The Family of John Lawrence Tremper to his granddaughter Priscilla Addie Tremper
John, the son of Daniel Tremper and Ariettje Kieffer, was born around 1803, probably in New York City or perhaps in Dutchess or Ulster County, New York. Daniel and Ariettje were both born in New York in the early 1770's, Daniel in Fishkill and Ariettje near Kingston. They were descendants of early immigrants to New Amsterdam. About 1805, John's parents and their six children, including John, removed to the area of Chaumont Bay in Jefferson County, New York, at the extreme western end of Lake Ontarion, where Daniel pursued his trade as a tanner for the fur trading industry. They were joined by Daniel's brother John (also a tanner) and his new wife Blandena.
Daniel and Ariettje, along with now nine children, again moved west, this time, about 1812, to Clermont County along the Ohio River, just east of Cincinnati. John and Blandena would raise six children and remain in Jefferson County. Ohio had become a state in 1803, and quickly grew as a destination for pioneers. Daniel apparently continued to pursue a trade rather than farming - sons James, John and William (born in Ohio) were carpenters, or sawyers. Ariettje died in 1841 and Daniel in 1845. Their eleven children all survived them.
When Daniel, Ariettje and family moved to Ohio, they joined his sister Catherine. She had married Thomas Collord in 1793. Catherine and Thomas had four children when they also moved west to Clermont County. Catherine died in 1828 and Thomas in 1840. One of their two sons, Isaac was a clergyman, Samuel a carpenter joiner. The younger daughter, Catherine, married in 1820 and died in 1843. The older daughter, Emeline, married Abel towner, a painter, in 1832.
Of John's 5 sisters and 5 brothers (excluding Laurens, either died young or is the same as John Lawrence), only his sister Leah, also called Lettie, is known to have also moved on from Ohio to Indiana (the histories of Michael, Anna Maria and Daniel are still to be discovered).
John took up the trade of sawyer and he and Margaret Hayes were married in Clermont County around 1823. They had two children, Alexander and Martha Ann, before Margaret died, and John then married Frances Elizabeth Rusk in 1836. Frances had come from Baltimore, Maryland, to Hamilton County, Ohio, as a ten year old, about 1823, with her parents David and Elizabeth Rusk and perhaps as many as eleven siblings. Frances and John would have six children, including David Rusk Tremper, born in 1840. All six
John's sister Leah and her husband, William Allen, and four children removed to Spencer County, Indiana, between 1837 and 1840. They would have one more child there before William died in 1842. Leah then married George Young, a farmer, and it is in their household, in 1850, that we find Alexander, John Lawrence's eldest child, though he may have been there as early as 1840.
John's wife Frances died in 1855. Their daughter, Martha, had married in 1850. Alexander was likely in Indiana by then. John had six children, ages two to seventeen, to care for.
Sometime before 1860, John and his children removed to Indiana. In 1859, Helen, the oldest of the six, married, in Spencer County in 1859, William Abshire. In 1860, John was living with his daughter Helen, along with Wealtha, Johnston and Charles (but not David).
Where David was living in 1860 is still not found, but in 1861 he joined the Union army in the Civil War. He would remain in the army for four years. Seeing many battles, he was reported wounded in the battle of Hatchie's River in 1862. David was mustered out in Louisville, Kentucky, July 17, 1865. He returned to Indiana, and on September 11, 1868, married Rachel E. Williams, daughter of Henry Williams and Priscilla Kimmel, then sixteen years old, to David's twenty-eight. Rachel's parents were from Kentucky and removed to Warrick County, Indiana, about 1848, where Rachel was born about 1852.
David and Rachel had four children: Susannah (1869, possibly named for Rachel's grandmother), William David (1871, possibly named for Rachel's grandfather), Priscilla Addie (1873, named for Rachel's mother) and John J (1875, possibly named for John's father). David died in 1876 at the age of 36.
Rachel returned with her children to live with her parents who were still in Warrick County. In December of 1880, Rachel, age 28, married Francis M. Wright. She died February 17, 1885, and was buried in Bethabara Cemetery in Folsomville, Warrick Co. Her children would marry in 1887, 1892, 1894 (Priscilla) and 1897.
Priscilla was twenty-one when she married Sherman Bridges. They were living in Spencer County, Indiana, in 1900, with three children, Nelle Belle, Esther and Fern. Their fourth daughter was born in 1903, and shortly after this the family moved to Posey County, Indiana. Sherman worked in a strawboard factory there, and the family was living on South Barter Street in Mount Vernon in 1910. In 1911, they had their fifth child, Walter Lee. By 1917, the family had moved to Yorktown in Delaware County, Indiana, and later that year moved again, this time to Carthage, about forty miles south of Yorktown. There, on November 18, 1918, Priscilla died at home, age 45.
It was while the family lived in Delaware County, Indiana, that Nelle Belle, the oldest child, married William David Lewis, then living in Mount Vernon in Posey County. Her brother and sisters lived with their father Sherman on First Street in Carthage. They married about 1923 (Fern), in 1923 (Edna May), in 1928 (Esther), and after 1930 (Walter Lee). Sherman then moved in with Nelle and William, who were living in Quincy. Illinois by 1922. He was still living with them when their daughter, Mary Christine Lewis, was born in 1926. Sherman died in Quincy in 1931.
Like his father-in-law, William Lewis worked in the paperboard business. After Sherman's death, Williams's work took him, Nelle and their daughter Mary to Fort Madison, Iowa by 1933. They moved again, by 1936, to Coshocton, Ohio. It was there, on March 28, 1939, that Nelle died at the age of forty-four.
[The 1870 census records for the Henry and Priscilla Williams household and for the David and Rachel Tremper household have not been identified, using Ancestry, FamilySearch and Marsha's Warwick Web.]
Source: SyngeneiaFamily.org