Ancestors

Harriet Roberts

b. 1832 · Johnstown PA → Jackson Township PA
Born 1832, Pennsylvania
Children include William

Harriet Roberts was born in Pennsylvania about 1832, and both her parents were born in the state. In October 1850 a Harriet, eighteen, was living on the farm of William Roberts, forty-nine, in Jackson Township, Cambria County. The household held his wife Catherine and the children Mary A., Harriet, Ester, Elizabeth and John. The census names no relationships. But everything about this Harriet fits her. Her married family farmed in the same township in 1880. Her age matches. And her eldest son was named William Roberts Smith.

So William Roberts was very probably her father. He was born in April 1801 and died at Johnstown on 31 May 1855, and he lies at Beulah, the old Welsh settlement of the county. His first wife, Ann Williams, died in January 1837. Harriet was born while Ann was alive, so Ann was probably her mother. A second William Roberts farmed in Conemaugh Township in 1850, and no record names either man as her father.

She married William C. Smith, a Cambria County man about four years older, and their first son was born at Johnstown in October 1853. The 1870 census finds her at thirty-three in the first ward of Johnstown with five children in the house, the eldest of them the seventeen year old William R. Ten years later she is forty-six and keeping house on the farm at Jackson Township, with the three youngest boys still at home.

The censuses record her only as Harriet Smith. Her maiden name survives through her sons. The eldest died in Florida in 1929, and the certificate names his mother Harriatt Roberts. The youngest applied to Social Security in 1957 and gave her as Harriet Roberts. Two clerks, two states, twenty-eight years apart, and the same surname both times.

The Mary A. of the 1850 household was Mary Ann Roberts, who married George Huntley of Ebensburg in 1853. If the two girls were sisters, the next generation married within the family. In October 1879 Harriet's son William Roberts Smith married Mary Ann's eldest daughter Alma Huntley at Ebensburg. They were first cousins.

Sources

1870 and 1880 censuses of Cambria County; the 1929 Florida death certificate of her son William R. and the 1957 Social Security application of her son Howard H.

If Harriet Roberts is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Harriet Roberts (b. 1832)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/harriet-roberts-1832-4257a7.