Ancestors

Benjamin Franklin Strong

Benjamin Franklin Strong was born on 13 May 1847 in Massachusetts, a son of Eleazer Herrick Strong and Elizabeth B. Cowles. His father was a paper maker. The family lived at South Hadley from 1845 to 1850 and then moved to Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, where his father worked in the paper mills for the rest of his life. Benjamin grew up there with his sister Lucy and his brother Oscar. A younger brother, Edmund, died at four in 1858.

By 1868 he had gone west to Missouri. He married Permelia C. Criss, a daughter of Levi Criss and Rebecca Need, in 1875 or 1876, in Andrew County, Missouri, where her family had settled. She was about eighteen. He went by Frank.

They went on to Nebraska. In June 1880 he was thirty-three and farming in Douglas Township, Saunders County, with Permelia, twenty-one, and three small children born in Nebraska: Edwin, three, Daisy, two, and Maude, one. Seven more were born in Nebraska by 1893: Guy, John, Levi, Lowell, Walter, Earl and Emma.

By 1896 the family had moved to Missouri. In 1900 they were farming in Center Township, Dade County: Franklin, fifty-three, Permelia, forty-two, and nine children at home, from Guy, nineteen, to George, born the September before. Their son Eleazar, called Lee, had been born in Missouri in 1896. Permelia told the census taker she had borne thirteen children and that eleven were living.

In January 1920 he was seventy-two and living at Newport, in Barton County, Missouri, with Permelia, their sons Lee and George, and their daughter Emma Wells, a widow of twenty-six. Later that year they went to California, where several of their children settled. In April 1930 the census found them at Rowland, in Los Angeles County, with their widowed daughter Maude Patterson and three of her children in the house. Permelia died in July 1931. He died at Rowland on Christmas Eve 1936, aged eighty-nine, and was buried at Downey, Los Angeles County, under one bronze marker with her.

If Benjamin Franklin Strong is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Benjamin Franklin Strong (1847-1936)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/benjamin-franklin-strong-1847-1936-bec083.