Olive Lavinia Schofield
Olive Lavinia Schofield was born on 30 March 1800 at Horton, in Kings County, Nova Scotia. Her parents were Nathan Schofield and Hannah Ward. The Horton town book, printed by Arthur Eaton in his History of Kings County in 1910, sets their children down in one list: "Nathan Schofield m. Hannah Ward. Children: Ann, b. March 30, 1796; John, b. Dec. 17, 1798; Aaron, b. Jan. 3, 1799; Olive, b. March 30, 1800; Elisha, b. July 17, 1802; William, b. Oct. 15, 1804; Pheby, b. Jan. 12, 1807; Sarah, b. March 19, 1809; Rebecca, b. April 4, 1811; Mary, b. Jan. 1, 1813; Hannah Susan, b. April 27, 1815; Elijah, b. Jan. 5, 1817; William, b. April 30, 1816." She was the fourth of thirteen.
A town book was the township's own record of births, marriages and deaths, kept by the town clerk. In Horton the clerks often entered a family all at once, years after some of the births, and the printed list shows the signs of it. Two children are entered three weeks apart in 1798 and 1799, two are named William, and the second William is dated a year after Hannah Susan. Olive's own date sits clear of all that.
Her mother was a daughter of William and Elizabeth Ward of Beech Hill, a Yorkshire couple who came out in the ship Two Friends in 1774. That made Olive a niece of Susannah Ward, the first wife of Jacob Britain Dodge. Susannah died on 14 March 1819, in the twenty-fourth year of her age. She left Jacob with two small daughters, Sarah Alice, not yet five, and Frances Susan, not yet three.
Olive married Jacob after that, some time between the spring of 1819 and late in 1820. The record of the marriage is not known; Horton or Cornwallis is the likeliest place. She was nineteen or twenty, and the two little girls she took on were her own first cousins. Her first child, Eunice, was born on 20 December 1820. George Gardiner, who went by Gardner, followed on 27 September 1822. Her memorial names Hiram, Paulina, Rachel Maria, Jacob Nelson and George Manley among the children who came after, without their dates.
Gardner's birth is sometimes said to be entered in the Horton book under Susannah's name. Susannah's gravestone settles it: she had been dead three and a half years when he was born. Nova Scotia township clerks often wrote a man's children in one run under the heading of his first marriage, which would explain the entry. Jacob's own memorial says it plainly: "Eunice and George Gardner probably belong to Olivia Schofield Dodge."
In the 1840s the Dodges left the Minas Basin for Wisconsin as a family group, brothers and grown children together. In 1850 the census found Jacob at Ridgeway, in Iowa County, with his wife entered as Olivia Lavinia. Ridgeway and Arena are neighbouring towns. Jacob died at Arena in 1860. Olive lived on there for sixteen years and died at Arena on 8 December 1876, at seventy-six. She is buried in Arena Cemetery under a round-topped marble tablet carved with an open book. Most of its lettering has worn away; the date of death and the words "aged 76 yrs 8 mos" can still be made out.
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Cite: Heirology, "Olive Lavinia Schofield (1800-1876)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/olive-lavinia-schofield-1800-1876-347808.