Ancestors

Wesley Elam

Wesley Elam was born in Virginia about 1825, the son of William and Judy Elam of Scott County. His sister Martha J. Elam died of consumption on 4 April 1864, aged 36, and Wesley reported her death; the register names her parents William and Judy Elam and the informant her brother. On 25 May 1843 he married Margaret Bond, an Indiana-born girl of eighteen, in Scott County, in the southwest corner of the state.

In 1850 he was 25, living in Scott County with Margaret, 24, and four children: Rebecca J., 6, Sarah A., 4, James M., 2, and William M., 1. A son named for him, Wesley Elbert Elam, was born in the 1850s; the Scott County birth register enters a Wesley Elbert, son of Wesley and Margarett, on 6 December 1853. Walter, Victory and Lucy H. came later.

The census takers found him in Scott County again in 1860, as Wesley Elem, 34, and in 1870, as Wesley Elom, 45, in Powell district. On 31 December 1866 his daughter Sarah A. married Amos Reed, a Confederate soldier home from the Union prison at Camp Douglas, and the clerk entered her parents as Wesley and M. Elam.

By 1880 the family had moved north into Walker district of Wise County. That June the census taker found Wesley Elam, 55, a Virginian, with his wife Margreatte and the children Walter, Victory and Lucy H. still at home. Sarah and Amos Reed were by then settled at Freeling, where they raised eight children. Margaret died at Clintwood in 1900 and was buried in the Short Cemetery there. When and where Wesley died is not known.

When Sarah Ann Reed died in 1925, her Virginia death certificate named her parents Wesley Elam and Margret Bond. The certificates of her brothers Walter, in Kentucky, and Elbert Wesley, in Ohio, and of her sister Lucy McFall name the same couple.

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Cite: Heirology, "Wesley Elam (b. 1825)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/wesley-elam-1825-d6c2c1.