Family Reunion: Witter
A Quick Overview of my work under this surname
Witter
This is the line of my paternal grandmother, Nancy G (Witter) Callin. I’ve been able to follow her paternal line back to Abraham Witter (1786-1882) with reasonable confidence. As it happens, renowned scholar and genealogist Elizabeth Shown Mills posted her research on Abraham and his (possible) family in her Historic Pathways publication.
Abraham’s wife was Catherine Piper (1805-1888), and I will have a lot of work to do to untangle her family’s story from the information already on the web. If you look at the WikiTree profiles for her parents and grandparents, you will see that there is very little evidence to support their relationships, and there are a lot of records for people with similar names in Pennsylvania for that time period that need to be examined.
Taylor Township, Fulton County, Pennsylvania
The children of Abraham and Catherine Witter grew up in this township, and some of them stayed and raised their own families here. Their son, Adam Witter (my 3x-great grandfather) married Hannah Jane Tice (1832–1919) around 1852, and they had several children in Fulton County before moving to Kansas around the time of the Civil War.
The Tice/Theiss family, like the Pipers, appear to have been a family that came to Pennsylvania from Germany; and like the Pipers, many other researchers have put information on the web that needs to be examined more carefully.
Kansas
My 2x-great grandfather, Abraham Howard Witter (1859-1918), was born in Pennsylvania, but his family settled in Pottawatomie County, Kansas, when he was a boy. Abe married Nancy Ellen "Ella" Shriver on 11 Feb 1885 and they lived in Belvue Township, raising seven children in Wamego and in St Marys.
The children of Abe and Ella, and the children of Abe’s siblings, did not stay in Kansas and have a lot of children of their own. About half of them had no children of their own, and many of them re-settled in other places: Idaho, Texas, California, Colorado, and Arizona.
Arizona
Growing up, I heard about how my great-grandmother’s family came to Arizona from Kansas in a covered wagon. Her name was Hannah Merle Huff (1889–1984), and she married another former Kansas resident, Howard Ray "Dick" Witter (1890–1963), the middle child of Abe and Ella Witter.
If you click the links in these posts, you will find yourself on WikiTree, looking at the profiles of those individuals. I’ve done my best to develop those profiles, add sources, and connect them to existing profiles made by other researchers. In each generation, I’ve attempted to find or build a full profile for each ancestor’s parents and siblings - but as you can imagine, there is a lot of work left to do.
Be sure to comment here, or on the WikiTree profiles, if you see something interesting. Questions, suggestions, and corrections are always welcome (especially if you have evidence I’m missing).
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