Samuel O'Brien
Samuel O'Brien was born in Loudoun County, Virginia, on 2 July 1837. In 1841, when he was four, his parents took him west to Kendall County, Illinois, on the prairie south-west of Chicago. He grew up there and became, in his obituary's words, "a regular attendant of the Congregational church".
On 29 January 1861 he married Martha Virginia Furr, the youngest daughter of Newton and Pleasant Furr, a Virginia family that had come out to LaSalle County, next door to Kendall, in the 1850s. O. Hutchins, a minister, married them. Their first child, Frank Herbert, was born on 14 October 1861, and Mary Isabelle, called Belle, Ida Pleasant and Alice Virginia followed in the 1860s. Ida carried her grandmother Furr's name and Alice her mother's.
In July 1879 Samuel took the family to Kansas and settled at Dorrance, a small station on the Kansas Pacific railroad in the eastern end of Russell County. Martha was 36. Two more children were born there: Mable Annett in 1881 and Thomas H. on 29 November 1883. In November 1883 Martha, signing from Dorrance, gave her brother S. W. Furr of Grundy County, Illinois her power of attorney to collect her share of her parents' estates.
Martha died on 22 December 1899. Their son Frank died at Dorrance on 5 April 1900, aged 38. In 1901 Samuel left Dorrance and moved to the country around Lucas, in the north of the county, and that August his daughter Mable married Arnest Frank Aimes at Dorrance. His last months were spent in Mable's house at Lucas, where he died on 19 November 1915, aged 78.
His obituary said that during his illness of the last year "he expressed to his family and friends his faith in the Almighty God and His divine will and said he was ready to go." Four daughters and three sons had been born to the marriage; two of the sons and his wife had died before him, and four daughters and one son survived him. The notice closed with a verse:
"There is a reaper whose name is Death, And with his sickle keen He reaps the bearded grain at a breath, And the flowers that grow between."
The text for the funeral was Amos 4:12, "Prepare to meet thy God." He was buried on the Sunday afternoon in the Dorrance cemetery beside Martha, Rev. Beltz of the United Brethren church officiating, and "a large number of Dorrance old friends turned out to pay a tribute of respect to him whom they know so well and thought so much of." A rough-hewn monument cut to look like a block of quarried stone carries the family name, O'BRIEN, with small stones for Samuel, Martha and Frank.
Samuel was the eldest child of Peter O'Brien, an Irish-born farmer, and his wife Mary. In 1850 he was thirteen and living in Kendall County with his mother and his brothers and sisters Thomas, Stephen, Peter, Margaret Ann and James. In 1860, at 23, he was still at home on his father's farm in Seward Township. His father had been one of the first settlers there, about 1839. Peter died in 1879, the year Samuel left for Kansas, and Mary in 1885.
Sources
If Samuel O'Brien is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Samuel O'Brien (1837-1915)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/samuel-o-brien-1837-1915-3df01f.