BIO:  WILSON Family, Menallen Township, Adams County, PA

Contributed for use in the USGenWeb Archives by Kathy Francis

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History of Cumberland and Adams Counties, Pennsylvania
Chicago:  Warner, Beers & Co., 1886
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Part III, History of Adams County, Page 477

THE WILSON FAMILY were originally from Lochgall, County Tyrone, Ireland, and the 
first of the immediate ancestors of those who afterward settled in Menallen 
Township was George Wilson, who settled in Chester County, Penn., in 1690.  He 
also had a brother, Michael, who afterward moved to North Carolina.  George came 
to what is now Menallen Township, and built a log house just adjoining the 
village of Bendersville, about 1785.  He had a family of one son, Benjamin, and 
several daughters.  Benjamin lived and died in the log house.  He had several 
daughters, and one son, George, who kept the first postoffice in Bendersville.  
George had the following children:  William; Benjamin F., who made the first 
survey for the village of Bendersville; John; Ruth, who married James J. Wills, 
and became the mother of Judge David Wills, of Gettysburg; and Elizabeth, who 
died in infancy.  Benjamin F. Wilson, of the fourth generation here, married 
Susan Wierman.  Their children are Sarah, wife of Dr. E. W. Mumma; Nicholas G., 
now the superintendent of the cemetery at Gettysburg; and Benjamin F., of 
Norfolk, Va.  The father died in 1834, aged thirty-three years.  His widow 
remained single fifty years, and died July 26, 1884.  The Wilsons were 
originally members of the orthodox Society of Friends, and many of their 
descendants still adhere to the faith.  Being the only members of that society 
in their part of the county they never erected a meeting-house, but meetings 
were held every Sabbath at the house of George Wilson, a grandson of the 
original settler.