Meri's Musings

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 ...

It's another Sepia Saturday, so I'd like to introduce to you Daniel Clayton and his wife Cyrene Moore Clayton. Daniel, son of John and Elizabeth (Elly) Clayton, was born October 14, 1824 in Richland County, Ohio. He was probably the youngest in a family of ten children, though the birth order is a bit hard to pin down because census records were not particularly detailed during his childhood and adolescence. It was only in 1850 that individual members of a household were named in a census and their ages given. That having been said, we do know that Daniel married a local girl, Mary Craig, when he was 21. They married March 10,1846 in Richland County, Ohio and Mary Craig Clayton died  on December 17, 1846, in Allen County, Indiana. Given that her death came just over nine months after the marriage, I'm guessing that she died in childbirth, though I don't know for sure. Daniel's father John died a few months after his daughter-in-law. About two...