth moved to the Sand Hill country of northern Nebraska. Some of their grown offspring and their households came along, though they stayed put only a decade or so. Jerry died 20 January 1886 and Elizabeth 23 March 1888. They were buried in Johnstown, Brown County, NE. Most of their offspring ended up in either Wisconsin or other parts of the upper Midwest. Three -- Jacob Silas Frame, William Patterson Frame, and Elias Frame -- migrated to the San Joaquin Valley of California in the 1890s and left large clans of descendants in that region.

Anna Catherine Strader -- better known by her middle name and sometimes by a reversal of the first and middle names (her niece Juliette Martin Savage left a genealogical note that refers to her as “Aunt Katie Anne” and she is called Katie Anne in a 1901 biography of her second husband Henry Rush) -- initially married James Frame, who had been born 17 July 1820 in Preble County, OH. The wedding took place 21 October 1849 in Jordan. The couple had three children -- David Patterson Frame, Mary Rachel Frame, and Jacob Strader Frame, the girl being the Rachel Webb who left some of the genealogical notes which were helpful in the creation of this website. James was yet another Lafayette County lead miner. However, he gave up the profession in the early 1850s, taking to farming a forty-acre parcel in Green County. His abandonment of mining may have come too late. His health went bad by the mid-1850s, perhaps an after-effect of lead poisoning, though his daughter later attributed it to general overwork, recalling a time when her father collapsed from heat stroke after a grueling day harvesting grain. James spent about four years as a semi-invalid and then died 26 January 1861. He was buried in Kelly Cemetery. Katie Anne soon married Henry Rush, a Bavarian immigrant and a veteran of the so-called Mexican War of 1846 to 1848, who just after the war had settled in Martintown as a carpenter. He had been married twice before (and would eventually marry a fourth time), fathering three children with each of those two wives before they passed away. Katie Anne helped finish raising her Rush step-children in addition to caring for her Frame kids. She and Henry did have one biological child together, but lost that one as an infant. Henry owned a great deal of land in the Martintown area -- second only to Nathaniel Martin in the extent of his holdings -- and in the 1870s was a key business associate of the Martin family, operating the Martintown hardware store and conducting sales of building supplies and lumber, some of the latter product inevitably being generated by the Martin sawmill. Henry remains a notable figure in Cadiz Township/Green County history, among other things being the founder and sponsor of Rush Elementary School. During his lifetime he was popular with his Martin in-laws, but it seems Katie Anne did not regard him as the best of spouses. This led to a divorce in 1881, after all the children of the various marriages were grown. Having been unable for one reason or another to count on the men in her life, Katie Anne took steps to control her destiny a bit more. Among other measures, she learned to read and write at about sixty years of age. Fortunately she had kept title to the land she and James had owned in Green County. In her old age she moved out to the San Joaquin Valley of California. This dramatic relocation probably occurred after a sojourn in Nebraska, where she must have joined her sister Elizabeth, not long before Elizabeth’s death. The photograph at left, which dates from that part of her life, was taken in Nebraska amid a large group of Elizabeth and Jerry’s descendants, as well as a few of Katie Anne’s descendants. When her children decided to seek new opportunities in the Far West, Katie Anne chose to go along. The migration of this group in turn drew Elizabeth’s sons Jacob, William, and Elias to the region, and would in 1906 lure Hannah’s daughter Nellie Martin Warner and most of Nellie’s offspring and their young families. Katie Anne settled in Porterville in Tulare County, which placed her close to (or with) son Jacob and nephew Elias. (Porterville is the town that Elias’s grandson Howard Frame, the genealogist, would call home for all but the final fraction of his ninety years of life.) Katie Anne died there 3 August 1893. Her remains were buried in Home of Peace Cemetery.

Margaret Ellen Strader married Virignia-native James Henry Eveland in about 1848 in Jordan. Like Peter Hughes, James went to California to mine gold. Like her sister Susanna, Margaret remained in Wisconsin and lodged with her parents. Both Peter and James returned to Wisconsin in the early 1850s, but while Peter convinced Susanna to move the whole household to California, Margaret persuaded James they should remain in Wisconsin. Margaret and James settled in as a farming family near Monroe. The couple had eight boys, beginning with Millard, who was born in January 1849, having been conceived before his father yielded to his case of gold fever. Margaret passed away 6 January 1879 in Monroe before the youngest of those boys had finished growng up. These days the Eveland clan can be found in many areas of the nation, one of the main places being Bonner County, ID. It is a huge clan, one of the key reasons being the conversion of some members to the Mormon faith. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when Hannah Strader was still alive to be aware of them, some Evelands chose to linger in Green County. Others migrated to the vicinity of Sioux City. This spot is where Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota come together, and exact locations of households varied between these three states. For example, the 1900 census shows Millard and his wife and the youngest of their four children on a farm near Winnebago, Thurston County, NE. Widower James Henry Eveland, age eighty-one, is listed as a member of the household. Millard’s wife was Lucinda Frame. She was a daughter of Thomas Alexander Frame and Sarah Devoe. As mentioned in Hannah’s biography, Thomas was the man she was “supposed” to marry, which would have created a fourth Frame/Strader union in the same generation, a scheme that Hannah’s preference for Nathaniel Martin thwarted. Sarah Devoe was a sister of Loren Devoe who, as mentioned above, married Millard’s first cousin Mary Jane Swearingen, the daughter of Margaret’s sister Polly. While Millard and Lucinda were not actually blood relatives, theirs was in a sense a marriage of first cousins, because Lucinda’s uncles Jeremiah, James, and Silas Frame were all brothers-in-law of Millard’s mother. There is a chance Lucinda may have come to know Millard when she was called upon to help her Aunt Margaret deal with her huge brood of all boys and no girls. Millard and Lucinda’s youngest son James is one of those responsible for the substantial size of the modern-day clan. James and his wife Mary Julia Styer had thirteen children. (Many of those children married into the same Allen clan, mimicking the pattern of the Starrs and Weitzels, Straders and Frames, et al.)

Daniel Strader worked for Nathaniel Martin as a young man, and while doing so boarded with Hannah and Nathaniel. He was no doubt a welcome presence during the 1858 episode of insanity that incapacitated Nathaniel for a time. Daniel married Sarah Jane Mace 16 August 1862. The wedding took place four days after he had enlisted in the Union Army (obviously before he reported for duty). He served in the 31st Regiment, Wisconsin Infantry and died in the war, perhaps of an infected wound, at Columbus, Hickman County, KY. His date of death was 29 July 1863. Apparently he must have been able to get a furlough, or Sarah had been able to visit him, because he is credited with having sired Harriet Almetta Strader, born 14 January 1864. By the time of the birth Sarah had moved off to Iowa, where she would survive until 1922. She married Levi Walker Ferneau, settled in Poweshiek County, IA and had six children with him, in addition to raising Hattie. Because Hattie was never a part of the lives of the Straders of Green County, her existence is not mentioned in any of the original early and mid-20th Century genealogical notes made by Hannah’s descendants or her sisters’ descendants -- the notes that were so central in the creation of this essay. Hattie had to be rediscovered in a genealogy posted on the internet. This forgotten-kin aspect is somewhat of an irony because as far as can be determined, Hattie lived later than any other grandchild of Jacob Strader and Rachel Starr, surviving until 1951. Whereas at one time Daniel Strader’s line was thought to have been extinguished before it had the chance to be founded, the list of his known descendants is now substantial and some are presumed to be alive today, springing from the five children Hattie had with first husband James Oliver Briney.

With dad Jacob Strader dead as of 1865 and brother Daniel a casualty of the war, it was up to John S. Strader to step up and become the patriarch of the family. He slipped into the role somewhat gradually, not giving up his bachelor ways until his thirtieth birthday. His bride was Adelaide D. Blair -- Addie -- with whom he settled on a farm near Clarno. Mother Rachel shared the home while the couple’s two children, Homer and Sebert (Bertie) were young. Sadly, Addie died 24 September 1871, less than three years into the marriage and only two months after giving birth to Bertie. John remained a widower for several years. On 23 February 1878, he married Henrietta E. Harris of Sturgis, MI. At thirty-four years old, Etta was not a young bride -- she would be referred to as an “old maid school teacher” in the 1947 genealogy correspondence of Juliette Savage -- but she was young enough to bear John two more children, Bessie and Stanley (full name John Stanley Strader -- implying that John S. Strader may also have been a John Stanley Strader) in the early 1880s. By 1900 -- and probably not long after Rachel Starr Strader’s death in 1889 -- the family relocated to a farm near Dell Prairie, Adams County, WI. Homer died in Dell Prairie in early adulthood when an injury to his abdomen turned septic. He left a wife, a namesake son (not junior -- the middle name was different), and an infant daughter, Ula. Little Homer would perish in childhood within a few years of his father’s death. Ula, by contrast, lived to be almost ninety-seven. She became a stenographer in Washington, DC in her late teens, went on to get a degree at the University of Wisconsin, and in 1928 married Gerald Tyler. She passed away in 1998 in Monroe, within a few miles from the place her Strader ancestors had settled more than one hundred fifty years earlier. Sebert stayed in Dell Prairie -- he was the city clerk there for a substantial interval. He is thought to have lived out a full life. Inasmuch as he had not married as of the 1930 census, when he was nearly sixty years old, he is assumed to have never become a father. As for parents John and Etta, they left Wisconsin, moving before 1910 to Virginia. John’s niece Rachel Webb left notes saying John owned “the General Gordon plantation” near Richmond, VA. She seems to have been referring to the famous General Gordon of the Confederacy, but he was a key figure in the history of Georgia, not Virginia. However, the rest of Rachel Webb’s tale seems more or less correct. The 1910 census shows John and Etta not far west of Richmond, VA on a plantation near the town of Cumberland. Their daughter Bessie, though already an adult, was living with them -- Stanley having passed away back in Adams County some time after Homer’s death. Etta died before 1920. John, having outlived every one of his siblings along with both his wives and two of his children, finally expired 23 March 1923 in or near Richmond, having left the plantation before 1920. It is not quite clear what happened to Bessie, but there is a female chiropractor in South Carolina in the 1920 census whose name and stats are a good match.

Rhoda Carolyn Strader married John B. Campbell. John was a son of William and Margaret Campbell. Born and raised in Muskingum County, OH, he had come to Green County as a young man. He and Rhoda were married 21 September 1865 in Monroe, whereupon the pair immediately settled on a farm in Jordan Township. They became parents of three children, including one that died as a baby. The children who survived were daughters Nellie (full name Rachel Eleanor Campbell) and Anna, born in the latter half of the 1860s. John died during the 1870s. (Born in about 1836, he may not even have reached forty years of age.) The 1880 census shows Rhoda living as a widow in Cadiz, the household consisting of herself, her daughters, and her mother Rachel Starr Strader. She did not remarry until 1890, when both Nellie and Anna had reached adulthood and become wives and mothers. Rhoda’s second husband was William G. Dunell, son of Charles Dunell and Anna Gaines. William had been born in England and had raised a family in Senatchwine, Pulham County, IL and Tullahoma, Coffee County, TN with his first wife. Rhoda and William enjoyed only a relatively brief marriage because William passed away within a few years -- the precise date is unclear except to say that he was gone by the time the 1900 census was recorded. No children resulted from the union inasmuch as the wedding took place after Rhoda had reached the end of her childbearing years -- in fact, the ceremony occurred on her forty-eighth birthday. Rhoda spent her second widowhood employed as a live-in housekeeper in Green County. She died September 1916 near Monroe, and her body was interred at Staver Cemetery in Clarno. As for her daughters -- Nellie married Ezra Josiah Wickwire 6 April 1884 in Cadiz and at the end of the 1880s or beginning of the 1890s moved with him to Iowa. Over a fifteen-year span she and Ezra had five children, then she married Ezra’s brother Fred Wickwire, with whom she had three more. In the early 1900s she and Fred moved to Nebraska, and then in about 1915 on to Wyoming, where Nellie passed away in 1940. Her offspring settled variously in Nebraska, Wyoming, and Twin Falls, ID and descendants remain in all those places. Anna Campbell married Silas O. Keller and produced a family line that remained centered in southern Wisconsin (mostly in Rock County and Green County), and descendants can be found in there to this day. They include members of the Coplien clan of Monroe.

Jacob Strader, Jr. died in infancy shortly after the family reached Green County. Juliette Savage attributed his death to tuberculosis, but she may have been guessing at the cause.