Ancestors

Lois Harrison

Lois Harrison was born on 4 February 1806 at Paris, in Oneida County, New York, daughter of Daniel W. Harrison and his wife Esther. Paris was then a young town on the hills south of Utica, settled from Connecticut a bare fifteen years earlier, and the family did not stay in it.

What happened to her between about 1820 and her marriage is the central fact of her life and the one the family kept telling. She was raised in the household of a circuit-riding preacher, Elder Thomas Jeril, and his wife Betsey Stone. Betsey Stone is sometimes given as her mother, but she was the woman who took her in, not the woman who bore her. Lois settled the question herself, in the way people of that period did, by putting the name into her own family. Her youngest son was christened Franklin Jeril Benedict, and Jeril then ran down the line for four more generations.

The orphaning has a documented window and an uncomfortable alternative reading. The 1820 census puts her father in Oswego County with his household intact, so her mother was alive that August. In July 1822 Esther appears in an Oswego County deed, examined by the officer "separate and apart from her said husband" so that she could release her right of dower in land he was selling. A dower release is the one legal moment in the period when a wife has to be spoken to on her own, and it is very often the only place a married woman's given name survives at all. That deed is the entire documentary existence of Lois's mother.

Her father sold that land and then vanishes from the state. There is no estate file, no administrator's deed, no Harrison household in the town at the 1830 census. His siblings turn up in Ashtabula County, Ohio. So the family story that Lois was orphaned may be a kindness laid over something else: she may simply have been left behind, at sixteen, the year before her wedding, by a father who went west. That reading fits a household with no death record better than a death does.

On 19 January 1823, within months of her father's disappearance, she married Elijah Westcott Benedict of Lebanon in Madison County, and stayed there for the next seventy eight years. He was a deacon, in a family that had held that office in an unbroken habit back to Norwalk and Danbury in the 1600s. They raised eight children. He died in 1881 and she lived on another twenty years, in her son Franklin's household by the time of the 1900 census, which recorded her as born in February 1806 and living still.

She died at her home at South Lebanon at six on a Saturday morning in 1901, in her ninety fifth year, and is buried in Lebanon Village Cemetery. The date given for her death, 31 May 1901, was a Friday; the Cazenovia Republican of 13 June reported it as "last Saturday", which would be 8 June. She was born while Jefferson was president and died in the year McKinley was shot. A photograph of her with Elijah survives.

If Lois Harrison is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Lois Harrison (1806-1901)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/lois-harrison-1806-1901-735896.