William Henry Shell
William Henry Shell was born on 6 August 1861 at Van Wert, in north-west Ohio, by his memorial. The census of 1900 gives August 1862, Ohio.
He was the elder of two sons of Henry Shell, a Van Wert County blacksmith, and his second wife, Mahala Jane, a widow from Bedford County, Pennsylvania, who had married in 1859. His brother Ira B. was born in August 1863. Their father died in June 1868, when William was six.
By 1880 he was in Kansas with his mother. That year the census found him at eighteen, a laborer, in Center Township, Russell County. He was living in the household of John Gambol, 26, his mother's third husband, and Mahala J., with his brother Ira, 16. The census entered both of William's parents as born in Pennsylvania. In 1910 he gave his father's birthplace as Germany and his mother's as Pennsylvania.
In 1885 he married Nancy Elizabeth Enlow, called Nicey, an Indiana girl about four years younger. Their children were born in Kansas over the next fifteen years: Jasper, William L., Roy Robert, Walter Joseph, Chester Henry, Anna B., Laura E. and Lovel. In 1900 the family was at Bunker Hill, in the south-east corner of Russell County, with seven children at home, Laura among them at two.
By 1910 they had moved south to Hoisington, a Missouri Pacific railroad town in Barton County. The census found William and Nancy there with Jasper E., 21, Walter J., 20, William L., 19, Chester H., 18, Roy R., 15, Anna B., 14, and Laura E., 12. Nancy died in 1915. William lived on at Hoisington, where in 1916 his daughter Laura married Warren Sherman Sellens of Russell County. He died on 27 March 1922 and is buried in Hoisington Cemetery.
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Cite: Heirology, "William Henry Shell (1861-1922)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/william-henry-shell-1861-1922-8b0b13.