Sepia Saturday: A Clayton Family Portrait

The stern looking patriarch here is Daniel Curtis Clayton,

seated next to his wife Cyrene Moore Clayton.

They are my great-great-grandparents.

The young woman beside Daniel is his youngest daughter,

Sarah Emoline "Emmy" Clayton. She is one of my great-grandmothers.

Standing behind Sarah is her twin, Thomas Perry Clayton.

Her sister Rosalia Clayton, wife of Charles Augustus Ruark,

 is next to her mother.

William Curtis (Billy) Clayton, the eldest surviving son,

is standing behind Rosalia and Allen Sylvester Clayton

is standing in the center, hand on his father's shoulder.
Don't the boys have impressive moustaches?

I'd guess this portrait was taken in the 1890s,

since Emmy and her twin look like they're in their 20s

and they were born in 1869. Daniel died in 1902
so that sets an outer limit for the photograph.

Billy Clayton was just a newborn when his parents
hitched the team to a wagon and set off for the West.
Daniel and Cyrene were party of a wagon train
that included her parents and siblings.

 I've often wondered what longing

was strong enough to beckon them to leave
 their comfortable homes

in Iowa and travel in hostile country
 where "trouble with the Indians" and outbreaks of disease
 could end lives in the blink of an eye.

Some descendants say that William Moore, Cyrene's father,
was from a Quaker family and felt the winds of war blowing.
 William and Priscilla Ayers Moore

(she an Episcopalian whose family thought she'd married "down")

had sons who would have been of an age to be conscripted

into military service for the Union, so perhaps the move

was calculated to remove their sons from harm's way.

The most frequent motive for the arduous trip west, however,
was the promise of free land via the Homestead Act.

For whatever reasons

 William and Priscilla, Cyrene and Daniel,

and the rest of the family joined the westward movement.

But can you imagine

finally arriving at your destination

in the wild, wild West

in mid-September with winter just around the corner

and having to build a place to live?

But thanks to William and Priscilla Moore,
I can claim that I am a sixth-generation Washingtonian.

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For more Sepia Saturday fun,

click HERE.