Ancestors

James Thompson Wylie

James Thompson Wylie was born on 6 December 1861 at Athens, Bradford County, Pennsylvania. His father, James Wylie, was a Scottish immigrant, and his mother was Mary S. Thompson of Athens, whose surname he carried as his middle name. His older sister Agnes had been born in 1859, and his sister Stella followed in 1863.

When he was about four the family moved to Perry, Wyoming County, New York. His father ran a woolen mill there that shared its water power with the Andrus lumber mill. James grew up at Perry with five sisters: Agnes, Stella, Mary, Elizabeth and Jessie. He was in his parents' household there in 1870, 1875 and 1880. As a young man he worked in the mill, which ran in its last years as James Wylie and Son. It burned on 7 August 1880, when he was eighteen.

By 1890 he had moved west to Saginaw, Michigan, a lumber city. On 18 December 1890, aged twenty eight, he married Agnes Hardie Batchelor at Saginaw. She was twenty three, born at Port Huron, the daughter of Henry A. Batchelor, a lumberman, and Agnes Hardie. In April 1891 he went into partnership with Edward A. Gyde in the firm of Gyde and Wylie, which made coiled elm hoops for barrels at the foot of Youmans Street in Saginaw. Their daughter Lillian B. Wylie was born on 7 March 1897 in Canton, Stark County, Ohio. By 1910 the family was back in Saginaw, and they stayed there.

James worked as a lumberman. His father died at Perry in 1906, and the obituary named "one son, James Wiley of Saginaw, Michigan." In 1921 his daughter Lillian married Harold L. McLurg at Saginaw.

In the summer of 1923, at sixty one, James and Agnes applied for passports to tour Great Britain and France. The clerk described him as five feet ten, with grey eyes and grey hair, a fair complexion, a full face and a crooked nose. They lived then at 1019 Genesee Avenue, Saginaw. The 1930 census found the couple still in Saginaw.

James Thompson Wylie died on 3 April 1938 in Frankenmuth Township, Saginaw County, aged seventy six. He is buried at Forest Lawn Cemetery in Saginaw, where Agnes was later laid beside him. A columned family monument marks the plot, carved WYLIE on one face of its base and BATCHELOR on another. His own flat stone reads "JAMES THOMPSON WYLIE / DECEMBER 6 1861 / APRIL 3 1938".

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Cite: Heirology, "James Thompson Wylie (1861-1938)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/james-thompson-wylie-1861-1938-0b041e.