My great-great-great-great-grandfather Nathaniel
Chapman came west with his half-brother
John Chapman in the 1790s. By the early
1800s they were both in Ohio, Johnny on his way to becoming a legend
and Nathaniel starting to settle down and raise
a family and farm.
Nathaniel Chapman was born in December of 1781 in Longmeadow, Massachusetts
to Captain
Nathaniel Chapman and Lucy Cooley Chapman.
Nathaniel (the second) married Amarilla Stevens on April 14, 1808
in Washington County, Ohio. They had four
children: Isaac, Lucy Lawrence, Eleanore, and Nathaniel (the
third).
Amarilla died in 1860; Nathaniel (the second)
died in 1861.
Nathaniel Chapman (the third) was born February 17, 1810. He moved
to Muskingum County, Ohio
as a young man, settling in Salt Creek Township
around 1832. His mother's brother, John Stevens, laid out the town
of Chandlersville in Salt Creek in 1842. Chandlersville was where
Nathaniel (the third) lived for most of his life. He
married Mary Eliza Frazee on December 14, 1834.
They had at least nine children: John Lewis (1835 - 1835),
Eleanor Frazee (1836 - 1906), Amarilla
S. (1839 - 1906), Lucretia (1841 - 1854), Mary Eliza
(1843 - 1884),
Rebecca (1846 - 1850), Philena Reev.
(1848 - 1850), Nathaniel Cooley (1850 - ????), and Estella Cornelia
(1853 - 1865).
As you can see, only three children lived to adulthood. Mary Eliza
moved with her husband,
Barzillai Robinson, to Hancock County, Illinois
in the 1870s. Amarilla (or Rilla as she was called) married
Robert
Crane on March 21, 1860 and is buried next to
her parents in the Old Chandlersville Cemetery. Eleanor married the
Rev. John Kelly, the local Presbyterian minister,
on November 1, 1859. They had two children: my great-grandmother
(Mary) Lelia, and her sister Edith. Edith
married John Calvin McCullough.
Lelia was born on April 24, 1861 in Chandlersville. She married Frank
Matthew Bell on
December 27, 1888 in Richland County, Ohio.
They had three children: a son William Kelly Bell who died shortly
after birth in 1890, a daughter Eleanor Cretcher Bell, and another son
Harold Kelly Bell. Frank Bell was a well-known
individual in his hometown of Lima, Ohio as both a businessman and an officer
in the National Guard. Harold Bell was a partner in the Cleveland,
Ohio, law firm of Spieth,
Bell, McCurdy and Newell.