Thomas J. Sellens
Thomas J. Sellens was born in England on 12 October 1843, the date cut on his gravestone. The census of 1900 gives October 1842 and says both his parents were English. He came to America as a boy and grew up in Illinois.
He served in the Civil War in Company C of the 7th Illinois Infantry, one of the first regiments Illinois raised in 1861. A carte de visite photograph of him in uniform survives. It shows a young man with a heavy shock of dark hair and a moustache, in a frock coat with three large buttons, and under it someone wrote in ink: "Thomas J. Sellens, Comp. C, 7th Regt." His gravestone carries the same unit: Co. C, 7th Ill. Vol. Inf.
On 7 December 1868 he married Lucinda A. Clark in Kankakee County, Illinois, south of Chicago. She was fifteen. Their first three sons, Thomas W., Horace J. and John R., were born in Illinois between 1868 and 1873. By 1876, when Mary Lucinda was born, the family was in Kansas. They settled in Russell County, on the plains west of Salina, where a Sellens family was farming in the 1870s.
In 1880 the census found Thomas farming in Center Township, Russell County, with Lucinda and five children. That January he had applied for an invalid pension for his war service, and he received it as certificate 728,278. Twelve children were born to the marriage. Benjamin, born in 1886, died at two. In 1900 Thomas was 58 and farming in Lincoln Township, and eleven children still lived at home, from Thomas W., 31, down to Walter, 5. Warren, the eleventh child, was ten.
Thomas died on 15 October 1901, three days after his 58th birthday, and was buried at Cross Plains Cemetery near Russell. His flat gray stone reads FATHER, THOMAS J., OCT. 12, 1843, OCT. 15, 1901, CO. C. 7TH ILL. VOL. INF. Lucinda then applied for a widow's pension on his service, and received it as certificate 660,367.
Memorials name his parents as James Sellens (1811-1874) and Mary Simmons (1818-1906), English immigrants who are also buried in Russell County. No record of the time yet names Thomas as their son.
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Cite: Heirology, "Thomas J. Sellens (1843-1901)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/thomas-j-sellens-1843-1901-62c733.