Family Reunion: Shepard
Going four generations back to find another line
This surname can be found among my wife’s Sixteen great-great-grandparents. We have to go that far back to find the first Shepard -
Harriet Jenevereth Shepard - 18 Dec 1874 - 17 Jan 1923
Hattie was the paternal grandmother of my wife’s maternal grandmother, Merilyn (Martin) Holmquist Rossiter. Hattie was the wife of William Findley Martin (1874–1943) and we talked mainly about their son, Howard, in the Martin post last year:
I am always fascinated by unusual names, and “Jenevereth” is one of the most unusual given names I’ve encountered. Hattie seems to have gotten the name from her maternal grandmother, and I know at least one of Merilyn’s cousins was given the name in honor of Hattie.
This spelling of “Shepard” is also a bit unusual. Still, the records I found for this family consistently used that spelling, and Hattie’s father is buried under a marker with that spelling. My rule of thumb is that if a family paid to set the name in stone, they probably got it right. (Not always, but often enough!)
Hattie’s parents were Sylvanus Sylvester Shepard (1850–1921) and Lucy Gertrude Rounds (1848–1920).1 Sylvanus and Lucy were from near Rochester and Syracuse, New York, respectively. They married around 1869 and moved from Onondaga County, New York, to Council Bluffs, Iowa, between 1875 and 1880. Hattie’s two older siblings, Otis D Shepard (1870–1954) and Lillian M (Shepard) Schmidt (1872–1943), both married and each had two children they raised in Council Bluffs.
Sylvanus Shepard is the youngest son of Anson Nathaniel Shepard (1803-1857) - and his wife, Eunice; but I only recently figured out that there are two men named Anson Shepard with wives named Eunice, and most researchers seem to have them mixed up with each other. Sylvanus was born just after the 1850 Census, so he doesn’t appear in that record but in the New York State Census in 1855. From there, we can see that the family we’re interested in lived in Ogden, Monroe County, New York, and the records suggest that Anson was born around 1803 in Massachusetts, and died between 1855 and 1860.
I’ve been able to piece together a tentative biography for Sylvanus’s parents, but I’m still searching for records to confirm some of my guesses. For now, the editable sources (Find-A-Grave, Geneanet, and some of the index databases) are a bit messed up. What I can tell is that Anson had at least 8 children with three different wives and he is the youngest son of four born to his parents, Nathaniel and Alice Shepard. Our Anson Shepard was born on 10 Jan 1803, in Otis, Berkshire County, Massachusetts.
If you’ve got Shepards in your tree, and they look like they might connect to any of these folks, let me know!
I have not had the cycles to add this branch to WikiTree - but if you’re looking for a chance to practice making WikiTree profiles, I can send you the Ancestry link to any of the folks in this post so you have my sources and notes.