Today, April 26, is the birthday anniversary of two members of the Green family; Benjamin, born 1855, and his granddaughter Nancy, born 1816.

Benjamin is the progenitor of the Dayton branch of the Green family. He was born in New Jersey in 1755. During the Revolutionary War, he served in the Virginia militia from Loudoun County on three separate occasions. He entered the service about the last of June 1777 as a volunteer and marched to a place then called Bellhaven in the State of Virginia , now Alexandria in the District of Columbia and left the service about the last of August at the expiration of his two months service and returned home.

In September 1778 he was drafted into the service and served two months at Leesburg in Virginia guarding prisoners and again in the month of August 1781 he was drafted into the service and marched to the siege of Cornwallis, was at the taking of Cornwallis, and marched as a guard to prisoners to Nolens ferry on the Potomac river. There he was discharged in October 1781, having served two months in his last tour.

After the war he moved his family, first to western Maryland and then to Ohio. He was in Ohio by 1799, settling near Marietta for a year and then moving up to settle on the Licking river, near what is now Newark, Ohio. It was from this area that his son John in 1829 organized the expedition to Illinois that resulted in the settlement of Dayton. Benjamin’s wife, Catherine, died in 1821 and Benjamin moved to Moscow, Licking County, to live with his son Daniel. Benjamin remarried in 1823 to Mrs. Martha (Rees) Lewis. He died in 1833, at age 78. Both he and Catherine are buried in the Beard-Green Cemetery in the Dawes Arboretum near Newark, Ohio.

Nancy was born in 1816 in Ohio, the daughter of Benjamin’s son John and his wife, Barbara Grove. She was 13 when John brought his family to La Salle County, Illinois in 1829. She married Joseph Albert Dunavan on January 26, 1834, and they raised a family of twelve, only two of whom died as children. In 1889 they left Illinois to live in Missouri, near some of their children. Joseph died in 1892 and Nancy in 1905. They are both buried in the Highland Cemetery in Hamilton, Missouri.

A search for Nancy Green on this web site will turn up much more information.

          

This is my great-aunt, Maud Virginia Green. She was born in Dayton September 4, 1866, the daughter of Isaac and Mary Jane (Trumbo) Green. She went to the Dayton school, where she earned high marks in grammar and history. As you can see, she was never absent or tardy, but her deportment evidently needed improving. Ada Green, her teacher, was her first cousin.

She lived at home with her grandparents, John and Barbara Green, her parents, Isaac and Jennie (Mary Jane was called Jennie) and her younger brothers and sisters, Lyle, Ralph, Grace, and Barbara.

As the youngest son, Isaac remained at home, working the family farm with his father. Isaac married Jennie September 6, 1865 and Maud was born a year later.  She was eight when her grandfather died and 19 when her grandmother died. She heard many stories of the early days of Dayton’s settlement from her grandmother.  I have a handwritten sheet on which she wrote down Barbara’s recollections of the Black Hawk war. Maud was interested in Dayton’s history from an early age, as so much of it was the history of her own family. It is because she collected so much information on Dayton’s early days that this web site exists. She was also related to most of the families in Dayton and Rutland. I can remember drawing family charts for her on the back of rolls of wallpaper. She passed her interest and information on early Dayton to other family members and years later i was able to draw on all this collected information.

In 1904 her father died and her brother, Lyle, took over the farm. Maud remained at home, keeping house for her mother and brother. When Lyle married in 1908, Maud and her mother moved to Ottawa. After her mother’s death, Maud returned to Dayton to keep house for her brother. After Lyle’s death, Ralph and his family moved to the family home and Maud continued to live there until her death in 1952.

So I knew her for the first thirteen years of my life, saw her nearly every day, and have many memories of her. That’s why this web site exists.