Henry's Heirs

Henry's Heirs
The table below is extracted from the 1860 census, taken 5 years after the settlement of Henry's will. I've added spouses' maiden names and wedding dates where I know them, and notes where there's some particular point of interest.

Name	Age	Location	Spouse	Age	Children	Age	Real Estate	Cash	Notes
William F.	56	Knowlton NJ	Maria Ribble 5/26/1838	53	Mary E Sarah E Emma F Penina A Maria Butler	20 18 17 14 8	$9500	$1500	Maria Isabella Butler is the daughter of Maria Ribble's late sister Eliza Ribble Butler (12/30/1821-1/28/1853). The only one of the five listed girls to get married, she is buried in the family plot at Ramsaysburg.
Derrick	54	Knowlton NJ	Mary Angle nee Kirkhuff 9/12/1846	52	Charles A	11	$3900 (Mary's)	$1500	This is part of the old Angle estate butting and bounding the north end of the Albertson estate back in Nicholas' day. Riverfront plot.
Eli	51	Oakland MI	Sidney Teeter 7/4/1856	33	Alonzo Irabell Josephine	11 3 1	$8000	$2000	Eli lived with sister Jane Hartung and family in 1850, married the young widow Sidney Bennett nee Teeter 7/4/1856. Alonzo was Robert Alonzo Bennett.
Agnew	50	Addison MI	-	-	-	-	$1200	$600	Lived 2 houses from John in Addison; Killed 1/10/1864 by a guard in a POW camp near Richmond.
Sarah	45	Knowlton NJ	Mathias Cummins 3/22/1845	43	Ellen	10	$3760	$2700	Mathias was a son of John Cummins, dc'd, who left a parcel of land that figured in the settlement of Henry's estate. Ellen had a sister Mary Jane, who died of consumption at 13 in April 1860
Henry	44	Knowlton NJ	Susan Angle 9/14/1844	35	John Jacob	14 12	$7860	$800	Riverfront farm south of Delaware, previously owned by Uncle Derrick
Jane	42	Knowlton NJ	Charles Hartung 1/24/1839	46	Alfred Mary William	20 18 16	$11520	$2000	Big farm on Lime Kiln Road in Delaware
John	40	Addison MI	Susan C. Hartung 9/15/1844	37	Mary George Caroline Luther	15 12 8 1	$3000	$600	Moved to MI on his inheritance, with unmarried older brothers Eli & Agnew.
Susan	37	Oxford NJ	John Burd 11/16/1844	43	Edwin Sarah Mary	13 8 3	$500	$1500
Mary	dc'd		David B. Ribble 1/4/1846
David B. Ribble	42	Knowlton NJ	Margaret Buchner 1856	27	Sarah Watson Edwin	12 4 1	-	$1200	Sarah wasn't even 11 yet on June 1, 1860. Shows how much her step mother knew about her. David was 44.

The Angles and Hartungs lived on farms that butted Henry's land on the north. Four of Henry's children literally married the girl or boy next door. Neither the Angles nor Hartungs they married were siblings. Charles Hartung was Susan Charlotte Hartung's uncle, youngest brother of her father William. The Angle story is more interesting. It begins with Jacob J. Angle (1772-1844). He had at least 2 sons with his first wife Elizabeth Bellis - John (1798-?) and Samuel (1802-1895). Samuel married Mary Cool on 10/30/1823. Daughter Susanna Cool Angle was born November 23 of the following year. She grew up and married Henry Albertson Jr. September 14, 1844.

Elizabeth Bellis Angle died 2/28/1825. Jacob wasted no time starting a second family, beginning with Jacob J. Angle Jr., born 6/22/1826. Jacob Sr. was 54 years 2 months old and widowed less than 16 months when Jacob Jr. was born; the child's mother Mary Kirkhuff Angle was 17 years 7 months! I can't find any official record of their marriage. There are entries on ancestry.com claiming they were married on March 24, 1825, but I find that hard to believe, being only 3 weeks after Elizabeth's funeral. If this wasn't a shotgun wedding, there's only one possible motivation for Jesse Kirkhuff to marry off his 16 year old daughter to a man more than three times her age. Jacob owned a fine piece of farmland reaching from the Delaware River 3/4 mile into New Jersey. I'm sure that if he had a mind to marry Mary he could afford whatever price Jesse asked. Whatever the case, the name of Jacob Angle remained in good repute in the community - there was a child baptized as Jacob Angle Cowell at St. James Episcopal Church in 1830.

Jacob and Mary had a second child, Charlotte Kirkhuff Angle, born 4/13/1830, who lived with Derrick and Mary in 1850. Mary was widowed on 3/7/1844. When she married Derrick Albertson on September 12, 1846, she became her step-granddaughter's sister-in-law! Derrick and Mary only ever had the one child listed on the 1860 census form, Charles Abel Albertson. He died in England at age 17 in August 1865, shortly after the Civil War drew to a close. Abel was Mary's mother's maiden name. Her grandfather Matthias Abel fought in the Revolutionary War. Her grandson Jay Warren Angle, son of Jacob Jr., applied to join the Sons of the American Revolution in 1920. The application form requires the applicant to provide names and dates for his ancestors back to the Revolutionary War veteran. Jay Warren Angle gave 1825 as the year of his grandparents' marriage. If true, it would indicate a planned marriage, as Mary should have been able to conceal her pregnancy well into 1826.

There was one pair of sibling marriages, between Albertsons and Ribbles, also close neighbors in Delaware NJ but not quite next door. The eldest of the two families, William F. Albertson and Maria Overfield Ribble, both in their early 30's, married on May 26, 1838 in St. James Episcopal Church, located at the time at Ramsaysburg, about a mile south of Delaware. The youngest Albertson and the second youngest Ribble, Mary and David B. (he had a younger sister Eliza) married in the same church on January 4, 1846. There are no living descendants of either marriage. Both couples had a son who died in early childhood, William and Maria's in infancy before even being named, and daughters all of whom survived at least into their 50s (two into their 90s) without ever getting married. Sarah Ribble, a school teacher mentioned specifically in her grandfather Henry's will, died in Newark in 1905. She's buried at Ramsaysburg Cemetery, located along Rte 46 just south of Delaware NJ. So are her cousins, the four daughters of William and Maria. So for that matter are William and Maria, and dozens more Albertsons including a bunch not yet in the find-a-grave database. Mary Albertson Ribble is buried in a much smaller cemetery nearby, which was the churchyard of St. James Episcopal Church at Ramsaysburg before it burned to the ground in 1866.

A little bit more about Eli's wife, Sidney Teeter (it started out to be a little bit more but I got sucked in). She was the daughter of Elias Teeter of Knowlton Twp and Catherine Kinney of Oxford Twp, NJ. Elias and Catherine were married in New Jersey on 6/24/1813, according to family records as entered by several descendants on applications to the Sons / Daughters of the American Revolution. They remained in New Jersey at least through the 8/23/1819 birth of their fourth child, daughter Sarah; Charlotte was born in New York state 4/12/1824, in the Finger Lakes region where many of Elias' kin had migrated in the 1790s. There was a daughter Catherine born in between, around 1821. She married Jacob Searfoss in Belvidere in 1841. He would turn up in 1860 in Illinois with wife Mary and an 11 year old daughter also named Mary. Apparently Catherine died too soon to be recorded in the 1850 census, so there's no telling where she was born, and no telling whether the Teeters' move to New York State was before or after 1821.

The 1830 census missed Elias' family. There are 2 Elias Teeter families recorded in the Finger Lakes district, doubtless cousins, but both sets of parents were too old and neither family had the right numbers and ages of children to be our Teeters. Some time between the January 1832 birth of Laura and the July 1834 birth of Jacob "Jake" Teeter (who would grow up to become a constable in the Wild West town of Truckee, CA, where he died in a saloon shootout) they returned to Belvidere NJ. In 1840 they lived in Belvidere, with 2 daughters ages 15-19 (Catherine & Charlotte) a son and a daughter ages 10-15 (Elias & Sidney), a son and a daughter 5-10 (Jacob & Laura) and a son and a daughter under 5 (James and Mary Jane).

By 1850 they had moved to Addison, MI, with Elias, Jake, Jimmy and Mary Jane in tow. Sarah had migrated to Addison with her husband Conrad Walters shortly after their 1839 marriage - all of their children were born in Michigan beginning with their own Mary Jane in 1840. Elias and family moved right next door to the Walters. The move probably occurred late in the decade. Charlotte and Sidney both got married in 1846. Neither one made the move to Michigan - Charlotte and William H. Lowry of Pennsylvania settled down in New York City, and Sidney and Robert Bennett of New Jersey went to upstate New York just north of Albany. It's not likely that Elias and family moved until after the two marriages, by which time he was in his middle to late 50s. An earlier move would have left Charlotte, Sidney and Laura homeless! It is likely that Laura went to New York City with Charlotte - the 1850 census finds her living in Jersey City with her stock broker husband, Jonathan Sturges Mortimer, having married him in 1849 at age 17.

Assembling a Wedding Party, or Go West Young Man

The first move in the 1850's was by Elias, Sidney's brother. He married Sarah Boyce and moved out of his parents' home to Washington Township, where he worked as a carpenter. Elias and Sarah named their first child John Mortimer Teeter - the Teeters were proud of Laura for snagging a stock broker! Charlotte and William H. Lowry arrived in Michigan from New York City by 1852. They settled in Bruce. Some time during the decade Conrad Walters gave up his farm in Addison and moved, but not far, just down to Avon Township (now Rochester Hills). He also took up carpentry. At some point Robert Bennett died, and Sidney and son relocated to Addison. Henry Albertson's children came into their inheritance in the spring of 1855 following an exchange of deeds back east. John had to move out of his father's house, the Albertson House overlooking Delaware NJ, which now belonged to his brother William. He couldn't find a farm to buy in New Jersey, or maybe he didn't want to; Eli and Agnew were bachelors with pocketfuls of cash and nothing tying them to New Jersey. So the three brothers packed up John's family and relocated to Michigan, where land was cheap. They were accompanied by John C. Albertson, the 28 year old son of their cousin Nicholas, his family and his 21 year old brother Jabez who barely survived the trip. John and John C. bought farms in Addison (where we know the Walters were selling one, hmmm), Eli bought one in Oakland. By 1858 but probably sooner Edward, the oldest child of cousin Nicholas, settled in Oxford, the next township west of Addison. Interesting side note: by 1863 five of the seven sons of Nicholas Albertson lived in Michigan, a sixth was buried there, and Jehiel was nearby in Illinois. That June 13 their sister Sarah Jane married a man named John Marshall Creveling, a railroad engineer. He was from Phillipsburg, NJ and that's where they settled, but the center of gravity of Sarah Jane's family had shifted so decisively westward that the wedding was held in Oxford, MI, with participants from the east brought in by train.

The migrating Albertsons of 1855 chose Addison and vicinity as their destination for a reason. There was a good-sized colony of people from Knowlton who had migrated there beginning around 1838, with the names Axford, Lambertson, Banghart, Flumerfelt and others turning up in both places. John's next door neighbor in Addison was Mathew Ribble, whose father was a first cousin of Maria Ribble Albertson, John's sister-in-law. Mathew was born in Knowlton NJ in 1826. In 1850 he married Nancy Ann, the 18 year old daughter of Abraham and Mary Lambertson of Addison MI. His parents and the Lambertsons had been neighbors and apparently quite close friends. One of Mathew's sisters was given the name Polly Ann Lambertson Ribble, and William Ribble Lambertson was the name of a brother of the bride. Mathew was orphaned in 1830 along with 7 brothers and sisters ages 13 and under. The Lambertsons were part of the first wave of Knowlton-to-Michigan migrants, arriving around 1837 in plenty of time to be counted in Oakland in the 1840 census. Happily there were no 10 - 15 year old males in the house - Mathew Ribble was not raised in the same household as his future wife. Late in his life he was interviewed for a book titled Biographical Album of Oakland County Michigan, which reports that he was raised "by a bachelor and two maiden ladies" in New Jersey, and that he migrated to Oakland County in 1849, where he was no doubt welcomed by his boyhood neighbors the Lambertsons.

And then there were the Teeters. Sidney and Eli probably met in New Jersey in the 1830s/40s, whether they knew it or not. They lived about 5 miles apart from 1834 to 1846, and there just weren't that many people living in the area at the time. He was 18 years older, so any contact between them would have been casual, but John Albertson and Sarah Teeter Walters were the same age, and so were John C. Albertson and Sidney. Assuming they all attended school (they probably did - according to the 1850 census all of John C.'s brothers and sisters up to age 19 attended school in 1850, and out in Addison so did Sidney's up to the age of 21), John and Sarah would have been in class together, and so would John C. and Sidney. Maybe Sarah Walters wrote a condolence letter to John Albertson when word of Henry's passing reached Addison. Maybe John C. wrote to Sidney on getting word of the death of Robert Bennett, whom he also would have known. Whatever (if any) role old school ties had in drawing the Albertsons to Addison, once they arrived Eli and Sidney soon became an item. Maybe they met at church. Maybe Eli worked on the Teeter farm that first year while his house was being built in Oakland. Maybe their siblings played matchmaker, maybe it was love at first sight (figuratively, literal first sight having probably been in New Jersey 20 years before).

Sidney and Eli were married on Friday July 4, 1856, with ample relatives on both sides living close enough to easily attend - his brothers John and Agnew, John C. Albertson, possibly Edward Albertson, the mother of the bride, her older sisters Sarah and Charlotte, younger brothers and sister Elias, Jake, Jimmy and Mary Jane, her son Robert Alonzo Bennett, and spouses and children of many of the above. But alas not her father Elias, who died a few weeks before the wedding. It's not clear where Laura lived in 1856. Her only child, Nellie Mortimer, was born in Michigan within a year after this wedding (not sure when - Nellie lied about her age to the census taker in 1900, the one census in which birth month and year were recorded. Her age was given as 3 on the 1860 census and 13 in 1870, so she was born between June 1 1856 and June 1 1857). If the Mortimers were in Michigan in 1856, they were in Detroit, about 50 miles SSE of Addison. Her husband's occupation demanded it, and that's where they were in the 1860 census (by 1870 they were back in New York City and he was a saloon keeper). Of course it's possible that they attended anyway even if they hadn't yet relocated, and that goes for New Jersey relatives on both sides. By 1855 the northeastern quarter of the United States had gotten to be quite well connected by rail. There was even a spur from Detroit to Pontiac, Oakland County, to drop wedding guests off just 20 miles from Addison!

Eli and Sidney had four children, all girls. They were Irabell (or Arabell or Isabel, eventually she went by Belle), Josephine (Josie), Carrie and Carrie May. The first Carrie only lived a few months, 1/18-9/13/1863. There's a massive 4-faced Albertson monument in Mount Vernon Cemetery in Macomb County. The inscription on one face reads "Our little darling budded on earth to bloom in Heaven". Sidney reported on the 1900 census having lost 3 of her 7 children. The other 2 are unknown, though there's a good chance that at least the first one was with Robert Bennett - they were married nearly 3 years by the time Robert Alonzo came along.

Eli Albertson died in 1882. Charlotte Lowry died in 1883. On October 29, 1885 their surviving spouses Sidney and William H. Lowry got married. In the 1900 census Sidney claimed to be married to Lowry. He, on the other hand, claimed to be a widower, and lived 50 miles away in Saginaw with his daughter Ida M. Linton, her husband former Congressman William Linton and their family. There are other discrepancies on Sidney's line on the census form. Her first name is recorded as Sidna, the last digit of the year of her birth looks like a 6 written over an 8, her place of birth is given as New Jersey which is wrong, and there was an occupation written in then erased:

. She was recorded in Avon Township. Her daughter Josie Flumerfelt lived in Avon with husband Lewis in the 1910 census, and by herself as a widow in 1920. There's no telling from census records alone when Josie and Lewis moved to Avon. In 1880 they were newlyweds, but both still lived with their parents as of the June 1 census date. The 1890 census was destroyed in a warehouse fire. The Flumerfelts were missed by the 1900 census. The house Sidney lived in with Eli in Oakland would be home to another daughter, Carrie May, from 1910 on, and Sidney must have still owned it in 1900 for Carrie May to inherit it, but that's not where the census taker found her. I suspect that Sidney was living with the Flumerfelts in her waning years, that she was the only one home when the census taker called and that she neglected to mention them, in addition to the other problems with the interview. Sidney died November 19, 1901 and is buried with Eli as Sidney Albertson.

Henry's children married late! When Henry died, the middle two of his six sons were still bachelors well into their 40s. William had married at age 33, Derrick at 40, Henry Jr. at 28, John at 25 and Sarah at 31. The younger sisters Jane, Susan and Mary all married in their early 20's, but by the time Eli got around to tying the knot he was 48, raising the average marriage age of Henry's children to 30. In the middle of the 19th century!

Below is a portion of a tax map of Knowlton, NJ from 1860. I've underlined in red the names of Henry's heirs who remained in town, which was most of them. There's Charles and Jane Hartung up at the north end of town living on Charles' inheritance, Derrick and Mary down the road living on Mary's inheritance. Mathias and Sarah Cummins are on property they bought in 1846 from cousin Nicholas. Their house was located near the Holiday House Pool (visible in this image as a small rectangle just to the left of the property line), their land stretched from there to the Delaware River. Henry is at the south end of town on late Uncle Derrick's farm, not far from David Ribble. The Burds are just off the map to the south in Oxford. William F. Albertson is living in the house his grandfather built, its white roof visible to the right in the same image.