Ancestors

Jesse E. Snell

Jesse E. Snell was born at Wareham, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, in 1874. He was a son of William Henry Snell, a nailer and Union veteran of the 20th Massachusetts Infantry, and Maria Bridge Tripp. His father died when Jesse was about thirteen.

On 3 December 1892, at eighteen, Jesse married Josephine Stringer at Wareham. She also gave her age as eighteen, though her gravestone's birth year of 1876 would make her sixteen. She was a daughter of Edmund Stringer and Victoria Westgate. The couple made their home at East Wareham, the village on the Agawam River at the eastern edge of Wareham.

They had at least five children: Ella Josephine in 1893, Esther Louisa in 1894, Grace Frances about 1896, Elmer William in 1901 and Bernice Maria in 1903. Grace married Lester H. Leonard at Wareham on Christmas Day 1914, when she was eighteen, and the marriage register names her parents as Jesse E. Snell and V. Josephine Stringer.

Jesse worked the cranberry bogs. Wareham and Carver were cranberry country, and the low swamps along the rivers were cleared, leveled and sanded into bogs, the shallow beds in which the vines are grown and flooded. By 1904 Jesse was foreman of the Maple Park Cranberry Company at East Wareham. That April the Middleboro Gazette reported that he would begin work on 1 April, "as they are to build ten acres of cranberry bog this spring."

Josephine died at East Wareham on 19 January 1928, five days after her father. Jesse lived another thirty-six years and died in 1964, at about ninety. He was buried at Agawam Cemetery in Wareham, in Section A, Lot 306, Grave 1. His flat marker reads "JESSE E. SNELL 1874 1964" and lies beside her upright stone.

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Cite: Heirology, "Jesse E. Snell (1874-1964)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/jesse-e-snell-1874-1964-98d592.