Ancestors

Walter Joseph Terry

Walter Joseph Terry was born on 24 March 1864 at Warren, a hill town in Grafton County, New Hampshire. His father, Ezra D. Terry, had come home the year before from service as a private in the 15th New Hampshire Infantry, a regiment sent to Louisiana for the siege of Port Hudson. His mother, Esther, was born in Canada East, now Quebec. He had an older brother, Edward, and older sisters, one of them Fidelia.

When he died, his obituary said he had come to Kaukauna in 1867, at three, and lived there the rest of his life. Kaukauna is a mill town on the Fox River in Outagamie County, Wisconsin, where the river drops through a series of rapids that powered paper and pulp mills. His father died at Warren in 1869.

Walter went to work in the paper industry. The Thilmany Paper and Pulp company opened at Kaukauna in the 1880s, and he was the sixth man it hired. He stayed with the company until he retired, by then a foreman.

About 1884 he married Elizabeth Robinson, a Kaukauna girl born there in 1866. They raised eleven children: Joseph (1885), Edward (1886), William, Rachel Anna (1891), David, Enough (1895), Walter (1897), Julius (1900), Ezra (1902), Emma (1902) and Leona (1906). He named his son Ezra for his father.

Three of the children died before him. Enough died in 1898, aged two or three. Walter Jr., born on New Year's Day 1896, had been ailing for a year and had two operations for chronic appendicitis. He died after the second, at St. Elizabeth's hospital in Appleton on 7 November 1917, with his family at his bedside. He was nineteen. The funeral went from the Terry home near the lower sulphur springs to the Brokaw Memorial church, and he was buried at Kelso.

Leona, the youngest, married Joseph Kappell and had two sons, Joseph in May 1930 and Eugene in November 1931. Two months after Eugene was born, on 3 January 1932, she died at Appleton, aged 25. Her funeral was held at her parents' house and at the Immanuel Reformed church.

In July 1939 Walter and Elizabeth marked their 55th wedding anniversary, and the Kaukauna Times reported it.

The censuses find Walter at Kaukauna in 1900, 1905, 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940 and 1950, always giving New Hampshire as his birthplace. In 1940 his son Edward was still at home. Elizabeth died on 28 October 1942. In 1950, at 86, he was living with his daughter Emma Humphrey's family. His eldest son, Joseph, died in May 1956, and his obituary named Walter among the survivors.

Walter J. Terry died at eight in the evening on Saturday, 20 December 1958, at his home at 917 Terry Lane, Kaukauna, after a short illness. He was 94. The Rev. Paul Stevens, pastor of the Kaukauna Methodist church, took the funeral at the Fargo Funeral Home, and he was buried beside Elizabeth in Kelso Cemetery. He left two daughters, Mrs. Ed Hahneman and Mrs. Arthur Humphrey, three sons, Edward, David and Ezra, all of Kaukauna, 27 grandchildren, 40 great-grandchildren and three great-great-grandchildren.

If Walter Joseph Terry is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Walter Joseph Terry (1864-1958)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/walter-joseph-terry-1864-1958-3f6ff6.