Ancestors

Arbelia Wilmarth

Arbelia Wilmarth was born on 27 May 1795. Her gravestone says she was born "near Boston, Mass." The censuses of 1860 and 1880 agree on Massachusetts and on the year. The same stone calls her the daughter of "N. & M. Willmarth." Her name is spelled several ways in the records: Wilmarth, Willmarth and Wilmouth.

Those initials most probably stand for Nathaniel Wilmarth and Mercy Snow. Mitchell's History of the Early Settlement of Bridgewater, published in 1840, lists the children of Eleazar Snow of North Bridgewater and ends the entry: "Mercy m. Nathaniel Wilmouth 1795." The same couple married as Nathaniel Wilmarth and Mercy Snow. The initials, the surname and the year all fit. If so, Arbelia was a Bridgewater Snow on her mother's side before she ever married one.

She married Ansel Snow, a Bridgewater man eleven years older. No record of the marriage has been found. The couple were in Oswego County, New York by about 1815, when their first children were born. Ansel had bought a farm near what later became the city of Oswego, and the family's home was at New Haven in that county. Their children were Permelia, Hannah, Mercy Ann, Cordelia, Orson, Orrin and, born later in Michigan, Orla.

In February 1837 the family left New York for Michigan. A county history printed in 1880 tells the journey. Ansel had gone out the autumn before and bought land from the government: eighty acres in Oshtemo township and one hundred and twenty in Kalamazoo township. The family went "with sleighs," Ansel, Arbelia and seven children. "They were four weeks on the road, and found good sleighing all the way." They reached Kalamazoo on 16 March 1837. "The farm was all new, and there were no buildings; a log house soon went up." Ansel could not do hard labor. He had lost his health in the lumber woods of Canada, and the farm was improved "with hired help and the assistance of his boys."

In 1840 they sold the Kalamazoo land and moved onto the Oshtemo farm. Her daughter Hannah had married Solomon Forbes in 1837, and Hannah died there in November 1845, at thirty. In 1860 the census found Ansel, seventy six, Arbelia, sixty five, and their youngest son Orla, eighteen, still on the Oshtemo farm. Ansel died there on 15 October 1864.

Two years later, at seventy one, she moved west again. Her sons Orson and Orla "removed to Macon County, Mo." in 1866, and she went with them. Her daughter Cordelia was already married to Anson Forbes of Macon County. Her granddaughter Abigail, Hannah's daughter, came to the same county with her husband Francis Marion Snow, and their children Nellie, Lena and Hattie were born there.

In 1880 the census taker found her at Lyda, in Macon County, eighty five years old. She was living in the house of her son Orla, with his wife Marilla and their daughters Clara and Effie. She died that summer, on 28 July 1880, in Missouri, "where she had gone with her son," in the words of her son Orrin's biography. She is buried at Mount Tabor Cemetery, near Atlanta in Macon County. Her son Orson and his wife Rosella lie a few yards away.

Her white marble stone is topped with an urn. Below the dates is a verse, partly worn away: "The pains of death are past, Labor and sorrow cease, And life's long w..."

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Cite: Heirology, "Arbelia Wilmarth (1795-1880)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/arbelia-wilmarth-1795-1880-b09aa2.