Manlove Origins, Part 8 - Be Fruitful and Fill the Land

William and Jonathon’s children did their part to populate Illinois, Wisconsin and Kansas, but it fell to the offspring of George Manlove to fill the new State of Indiana. George and Rachel (Dunning) had five kids. The oldest, Hannah, married Edward Trotter, and they moved to DeKalb County, Missouri sometime after 1825 - both appeared in the 1850 US Census. George and Rachel's remaining four children were boys and they all settled in the Hoosier State.

William Manlove, the oldest son, first landed in Preble County, Ohio, and then moved on to Fayette County Indiana - probably about 1814. A local history of Fayette County stated that.. “William and Prudence (Cook) Manlove, natives of South Carolina, who, with their two children, took up their residence in what is now Posey township, about 1812. After a short residence …William went to Cincinnati, with a team, for supplies, and while there contracted the cholera, from which he died on the way home. His widow and six children were thus left almost destitute in a new and wild country, but the former managed to keep her family together.” The couple had six kids at William’s death in 1819 - two daughters and four sons.

John probably got to Indiana about the same time as his brother William - maybe a year before. He settled in Henry County and lived to a ripe old age of 96. His wife, Jane Wheeler, and he produced five boys and two girls. They each had a gaggle of their own, and all seemed to have stayed in Henry County.

George W. Manlove was my Third Great Grandfather (G-G-G-Grandfather). He died in 1832 while driving hogs to market in Cincinnati. He had sired eight children (six boys) at his death at 45 years of age. His two eldest sons, John and William, being 19 and 17 years of age were old enough to keep the farm going. His wife, Mary Caldwell lived on the place until her death at 83 years in 1878.

Mark, the youngest, was probably the last to arrive in Indiana. He was in Ohio for more than ten years, but eventually settled in Tippecanoe County by 1840 with his wife (Jane Hodgson) and their seven children (5 boys). It’s a curious coincident that he should have settled in the area in which Tecumseh established Prophetstown, and where the Battle of Tippecanoe was fought in 1811.

I figure nearly 30 grandchildren of George Manlove were seeded across several counties of Indiana - no wonder I had so much trouble in unraveling my line of descent when I first began tracing my ancestors. It seemed like several counties had nothing but Manloves.
GO TO: Part 9

The Will of Mark Manlove, September 1666

Somerset County, Maryland

In the name of God, Amen. I Mark Manlove of Pocomoke in the County of Somerset in the Province of Maryland, Planter, being weak in body but of good memory, blessed be God, do make this my last will & testament. My soul I commit to God who gave it and my body to be buried according as my executors think fit. As for my outward estate, my debts being first paid, I give and bequeath at followeth: first, to my loving wife Elizabeth and to the children I have lawfully begotten of her and to their heirs forever, five hundred acres of land lying upon the north side of Pocomoke River, beginning at a little branch on the south side of my new dwelling house, being at my first bounder and so running northerly up the river. All the rest of my land I give and bequeath to my sons Mark, William, and Christopher and to their heirs forever to be equally divided as they come of age, each child to have his portion. To Hannah Gilley, Richard Hackworth, and to his next son born, being three of my grandchildren, each of them a cow calf. I bequeath unto my sons John and Thomas one hundred pounds of tobacco, a piece.. The rest of my estate, after my debts are paid, besides the legacies already given and bequeathed, I give one third to my wife and two thirds to be equally divided unto my sons Mark, William, Christopher, George, and Luke and to my daughters Hannah, Abia, and Persey Manlove, and I do appoint my wife Eliz and my son in law Richard Hackworth to be the executors of my last will and testament, and William Stevens Horsey and Wm. Jarnes Meedon overseers of the sane, and this I publish and declare to be my last will and testament the 14tth day of September anno Domini 1666.


Mark Manlove made his mark. MM


Witnesses: William Green --- Will.


*********************************************

Mark Manlove's two Families

Mark Manlove___husband____b.1620 England____d.1666 MD

Hannah Williams___wife____b.1617or1625 Eng___d.1658 VA

John Manlove___son___b.1639 England____d.1694 MD

Mary Manlove__daughter_b.1641 England____d.1666 MD

Christopher Manlove_son__b.1642 England____d.1680 MD

Ann Manlove__daughter__b. 1645 England___n.d.

Thomas Manlove__son__b.1648 England___d.1709 DE

Hannah Manlove__daughter__b.1649 Eng or CT__d.1675 MD

Abijah Abia Manlove_daughter_ b.1653 MA or VA___n.d.

William Manlove__son__b.1655 VA or MD___d.1694 DE

Elizabeth Roberts__wife__ b.1632 England_______n.d.

George Manlove__son___b.1660 MD___________n.d.

Persey Manlove__daughter__b.1663 MD_____n.d.

Luke Manlove__son ___b.1666 MD__________ n.d.

Am=America, MA=Massachusetts, VA=Virginia,

MD=Maryland, DE=Delaware, CT=Connecticut

GO TO: Part 2

Manlove Origins, Part 1 - The Patriarch

My paternal grandmother‘s maiden name was Manlove. Twelve generations ago a guy named Mark Manlove got off a boat in America. I know only a few facts about Mark Manlove, enough to draw the sketchiest outline of his life. He was born in the English county of Shropshire in the vicinity of the villages of Wem and Aston around 1620. He married Hannah Williams, also of Shropshire, in 1637. I don’t know what he looked like, how he made a living, or when and why he came to America.

I hadn’t planned to put much time on the Manlove patriarch in America, but got obsessed with the family - a bit of an irony as Mark, Hannah and family have been dead and forgotten for more than three hundred years. The obsession started when I discovered Mark Manlove’s Last Will and Testament on a USGenWeb site. That web site gave names to his children, his son-in-laws, witnesses, etc. I had scanned hundreds of “Public Family Trees” in Ancestry.com trying to make sense of conflicting entries, but his Last Will made it possible to hazard some educated guesses.

I think Mark and Hannah probably arrived in the Chesapeake Bay area in about 1650. There is some evidence the family landed in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and spent some time in Stamford, Connecticut, before moving on to the lower Eastern Shore of present day Northampton County, Virginia (#1 on map).
The couple had eight or nine children - five sons and four daughters, but two of the daughters may be the same person. Their first child, John, was born in England, as were several others. The public trees differed as to where the children were born, most favored England on the older ones, but the youngest two were likely born in America. It seems possible that Mark and Hannah, along with their several children, left England in the late 1640’s to sail for the New World. I’ve always thought that immigrants in those days were single men, either adventurers or indentured poor. Mark Manlove must have been a man of some means to be able to bring his family over.

The English Civil War was raging through the 1640’s. Shropshire seems to have been a mix of loyalties between Royalist and Parliamentarians, but Wem/Aston favored the latter. The Royalists lost the war, and King Charles I lost his head in 1649. I can’t help to wonder if Mark Manlove’s migration to America was related to the Civil War. Was he a Royalist? I notice many of his associates on the Eastern Shore were also from Shropshire. Did they come over in the same boat? Why so many in one place?

Mark’s wife, Hannah, died in 1658 in Northampton County, Virginia. Most public trees put her age at 28 years, but she might have been as old as 37 - too young at either age. Mark Manlove remarried the year after Hannah’s death. His new wife, Elizabeth Roberts (also from Shropshire), had two sons and a daughter by him.

Somerset County, Maryland was opened for settlement in 1661 and Mark Manlove moved near Pocomoke (#2 on map), but died five years later at 46 years. Mark left the “new” house and five hundred acres to Elizabeth and her three children, and an unspecified amount to his three youngest sons by Hannah.

Elizabeth remarried a few months later to William Greene, who happened to be the witness to Mark’s Last Will and Testament. Many of Mark’s 11 (or 12) children lived their lives around Pocomoke, but two of them, Thomas and William, moved about 90 miles north into Delaware.
GO TO: The Will of Mark Manlove\
GO TO: Part 2

Origins

I never thought about where I came from while I was growing up. I lived in a cozy microcosm, unconcerned with why I happen to be born in Kokomo, Indiana, or how my parents got there, or where they might have come from.

My world had little definition. We were on the East Coast for a while during World War II, and I remember taking rides in our 1936 Ford, but I was too young to know our whereabouts or the why of things. I looked out the car window at the passing scenery and accepted it with the ignorance and innocence of youth.

I have difficulty distinguishing between things I remember and remembering things I was told. Do I remember the 1936 Ford or do I remember being told about it? For a while my world was a street in Kokomo, but that eventually expanded to encompass towns to the south, family reunions, graveyards on Memorial Days, and a ghost town in Kentucky. I met people and heard stories of others who I‘d never met - people I discovered to be relatives - relatives with surnames different from my own - Frank, Jacobs, Manlove, and Muir. How could they all be related to me? The jumble of names, places, and stories made no sense - fit no pattern.

I was born in 1939 and things were very different from what they have become. The United States counted 132 million people - half of today’s population. Transportation was not so dynamic as now - radio was popular, but there was no television. Computers and the Internet were inconceivable. Many of the families in the Midwest had been there for generations, and some of mine were among the original settlers.

Most of my ancestors came into the Kentucky-Indiana-Ohio region in the early 1800’s - some before that. They came over roads no wider than narrow paths through a wilderness of old growth forest with trees reaching five to six feet in diameter.

Natives, “Indians”, as the European settlers mistakenly called them, were hostile. A book by Alan Eckert does a great job of describing those early days. The Friontiersman is a well documented chronicle depicting the adventures of Simon Kenton, Daniel Boone, and other early settlers into Kentucky. Eckert tells of the Shawnees who lived north of the Ohio River, of their hunting grounds in Kentucky, and the resulting conflict between them and the encroaching settlers.

I got interested in genealogy later in life. By then many people I would liked to have talked to were long dead. My research added more names to my ancestry list. Five generations back and a person can count sixteen Great-Great-Grandparents - sixteen surnames. I know fourteen of them. The number of ancestral names doubles with each succeeding generation - from 16 to 32, 64, 128... etc. There are over two thousand surnames possible in the twelfth generation. That reaches back in time to when the Pilgrims stepped into America by way of Plymouth Rock. I have traced a few back to colonial times, but am not yet able to brag about any being on the Mayflower.

But my interest is not in discovering Mayflower relatives or famous ancestors. It is in putting a personal face on history; on fitting those historical events and trends I studied in school into my own family history. My quest is to follow the threads of those disparate people, ancestors of mine, as they wove the fabric of my background. I hope to retrace the random paths they traveled which eventually converged to produce me.