My Inspiration

 

Anna Wood Dyer

Anna Wood Dyer Biography

At a recent virtual meeting, someone asked if others had one ancestor who had inspired them either to start family history or to keep researching.  It didn’t take me long to think of my gggrandmother Anna Wood Dyer as my inspiration.  After briefly relating my discoveries about her, someone suggested she would make a good blog topic.

“No problem,” I thought, “I’ll dust off and update one of the biographies I’ve written about her.”  Looking back at the discoveries and development of her life story I realize something else—the timeline of my growth as a researcher.  Throughout this family history quest, Anna has been the most elusive with the least information available.  And yet, at this point I personally feel I know her better because I have had to learn so much about her environment and the events that must have impacted her life.

Anna has never seemed like a brick wall, only a weight bearing wall around which a family grew.  I can see beyond to her ancestors but after nineteen years, I still have no documentation about her birth or parentage.

Page from Anna's Bible

Born 10 June, 1810 in Vermont

Died 24 September, 1888, Coeur d’Alene, Kootenai, Idaho Territory

Married Charles Dyer about 1838, Bennington, Bennington, Vermont

 

These were the known events in the life of Anna Wood when my mother’s cousin did his family history work in the late 1950s.  When I started in 2001, I had only that information to go on and with that common name, not much hope of singling her out of a myriad of other Anna Woods.

I wasn’t particularly interested in going to cemeteries but finally decided to take some pictures of her headstone.  It was while looking at that stone, especially the legend, that I felt the connection.  Without this woman, I would not exist.  Perhaps she was asking me to discover and tell her unique story.

A newspaper clipping obituary, for a wife of someone who could have been a relative, led to a Wood family in Bennington, Vermont; there were seven boys and the widower was a son of one of the younger boys.  Circumstantial evidence of relationship.  Anna gave one of her sons a name very similar to the husband of another possible cousin.  Again, circumstantial. Through the process of elimination I determined that Anna’s father must be one of the two oldest boys, Isaac or Billa.

Pleas for some sort of sign, (yes, I believe in serendipity) led me to looking beyond Vermont, sometimes following the wrong Isaac but finding a younger one the right age to be Anna’s brother.  He was in Wyoming County, New York, in the 1850 census with a son named Dyer Wood.  In 1837 Anna married Charles Dyer.  Did her probable brother name a son in honor of his brother-in-law?  In the neighborhood was a young Billa Wood, right age to be another son of this Isaac.

In the 1860 census this family unit, Isaac with wife Betsey and sons Ira and Dyer were living in Wisconsin.  On the same page were young Billa, his wife Mary and 87 year old Billa!

A Family for Anna

It was about this time that I received scans of some old photos that had belonged to Anna.  Among them was a man with the name Isaac Wood written on the mat.  In the index he was identified as “Grandma’s brother”.  That scream you heard back in July, 2005 was me!

Betsey Fuller Wood

Isaac Wood    

Poking around in online records, both indexed and unindexed I found that Billa had married Hannah Millington and moved from Bennington County to Franklin County, Vermont.  The family shows up in each of the censuses from 1800 through 1840.  In some of them the census taker listed Billa as W. Wood as if his name might have been William.  Careful tracking shows that there were several more children but so far I have only identified Isaac and Anna.

Through several more years of hit and miss research and stacks of circumstantial evidence, I reached the conclusion that Anna’s parents were probably Billa Wood and Hannah Millington.  I added them to my family tree knowing I might have to change things if I ever found proof otherwise.

In the 1820s Billa and Hannah moved to White Creek, Washington, New York.  There are several land transactions in that area from late 1820s into the 1840s.  It was interesting that the transactions always included both Billa and Hannah.

The Troy (NY) Daily Whig published a little notice that Charles Dyer and Anna Wood, both of Shaftsbury, Vermont, were married on March 31, 1837, in Troy.

Children of Charles and Anna (Wood) Dyer:
                Albert Myron Dyer  1840
                Mary Dyer  1842
                George Phillips Dyer  1845
all born in Vermont

In the mid 1850s the family moved to Kenosha County, Wisconsin where daughter Mary married Solomon Stowe in 1858.

Charles and Anna Dyer moved to Minnesota with Solomon and Mary where they homesteaded in Mapleton, Blue Earth County.  Charles died there in 1877.

All the Way to Coeur d’Alene

Early in 1888, Solomon with his two older sons, Charlie and George, ventured west to Coeur d’Alene, Idaho Territory, where they selected land for homesteading.  A few months later Mary and the younger children, Lizzie and Edwin, followed with her mother Anna.  Anna died about three weeks after their arrival.  She was 78 years old.

What strength she must have had.  During her lifetime she survived a spotted fever epidemic that took the lives of her Uncle Isaac and three of his children, all in the same week of January, 1814.  Her family lived through the 1816 Year Without a Summer. 

She saw the building of the Erie Canal and other waterways in New York state.  She saw the development of the railroad and the growth of Wisconsin and Minnesota, receiving the Minnesota homestead land patent in her own name after the death of her husband.  Both of her sons served in the Civil War.

When I tested with Family Tree DNA I found lots of distant cousins but there were none that showed up as my Dyer or Wood families.  Next I decided to test with Ancestry because two known first cousins had tested there and that would help triangulate connections.

The morning that results came online I was browsing through possible fourth cousins when I found a connection with someone who was a direct descendent of Samuel Millington, 1749 to 1823, Shaftsbury, Bennington, Vermont.  Samuel’s probate was filed by Billa Wood, husband of Samuel’s daughter Hannah. 

Confirming with DNA Evidence

A distant match at Family Tree DNA contacted me looking for our connection.  While I found connections in two family lines, the most recent common ancestor was at the 7 great grand level.  However, he also had families in my Wood and Millington lines, thereby further confirming Anna’s parents.

Among the pictures I received in 2005 were several of one woman who were not identified, or rather, Grandma Anna Dyer was identified but the picture had been moved to another spot.  This is my first presentation of a picture that is probably Anna Wood Dyer.

After nineteen years of research I hear her telling me, “This story is not about me; it’s about the journey of discovery!”  That journey continues.

Anna Wood Dyer