Archibald Hollister, born in Connecticut, was a veteran of the Revolutionary War. A son, Algernon Sydney (A.S. as he was popularly referred to), was born January 28, 1796, in Vermont. Anna Teall, born in Vermont in 1800, married A.S., an Episcopal minister.
1787 saw the enactment of legislation by the new U. S. government, which formed the Northwest Territory. (States of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois and Wisconsin.) By 1805 the Territory of Michigan was separated from the Northwest Territory as Ohio, Indiana and Illinois had been at earlier dates. When General Lewis Cass became governor of the Michigan […]
Of the seven children of Godfrey and Sophia Westphall, Gustav was the youngest and the only one born in the U.S. His next oldest brother, Lewis H. (b. 1845), was born on the Atlantic Ocean during the long crossing from their ancestral home in Germany.
Groups of settlers united as they headed west to Michigan from New York in the 1830s; many of them long time friends. (Not unlike the wagon trains which went West a few years later.) Arriving in Brighton Township they found no living quarters, merely a wilderness. Some land was level, some wet, much rolling, almost […]
As early as 1837, German Lutherans had settled in southeastern Livingston County. By 1842, they began meeting for public worship services, under the leadership of the pioneer Lutheran missionary in eastern Michigan, the Rev. Frederick Schmidt (born Sept. 6, 1807, in Wuertemberg, Germany; died August 30, 1883 at Ann Arbor).
Eldad Spencer Field, with brother-in-law Norton Wait, came to Michigan within ten years of the completion of the Erie Canal. (The convenient and economical route over the Appalachian Mountains in New York opened the way for settlers to pioneer in Michigan Territory. Early Livingston County census records indicate a family of Fields in each township.)
When husband William Henry died at 48 in 1835, it may be assumed his mercantile business in Hamburg, Germany, was sold. Perhaps the proceeds enabled Henrietta to bring her family to America. She and the children, William H. (21), Emma (15), Edward G. (11) and Charles E. (8) spent 10 weeks crossing the briney deep.
Of the early settlers to the Brighton Area, many were of a moral caliber, which assumed a responsibility to the community and the young state. Among them was John Gilluly, son of Irish-born parents, Thomas and Ann. John was born in Massachusetts. Research indicates John taught in the Brighton School District in 1845, 46,57, 59. […]
In 1907, Henry Fitch was one of the some 800 former residents of Brighton to return from all points of the compass to attend a Home Coming celebration. Henry had been away for more than 50 years, and at a mass meeting at the old “Opera House” (today, Stouts Bar on Grand River) reminisced, in […]
Henrys father, Jacob, came to the U.S. in 1832, with brothers Phillip and Charles and sister, Mary Magdelene as very young children. Their parents, Charles C. and Maria Catherine Nadig came by sailing vessel, an ordeal of which our imagination is incapable. In the early 1830s German immigrants constituted a major portion of the stream […]
