Lydia Douglass Sibbald Line
It has been so much fun learning about the Lydia and John Sibbald family and their descendants. But this family dealt me a surprise!
I had been telling people that most of the Douglass families lived in the northern states of the U.S. or in Canada and gradually made their way west. But in trying to find more descendants of the Sibbald family from Oxford County, Ontario, I stumbled across a whole group who left West Oxford and settled in Kansas! Right smack dab in the middle of the mid-west. You just never know what you will find when you start climbing around in that family tree!
When John Sibbald’s will left bequests to the children of his deceased daughter, Mary French, and also to his granddaughter, Nellie French, wife of Benjamin French, I posited that there had to be some connection to the David French who lived next door to the Sibbalds.
The thing that bothered me first was Nellie French. I knew of no granddaughter named Nellie. Was she a child of Thomas who disappeared after his wife died? I kept looking at the ages of the Sibbald children and thought she might be the child of Jannett, but the 1861 census listed no child in Jannett’s household named Nellie. Since John did not write his will until 1883, I searched the LDS copy of the 1880 census, hoping that Mary was still alive then. And there she was, married to Benjamin French! In Kansas!
To make a long story short, David French’s brother, Sam, lived the other side of David and had a large family. In 1868, he moved to Illinois with all of his family except sons Ben and Nick. Then between 1870 when Ben moved to Kansas and 1874 when Nick moved to Kansas, the whole family moved from Illinois and settled on land along Buffalo Creek, claiming between them 840 acres of good Kansas wheat land. Sam’s wife’s sister’s family joined them; his married children came along. They had a whole colony of family members in Cloud County, Kansas, courtesy of the Homestead Act, and Ben’s insistence on claiming the “free land” the U.S. government was touting. These details came from a manuscript in the Cloud County library, written by Nick’s daughter, Gail French Peterson.
Mary Sibbald French died in December 1880, and her niece, Nellie, (neé Helen) married Ben as his second wife. There is a little more to the story. In 1868 Jannett, Nellie’s mother, had married Nick French when he followed his father to Illinois; six months later she died. Nellie, who had gone with them to Illinois, returned to live with her grandparents, John and Lydia, where she had lived ever since her own father died. When Mary French died, Nellie must have gone to help Ben with his young family and there found a new home for herself. It was not uncommon for men to marry a relative of their deceased wife.
The French men made good money from their wheat land. They bought more land. The railroad provided a ready route to market. They had to put up with the dry years; their wheat production was dependent on the amount of rainfall they got. But they were good managers and did well. By 1920, Ben was President of the Bank and his oldest son, Bert, owned the Opera House in Jamestown, KS. Ben Jr. had taken over the home farm. Ben’s youngest son, Ora, was in banking too. Nick had acquired hundreds of acres of land.
They were true pioneers. When Ben moved to KS in 1870, the Indians were still raiding sporadically in the western part of the state. The buffalo hunters were slaughtering the buffalo in western Kansas in such quantities that by 1874, they were all but gone. The Texas cattlemen were driving their huge herds to the railhead at Abilene, only 50 miles south of them. Their daily news-papers reported on activities of Wyatt Earp and Billy the Kid and the violence when the drovers hit town or the Indians went on a rampage.
They planted trees for windbreaks and learned to survive in a climate different from any they had known. The Fairview cemetery, on a knoll on Nick’s original farm, bears testimony that they came, and they stayed. Several generations did. ##
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1880 census, Cloud County, Kansas
French, Benj, 37, b. Canada, farmer
French, Mary, 35, wf, b. Canada, keeping house
French, Ethelbert, 15, son, b. Canada, help on farm
French, Mary, 9, dau, b. Kansas
French, Lena, 5, dau, b. Kansas
French, Benny, 4, son, b. Kansas
French, Ora, 6 mos., son, b. Kansas