Ancestors

Francis Marion Snow

Francis Marion Snow was born on 24 June 1837 near Wooster, in Wayne County, Ohio. He was named for the Revolutionary partisan Francis Marion, which was a common naming fashion in the 1830s and tells you nothing about the family except its politics.

His own account, printed at Norton in 1894 while he was living in the county, says he moved to Sandusky with his parents at ten and left alone for Kalamazoo at seventeen. The first half of that is not what the record shows. The 1850 census of Portland township in Erie County, which is Sandusky's township, contains no Snow household at all. It contains Francis, aged twelve, lodging in the house of Horace Eastman, a carpenter of twenty nine, with Hannah Eastman, a painter named Peter Lee, and a Fanny Snow of twenty seven who is almost certainly kin and whose relationship to him has not been established. His parents had died around 1847 to 1850. A man dictating his life at fifty seven, to a county historian, in front of his neighbours, said he moved with his parents. The census says he was boarding in a stranger's house at twelve.

He married Abigail L. Forbes in Kalamazoo County, Michigan. His biography gives 19 September 1859; the marriage record and the couple's first child point to about 1856.

In August 1862 he enlisted in Company F of the 19th Michigan Infantry, a regiment raised that summer under the call for three hundred thousand more men. Seven months later the regiment was effectively destroyed as a fighting unit in a single afternoon. On 5 March 1863 Colonel John Coburn took a brigade of about two thousand seven hundred men south from Franklin, Tennessee on a reconnaissance and ran into Earl Van Dorn's cavalry at Thompson's Station, with Nathan Bedford Forrest working around the flank. The infantry held a stone wall and a hill through several charges, ran out of ammunition, and were surrounded. About twelve hundred men surrendered in the field, the 19th Michigan among them. Francis Snow had been a soldier for seven months and was now a prisoner.

His biography says he spent the next nine months in Libby Prison, the converted ship chandler's warehouse on Cary Street in Richmond, three floors of open loft with barred windows over the canal, notorious for crowding and for the smell. Libby was principally an officers' prison and enlisted men were usually sent across to Belle Isle in the James, so either he passed through Libby and the account compresses it, or he was among the men held there while the exchange cartel was breaking down. Either way he missed the rest of his regiment's war, including Resaca and the march to Atlanta.

Afterwards he moved the household west in stages, and the children date the route better than he did. Macon County, Missouri by 1866, where Nellie was born in 1867, Lena in 1870 and Hattie in 1873. Webster County, Nebraska by 1876, where Orley was born in 1877. Norton County, Kansas by 1878 or 1879, in time for the 1880 enumeration. He died in 1912, and he, his wife and three of their daughters are buried at Norton.

His parents are not known. The 1880 census gives only a father born in Massachusetts and a mother born in New York, without names, and no record of him before his marriage is known except the 1850 census.

If Francis Marion Snow is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Francis Marion Snow (1837-1912)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/francis-marion-snow-1837-1912-993277.