Ancestors

Joseph North

Joseph North was born on February 18, 1855 at Galilee, a hamlet on the Delaware in Wayne County, Pennsylvania. He died on November 21, 1943 in Berlin Township, aged eighty eight. He lies in the Lookout United Methodist Church Cemetery in Damascus Township, the country churchyard nearest the Galilee end of the river road.

Who his parents were is not known.

The first record that places him is the 1870 census of Damascus Township, taken when he was fourteen. He is in another family's house. The head is Joseph Sutleif, twenty five and Pennsylvania born, with his wife Jenny, sixteen and born in New York, and their baby Freddy. Joseph North is entered last, fourteen, born in Pennsylvania, and the census gives him no relationship to the head. Whether he was there as kin or as farm labour the census does not say, but he was not living with a parent that summer.

No North household in the county is known for him to have come from. Apart from Edwin North, a labourer in Damascus in 1860, the enumerations of 1820, 1830, 1850, 1860 and 1870 show one North family in Wayne County, that of Sylvester E. North, first of Canaan and then of Clinton Township. Sylvester was born in Connecticut in 1792 and was in his sixties by the year Joseph was born. In 1850 he kept house with his wife Amanda and three boarders and no children of his own.

The other Norths of the county can each be set aside. Thomas North, whose will was probated at Honesdale in February 1866, left a wife Bridget and sons Thomas, James and Frederick. No Joseph is named in it. John H. North was dead by December 1864, and the guardianship petition for his three small children names Adeliaeth, George W. and Emery P. Joseph was nine that winter, well under the age the petition turns on, and he is not among them.

Edwin North was living in Damascus Township about 1860, thirty years old, a labourer born in New York, with no child in the house at all. Joseph called his own eldest son Edwin, which suggests a kinship of some kind rather than a parentage. In 1880 and again in 1900 he gave both of his parents as born in Pennsylvania, which is not what a son of Edwin would have said.

The only other North buried in Damascus Township is his own daughter.

He married Mary Mosher. Their daughter Margaret E. North, called Maggie, was born on November 14, 1881, or in November 1882 by the 1900 census, and married Bert Gillow. She died on December 26, 1924, nineteen years before her father.

Pennsylvania death certificates have carried both parents' names since 1906, and his, from 1943, is number 102264.

If Joseph North is in your family, start your own tree.

Researched September 2026. Cite: Heirology, "Joseph North (1855-1943)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/joseph-north-1855-1943-4fdcc5.