Ancestors

Elias Williams

Elias Williams was born on 27 February 1770 near Clarendon, in Rutland County, Vermont, and married Mary Boynton, born at Plymouth in Windsor County in 1773. He then spent the next fifty years of his life moving west in stages, which is the ordinary pattern for New England farm families of his generation and is unusually well recorded in his case because his family gave the whole itinerary to a county historian.

He was born into a town that was one year old. Benning Wentworth, governor of New Hampshire, had chartered Clarendon on 5 September 1761 to Caleb Williams and others, dividing twenty three thousand six hundred acres into seventy shares, and for seven years nothing came of it. In 1768 Elkanah Cook, Randall Rice, Benjamin Johns, Samuel Place, Elisha Williams and the Walkers came up from Rhode Island and Connecticut, chose their lots and went home again. They returned with their families in the spring of 1769 and made the permanent settlement. Cook, Place and Williams took the north part of the town, in the tract then called Socialborough. Elias was born the following February.

Four children were born in Vermont. About 1804 the family moved to Essex County, New York, in the Adirondack country on Lake Champlain, where their daughter Mary was born in 1806. A deed catches him in the middle of that move. On 7 July 1806 Benjamin Cutter of Westfield, in Washington County, New York, sold him about a hundred and thirty three acres in West Haven, back over the line in Rutland County, for six hundred dollars, and the deed calls him Elias Williams of Essex County, New York. He was buying Vermont land out of New York in the same summer his daughter was born there. From there they went to Hamilton County, Ohio, then to Butler County, then into Indiana in 1819. In February 1823 they reached Sangamon County, Illinois, and the following spring they moved onto the ground that became Rochester township.

They were early there but not first. A man named James McCoy had built the first cabin in the township about 1819, and the surveyors did not plat a village until 1831. In between, families like this one made the place. The eldest son, Samuel, had come out ahead of everyone in the autumn of 1821 and became the settlement's schoolmaster and preacher. The village of Rochester grew up around them.

Ten children in five states over roughly thirty years. His daughter Mary married Richard E. Barker; his son Samuel married about a hundred couples of other people.

If Elias Williams is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Elias Williams (b. 1770)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/elias-williams-1770-9e7317.