OHIO STATEWIDE FILES - Know your Ohio: Tidbits of Ohio -- Part 10A ************************************************************************ USGENWEB ARCHIVES(tm) NOTICE Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm All documents placed in the USGenWeb Archives remain the property of the contributors, who retain publication rights in accordance with US Copyright Laws and Regulations. In keeping with our policy of providing free information on the Internet, these documents may be used by anyone for their personal research. They may be used by non-commercial entities so long as all notices and submitter information is included. These electronic pages may NOT be reproduced in any format for profit. Any other use, including copying files to other sites, requires permission from the contributors PRIOR to uploading to the other sites. The submitter has given permission to the USGenWeb Archives to store the file permanently for free access. http://www.usgenwebarchives.org ************************************************************************** File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by Darlene E. Kelley http://www.genrecords.net/emailregistry/vols/00026.html#0006374 February 23, 2005 ************************************************************************** Historical Collections of Ohio And Then They Went West by Darlene E. Kelley Geneology by Byron Williams Tid Bits -- Part 10 A +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Geneology of Byron Williams of Clermont Bryon Williams wrote to Grandmother Eva Adelaide Kelley regarding the tracing of the family to see if she is a candidate for GAR qualifications. In his reply he called her a cousin. The reply is in Arthur Kelley's binder, written in a beautiful penmanship. Since then I have sent for and received two books written by Byron Williams. The below is from his book on Clermont and Brown Counties # 2 which gives the geneology of some of the residents of those counties. This is his geneology, compiled by Byron Williams. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ BYRON WILLIAMS A portrait and sketch of John Williams, of Williamsburg, Ohio, is to be found in Rockey and Brancroft's History of Clermont county, but as that work has been largely taken away from the county, some review of that worthy pioneer is proper. The traditions of his ancestry cross the ocean to Cromwellian times in Wales; whence, after the Restoration of the Stuarts to the English throne, in 1668, and the ensuing persecutions of the " Old Ironsides," four brothers of the Williams name, with a faith " In a State without a King and a Church without a Bishop " sought physical and religious freedom in America. For, they were classified as " Nonconformists" and " Malcontents." whose bodies were restrained to compensate for the independence of their souls. One of these brothers went to North Carolina. With a faith then persecuted in Massachusetts Colony, the other three accepted the scant toleration of a forest obscurity back from Long Island Sound. One of the three, Matthew Williams, a Welsh Baptist preacher, or " Gospeler." as Calvaliers scornfully called them, among few or many children, had Thomas, who was the father of Timothy, each of whom was also elected by their " Associations" to preach the Gospel. Matthew lived to be one hundred and three, Thomas, one hundred and two, and Timothy nearly one hundred years old. When very old and when the favor seemed to imply a cruel death to all, Thomas was permitted by the Indians to go from a captured block house with the women and children whom he guided to safety. The family register brought to Ohio begins with Timothy and Hester Williams, whose children were Jonas, Ruth, Peter, Robert, Mary, Isaac, Lydia, Benjamin and Thomas. Jonas was born December 26, 1751, and, in boyhood, was captured by the Indians, who bound his ankles so tightly with thongs that his feet froze while the captors slept. Yet, he managed to escape, and, wrapping his feet with his clothing, got back to his friends; but, when healed, in appearance and effect, he was club-footed for life, while otherwise strong and very active. Because of his lameness he became a currier in New York City, and then a miller, and, to fill the waiting hours while grinding, a shoe maker. He too was chosen to preach the saving ordinance of immersion, the futility of infant baptism, the virtue of close communion, and to practice the austere simplicity that had made Cromwell's " Ironsides" the founders of modern civil and religious liberty. Although his descendant writing these lines is a careless Gallio concerning much ancestral doctrine, he is not forgetful of the fadeless glory of such political service for humanity. Jonas Williams married Eleanor Ward, who was born at or near New York, Novemebr 11, 1748, and was the youngest of the five children of Timothy Ward. whose other children were Phebe, Zebina, Sarah, and Susannah. Rebelling through life against his crippled feet Jonas and Eleanor went from the Jersey side of New York to be a part of the Wyoming Enterprise, to which he was probably persuaded by his Connecticut relatives. He built and operated one of the several mills in the valley and there, on May 23, 1776, their first child, Zebina, was born. The second child, Robert, was born June 19, 1778. Two weeks later, while at dinner, a horseman rode by crying, " The Indians are coming." Unable to reach the fort and be a soldier, Jonas ordered his brother Isaac, then seventeen, to yoke the oxen and haul their boat below the dam, while he got the mother and babes with a bed and a sack of flour and bacon aboard to row away and hide under the willow covered banks. A neighboring woman on a visit there rode hastily away for her own home, but was quickly shot and scalped. After the band had hamstrung the animals, burned the buildings and hurried on, Isaac ventured forth and found that the woman had been stunned by a bullet which glanced from her metal comb, so that through his timely help she was restored to a mutilated life. Young Isaac went into the Revolutionary Army, was captured and died in a British prison in New York. After their ruin at Wyoming, the family went to Orange County, New York, where Jonas, Jr., and Isaac Jr., were born. Having gained a little, Jonas again went to the fontier in that direction in Cayuga county, New York, and built and ran a mill by Lake Cayuga, where is now the town of Genoa. On January 28, 1798, Zebina Williams, who became an expert wheel and mill builder, married Mary Cooley, who was born September 29, 1781, and joined his father at Genoa, where his oldest child was born August 24, 1800, and named John Cooley Williams. Mary Cooley was a daughter of John Cooley, who lived in Lower Salem, West Chester county, New York, which is now a part of New York City. He was one of the notable Cooley family, of Connecticut, which furnished more than a score of the name for the Revolutionary army. John Cooley, of Lower Salem, was commissioned as adjutant of the Third New York, often called " The Manor Regiment " under Col. Pierre Van Cortlandt, and, besides much other duty, Adjutant Cooley served as such a decisive charge at Saratoga, that brought Burgoyne's surrender. The other children of Zebina and Mary Williams, born in Cayuga county, were Ambrose, Ezra, Warren and Phoebe. In 1810 Zebina Williams, in partnership with John Perin, came down the Alleghany and Ohio, to Columbia. After some residence at Red Bank, where his son, Charles, was born, November 17, 1812, he came two years later for a partnership in milling with Samuel Perin, but living where, in 1819, he built the second brick home in Stonelick township, which is yet a substantial home one mile west of Stonelick creek, on the pike to Milford. About 1815 Jonas Williams came to Clermont with the rest of his family, but soon went to Indiana, where he was the first settler on and gave his name to the principal branch of White River; and there and about Connersville, his name and line are worthily continued. As soon as possible, Robert Williams was among the first in Iowa as a pioneer of Louisa county; and the descendants of other branches have gone beyond the Pacific coast. Through more than two centuries, this family has been on the front edge of pioneer enterprise with the reputation of honorable, useful, capable, and practical people, who have a goodly record of success as farmers, lawyers, judges, writers, teachers, and business men. The younger children of Zebina and Mary Williams and born in the home on the East Fork were Ann, Vesta, Ira, and George. About 1827 Zebina Williams sought relief from the early plague of malaria by moving to the northern hills of Stonelick, yet he died of an acute fever, August 31, 1845, while his father lived to December 7, 1845, and Mary Cooley lived till April 28, 1852. John Cooley Williams had such early reputation that he was sent before he was twenty " down the Mississippi " as supercargo of a boat load of valuable produce. Such a trip occupied the boating season of a year, and he made nine such trips, mostly for Samuel Perin, the commercial master of Clermont. During those trips, John Williams handled the produce and money that largely constituted the commercial life of Northern and Central Clermont from 1820 to 1830. In that business, his duty was not only clerical, but he was often required to act as principal in large transactions, where an error was a failure. Amid the good opinion afterwards accorded, little was valued more than the high respect of the keen old master for his young supercargo. Because of impaired health that boded a decline, he left the " river trade with a reputation for fine judgement and fair dealing that was never tarnished." Yet, his physique was fine an he excelled in wrestling and other pioneer sports and especially so in one. Standing exactly six feet tall clear of all, and weighing less than a score short of two hundred pounds, he gave the unique performance of all such entertainment, by standing erect between two men holding a taut cord so that he could move his head freely without touching the cord. Then taking one step back, with a single springy effort, he could and did jump over the cord without any other apparent effort. This feat has rarely been equalled in the story of athletics. He passed the grades of militia preferment to the rank of colonel, but he eschewed titles and rarely used his middle name. On November 14, 1830, he married Rachel Copeland Glancy, who was born January 6, 1813, and was the eldest of the ten children of John and Elizabeth Shields Glancy. Elizabeth Shields was born in Maryland, November 12, 1795, and was the youngest of the ten children o Thomas and Elizabeth Clark Shields, who came to Columbia in the spring of 1795, and to northern Clermont two years later. John Glancy, born Novemeber 30, 1786, was the second child of Jesse and Rachel Copeland Glancy, who came to Williamsburg, December 23/24, 1804, from York county, Pennsylvania. Jesse Glancy was the son, some say grandson, of a Scotch-Irish immigrant, who came with cash in a little trunk still preserved, that enabled him to leave a considerable estate. The lining of the trunk is printed with the date 1726. Jesse Glancy was born in 1756, and died September 1, 1831. His gravestone declares that he was a patriot soldier, and tradition affirms that he was in the battles of Brandywine, Monmouth and Yorktown. Rachel Copeland Glancy, of Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, died January 3, 1829, in her seventieth year. Tradition traces her line through a Quaker branch of the family of William Copeland, who married Mary, the second daughter of John and Ruth Alden Bass, and Ruth Alden was the third daughter of John and Priscilla Mullins Alden, of the Mayflower fame. After a life marked with strong mentality, John Glancy died December 29, 1874, in possession of much of the large tract midway between Owensville and Goshen, that his father had taken seventy years before. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Continued in part 10-B.