Pierre Jean Baptiste Chevalier
Pierre Jean Baptiste Chevalier, called Peter in America, was born at five in the morning on 10 May 1838 at Perrenot, a hamlet of Grandvelle in the Haute-Saône, in eastern France. He was born in the house of his mother's mother. His father, Jean François Chevalier, was nineteen and held a little land at Neuvelle-lès-la-Charité nearby. His mother, Jeanne Françoise Simon, was eighteen. They had married at Grandvelle the year before. The day after the birth his father carried him to the mayor and named him Pierre Jean Baptiste, the Pierre for his mother's dead father, Pierre Simon.
His mother died at Neuvelle in February 1847, when he was eight. A brother and a sister had died as babies in 1843, and another brother, Justin Laurent, died in 1851. His father married again in 1850, to Mélanie Rollot. In April 1854 his father took out a passport for the United States by way of New York, for himself and one son under age. Peter, then fifteen, was very probably that son, and his half-brother Adolphe came out later with his stepmother. The family was in Kansas by 1856 or 1857, and Peter was then a young man, as a Lawrence newspaper later remembered.
In August 1860 he was 23 and farming in Delaware Township, Leavenworth County, in the Kansas Territory. His wife Mary, also 23, had been born in Indiana. A laborer from Pennsylvania named John Thompson lived with them. The next house belonged to his father, then 43, with Malvina, their three children born in France and a baby born in Kansas. Delaware Township took its name from the Delaware Indian reserve, which covered that part of Leavenworth County until the tribe sold it and moved to the Cherokee Nation in the late 1860s.
A family account says Peter married Mary in 1859 at Delaware. Their five children were all born in Kansas: Francis about 1862, Albert on 24 January 1864, Ernest about 1866, Julia in June 1868 and Martha, called Mattie, on 24 September 1870. By 1864 the family had moved southwest to Melvern, in Osage County, and the younger children were born there. His father meanwhile settled in Douglas County, by Blue Mound southeast of Lawrence. On 29 June 1870 the census taker found Peter farming in Agency Township, Osage County, with land worth 1,400 dollars and 175 dollars in other property. He wrote Peter and Mary both as 25, though Peter was 32, and listed Francis, Albert, Ernest and Julia at home.
In June 1880 the family was farming at Melvern. Peter was 43 and Mary 42, and all five children were at home. The three boys, Francis, Albert and Ernest, were working the farm with him. The Kansas census of March 1885 found the household together again in Osage County.
In June 1891 his father was killed by a train at Lawrence. The Lawrence Daily Journal's account of the accident named "a son Peter, who now lives in Osage County," and when the estate was probated that July Peter was named first among the heirs.
Peter served as a justice of the peace in Osage County in the 1880s. From July 1885 he was guardian of a neighbor, Burrell White, "a person of unsound mind", and from August 1886 the administrator of White's estate. In August 1888 he swore in the appraisers of that estate as justice of the peace. The district court dismissed his suits as administrator against members of the White family in June 1888.
In June 1893 his son Ernest, just appointed postmaster at Ingalls in Payne County, was shot dead by Lige Samples, the husband of his daughter Julia. A coroner's jury called the killing "wilful and felonious", and Samples was convicted of manslaughter in 1894 and sentenced to four years.
Peter died in Payne County by the summer of 1900. He left a will, and the probate court at Stillwater held his estate. On 21 August 1900 the executor, written in the court's notice as Alfred B. Chevalier, rendered his account, and the estate was set for final settlement and distribution on 17 September 1900. The executor was very probably his son Albert B. Chevalier, who farmed near Ingalls. A family tree compiled later gives his death as 9 June 1899 at Ingalls; the date is otherwise unknown.
The marriage ended in the same years, and the family account says Peter and Mary divorced. In March 1895 Peter, 55 by the census, was living without them in Osage County. Mary had gone south to Payne County in the Oklahoma Territory, where she married again that September, and Albert and Mattie had settled near her.
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Cite: Heirology, "Pierre Jean Baptiste Chevalier (b. 1838)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/pierre-jean-baptiste-chevalier-1838-f29716.