Isaac Chapman Bible - A Legacy From His Mother

A treasured family Bible made its way from Massachusetts to Ohio nearly two centuries ago. Clues found within its pages have revealed the elusive missing links that connect my Ohio Chapman lineage back to colonial New England.

The Wagners of Lorain County, Ohio were surprised to find the very old Bible, dating back to the early 1800s, in the attic of a family property. The inscription identifies the Bible's owner as Isaac Chapman, Jr., "a legacy from his mother" dated 1807. The Wagners descended from the Wheelers and presumably the Chapmans who settled in north central Ohio during the 1830s.

I reached out to Diane Wagner, a fellow genealogy enthusiast, who had uploaded the Bible's contents to an ancestry research website in 2017. She responded, "I uploaded the information from the Chapman family Bible to Ancestry (ancestry.com) in the hopes that it would help someone with their family tree, so I was really happy to get your message." Diane explained that the Bible was discovered by family members in the early 1980s. Her father had four aunts, Wheeler sisters, who lived together for much of their adult lives in the house in Lorain. Nobody could recall any stories from the Wheeler sisters about the Bible's existence, and not until  after they had all passed away was the Bible discovered.

My research of the Chapman line had been corroborated with documentation only as far back as Buell D. Chapman, born about 1815, my fourth great grandfather. He married Fannie Northrop in Medina County, Ohio in 1841. I descended from their son Edwin Chapman, a veteran of the Civil War. I had speculated about Buell's parentage without any paper trail until I read about the Bible's discovery.

A printed page in the Bible records Chapman family names and dates of birth. Isaac Chapman, the beneficiary of the Bible, is my fifth great grandfather and was born in 1767. His father was Isaac Chapman Sr., born in Groton, Connecticut in 1740, and his mother, Mary (Bradford) Chapman was born in Plymouth, Massachusetts in 1742. Mary was a direct descendent (great-great granddaughter) of William Bradford who led a group of Puritans to America on the Mayflower in 1620 and served as Governor of the Plymouth Colony over the course of several decades.

William Bradford, my 10th great grandfather

All of Isaac and Mary's children were born in Groton, Connecticut, just across the Thames River from New London, where their Chapman ancestors had established roots more than a century earlier. Isaac and Mary acquired land northwest of Springfield, Massachusetts near Montgomery, and the family relocated there during the 1780s. All of their children married in Montgomery, four of them into the Avery family, and raised their children there. Some remained in Montgomery for the rest of their lives. Others joined the great migration of New Englanders to Ohio in the decades following the war of 1812.

Printed page from Chapman Bible

Isaac Jr. married Thankful Hoadley in 1791. In Isaac's Bible, the births of Isaac and Thankful's children are handwritten under the heading "Family Record" as follows:

• Thankful Chapman was born February 29, 1792
• Lodisa Chapman was born April 14, 1794
• Ambrose Chapman was born August 18, 1796
• Elisha Chapman was born February 25, 1798
• Lorin Chapman was born November 14, 1800
• Luria Chapman was born November 19, 1804
• Mary Chapman was born December 6, 1809
• Buell D. Chapman was born April 17, 1816

The last entry on this list of Buell D. Chapman provided the proof I needed to link my fourth great grandfather to this Chapman line, from Connecticut to Massachusetts to Ohio.

There was a time in history, after America's Revolutionary War, when northeast and north central Ohio was a part of Connecticut known as the Western Reserve. While most states relinquished their western lands back to the United States to satisfy war debt, Connecticut held onto this strip of Ohio with plans to compensate war veterans for their service. Land grants were often sold by the veterans or gifted to family members who were eager to join the westward expansion.

Connecticut ceded its Western Reserve sovereignty in 1800 

Isaac Jr.'s brothers Abner and Bradford left Massachusetts around 1832 with their families and settled in Huntington Township in southern Lorain County, Ohio. By that time, pioneers could travel overland to Albany, cruise the recently completed Erie Canal across New York to Buffalo, and then sail across Lake Erie to Cleveland, leaving just a few days of overland travel to reach their destination. Isaac Jr. died in 1836 in Massachusetts, but his widow, Thankful, soon moved to Ohio with her youngest son Buell and youngest daughter Luria, wife of Venus Clapp. The Clapps settled in Litchfield Township in Medina County, not far from their Lorain County relatives. On the 1840 Federal Census, Buell is listed as a head of household next to the Clapps living with his mother. The John Northrop family is enumerated as a nearby neighbor. Buell married Fannie Northrop in 1841 and they moved 65 miles west to Tiffin. Thankful moved in with the Clapps after Buell moved away.

The matriarch of this pioneer family, Thankful Hoadley Chapman, lived a full life, nearly reaching centenarian status before her death in 1875. The practice of naming a daughter after a virtue (Prudence, Patience, or Charity, to name a few) was common in early New England, as was the practice of passing names from mother to daughter. As such, Isaac Jr. and Thankful's first child, born in 1792, was a daughter also named Thankful.

Researchers have surmised that the younger Thankful Chapman had a son in 1808, possibly out of wedlock, named Valoris Wheeler. "One thing we want to note is that we do not have any proof that Valoris Wheeler is the son of Thankful," cautioned Diane Wagner. "Records may be hard to come by when the birth is outside of marriage. We think it makes sense that he is her son, but we don't have a record of his birth, and not for a lack of trying. I think if it existed we would have found it by now." 

Additionally, we have not been able to make a DNA connection between my autosomal kit and those submitted by Diane and her father. In fact, neither of us has had much luck finding Chapman matches on our DNA results. This could be attributed to the excessive number of generations removed from the potential common ancestor, seven generations from Isaac Jr. to me. Autosomal DNA matches become more difficult to identify beyond the first five generations. Another possibility is that Valoris is actually not Thankful's biological son at all but perhaps was orphaned and taken in by the Chapman family in Montgomery.

Valoris Wheeler married Charity Pomeroy in 1842. It seems that the younger Thankful, his presumed mother, had married twice in Massachusetts (Isaac Watkins 1818 and Sylvester Phinney 1823). She had a daughter named Electa Lodisa Phinney born in 1824 who moved to Ohio with her. Electa married Nathan Wells and they had a daughter Electa Wells in 1843. But the mother died, possibly from childbirth complications, and Electa Wells was raised by Valoris and Charity Wheeler, her presumed uncle and aunt.

In 1845, the younger Thankful married John Clifford, an aging widower and one of the early pioneers of Wellington Township in Lorain County. Mr. Clifford, the progenitor of a very large family, arrived in the area in 1818 and established a fine farm just east of the town of Wellington. A handwritten page in the Chapman Bible captures the relationship between the Chapmans, Clapps, and Cliffords as follows:

Isaac Chapman was born October 19, 1767

Thankful Chapman was born November 20, 1775

Isaac Chapman died March 5, 1835

Thankful Chapman died June 12, 1875

Lorin Clapp died January 1, 1873

Thankful Clifford died November 5, 1878

A hand-written insert contains more documentation about the Cliffords:

September 17, 1869

John Clifford at age 92 July 8, 1869.

Died September 17 1869.

Grandchildren 79.

Great grandchildren 97.

Grandchildren died 20.

Great grandchilren died 15.

One great great grandchild.

John Clifford obituary, 1869

Thankful Clifford and her mother Thankful Chapman lived with John Clifford until his death in 1869. Thankful Clifford was provided for in his will as follows:

Item 1st I do give and devise to my beloved wife Thankful Clefford one thousand dollars to be paid immediately after my demise together with her bed and beding and household articles that has accumulated since she has lived with me.

Thankful Clifford and her mother then went to live out the remainder of their years with the Valoris and Charity Wheeler family. The Chapman Bible went with them, and when they died, the Bible remained on the Wheeler property in southern Lorain County. It eventually found its way to the attic in the home of the Wheeler sisters, granddaughters of Valoris and Charity, until the Wagners discovered it.

Diane's parents held onto the Bible for about 20 years. She remembers how they really ramped up their research efforts after her father retired. The arduous process of poring over records, in the era before they were available on the internet, required travel to genealogy centers and long hours of sifting through microfiche rolls. "They spent a lot of time learning about the Chapman family and trying to connect our family to the names and the births that are recorded in it." 

Diane holds a personal recollection of relics stuffed in the Bible, trinkets from another time. "One thing I remember is that there were a few things pressed between the pages: a flower, a chipmunk's tail, a few bookmarks, etc. Other than the personal birth records, these personal items that had been saved long ago were my favorite part of the Bible."

During a research trip to Montgomery, Massachusetts, Diane's parents visited the Montgomery Historical Society to search for any records that might be beneficial. It was during this trip, Diane says, that they decided what to do with the Bible. "Once they felt they had done all they could, they had the idea to donate the Bible on behalf of our extended family to the Montgomery Historical Society, who seemed really happy to have it."

The Isaac Chapman Bible has since been put on display at the Montgomery Library.

Follow this link for more about what happened to Buell and Fannie Chapman after they moved to Tiffin: Edwin Chapman of the 72nd Ohio Infantry

The Chapman DNA Project is seeking male participants with the Chapman surname for Y-Chromosome DNA testing (paternal line). For details, follow this link: Chapman DNA Project

Sources:

• Ancestry.com general search
• Diane Wagner personal accounts (Thank so much!)