Young Story
It is tempting to trace ancestors back a thousand years, and many amateur genealogists follow tantalizing leads that claim to show a relationship to Charlemagne or William the Conqueror. In the case of the Youngs, however, the family tree may be a little more solid, thanks to a book published by Selah Youngs, Jr. in New York in 1907. Along with chapters on Welsh and English history, it includes detailed ancestry charts showing a direct descent from Tudor Trevor, a 10th Century Welsh king of Powys in central Wales, and his wife, Angharet, descendant of kings of Gwynedd in northern Wales, all the way to the first Young ancestor to emigrate to America.
The line of English descent, Selah Youngs says, was verified by the Tudor Trevor coat-of-arms on the seal of Col. John Youngs’ will, which shows descent from Trevor through the Younges of Brynyorken. (The use of a particular coat of arms is a statement asserting descent from the person to whom it was granted. Col. Youngs added the seal to his will in 1697, but on authority he claimed it is not recorded, although the seal was authenticated in London by the author.)
In the 14th Century, a descendant of Tudor Trevor named Iorwerth ap Morgan (“ap” means “son of”) married Margaret or Marget, the daughter of William Yonge de Sawardek of County Salop, and took the surname Yonge, sometimes spelled Yong. Few people had used surnames before that time. The very first Yonges may have been Norman French, Le Jeune meaning literally “the young.” They migrated from Normandy to England and Wales following William the Conqueror in the mid-11th Century.
According to Selah Youngs, Jr., Rev. Christopher Yonges, Vicar of Southwold and Reydon in England, was descended directly from Iorwerth and Margaret Yonge. Christopher was assuredly the father of the first immigrant to America in the line that leads all the way down to Grace and Vida Young, meaning that they were descended from a Welsh king, Tudor Trevor. If the name Tudor sounds familiar, it is because Henry Tudor, another of that king’s descendants, became the first Tudor king of England.
The early 17th century was a period of intense turmoil in England. Henry VIII had established the Church of England in defiance of the Pope, causing persecution of Catholics; but Charles I ascended the throne in 1625 — an authoritarian monarch who believed in the divine right of kings and supported the high church Anglicans over the non-conformist Protestant sects like the Puritans. He would lose his head in 1649 when Puritan Oliver Cromwell established a short-lived Commonwealth, but in the two decades before, he and Archbishop Laud brutally persecuted the Puritans.
The town of Southwold, located in Suffolk County on the east coast of England, overlooks the North Sea. The people of Suffolk and the Southwold Church were decidedly non-conformist; many churchmen fled the country. The Southwold Church Register says that Christopher Yonges, having studied at Cambridge, became Vicar in 1611, baptized his youngest child there, lost a daughter and son by drowning, celebrated the marriages of his two eldest sons and baptized several of his grandchildren. It also records his death in 1626 and that of his wife, Margaret, in 1630. Christopher and Margaret Yonges had eight children: John, Edward, Elizabeth, Joseph, Christopher, Mary, Margaret and Martha.
Bishop Laud formed a High Commission to force the people of Suffolk to stay and conform to his edicts, but several of Christopher Yonges’ adult children sailed away with their families in 1635 on a ship commanded by Capt. Joseph Youngs. An edict had been sent out to force Rev. Youngs’ son John, also a vicar, to stay. ‘This man, John Yonges, aged 35 years, of St. Margretts, was forbyden passage, by the Commision and went not from Yarmouth with his wife Joan and 6 children.’ The reference is to St. Margaret’s Church at Reydon, where John presided. He resolutely ignored the edict.
REV. JOHN YOUNGS, born in 1598 in Southwold, had followed in his father’s footsteps and studied for the ministry, by some accounts at Oxford. He was first married in 1622 to Joan Herrington, and they had five children: John, Jr., Thomas, Mary, Rachel and Joseph. Joan Herrington died about 1630, and he married Joan Harris Palgrave, who had a daughter, Anne, by her first husband. Together John and Joan had a daughter, Mary, born in England.
As danger grew for the non-conformists, John slipped away on the ship Mary Anne in February, 1637, with his five children by his first wife, his second wife and her daughter and their daughter, Mary, at the worst possible time of year for crossing the Atlantic. It was an expensive trip, too, costing an adult ten pounds and a smaller amount for each child: Under four years old—three children for one fare; Under eight—two for one fare; and Under 12—three for two fares. Passengers also had to provide goods, clothing and food for subsistence on the five- to twelve-week voyage and pay for their freight. They were required by the Massachusetts Bay Company to also bring a supply of food, leather, cloth, nails, glass, iron, guns and ammunition, farming implements, household utensils and farm animals. As one writer put it, “Poor Puritans were warned that they could not make the journey on piety alone.”
Nearly three months later, John, Joan and the children had disembarked in Salem on the Bay of Massachusetts, the first of Grace and Vida Young’s direct ancestors to immigrate to America. Salem had only been settled by English colonists in 1626, so the conditions must have been harsh. John was immediately allotted land, first one acre, then fifty acres if he used the land for farming and curing fish, a vital source of food in those early days; but he only stayed three years or so, moving south to what is now called Long Island, New York. John’s second wife died in Salem and he immediately married again to Mary Gardner.
He was accompanied to Long Island by a few other settlers from New Haven, Connecticut directly across the sound, and together they established the town of Southold, echoing the ancient name of the English town where he had grown up. October 21, 1640 is given as the date of its founding. (Eventually the county was named Suffolk, using another placename from England where many Puritans had lived.)
How and why John moved his large family from Salem, a small but established settlement, to the tip of Long Island where few people lived is not recorded. It would have been at least a 150 mile journey south by wagon over game trails, and then a boat trip across the sound from the two-year-old town of New Haven, to a remote and desolate place with few people. Selah Youngs says: “At that time, New England was over-supplied with ministers and teachers who had fled from religious persecution in England.” His conclusion is that John simply decided to establish a new settlement where he could be the minister of the church. But conditions were so harsh, supplies so scarce, life so difficult it defies reason that he would strike out on his own with a wife and seven children.
Nevertheless, that is what he did, organizing a new church there with eleven other settlers and their families. The inscription on Rev. Youngs’ tomb is: “First Settler of the Church of Christ in Southold.” Friendly overtures were made to the four tribes of Native Americans who inhabited Long Island, and they all seem to have peacefully coexisted at first, although the tame wolves that the natives kept as companions made the settlers nervous. The settlement was located at the head of a creek that emptied into Peconic Bay, a good harbor for vessels, and eventually a shipyard and warehouse were built on the shore. (To the southeast across Peconic Bay lie the Hamptons, today some of the most valuable real estate in the world.) While the east end of Long Island was being settled by the Youngs and other English immigrants, the west end was settled by the Dutch…which led to considerable conflict some decades later.
Town lots were laid out, four to seven acres each, and Pastor Youngs’ lot was the largest, extending from the town’s main street that ran east and west to the meadow overlooking the creek. Even today there is a Youngs Street in Southold. Selah Youngs: “On these home lots their first homes were built of logs, with small windows covered with oiled paper and roofed with creek thatch. As a protection against fire, each householder was required to have ‘a ladder sufficient to reach the topp of his house under penalty of 5 shillings.’” By then John’s two older boys were 15 and 17 and could help with building, but these English countryfolk would have had much to learn about hunting and woodcraft.
By 1650 Southold had thirty houses and several of the children of Vicar Christopher Yonges were there with their brother John — Capt. Joseph, his wife Margaret Warren, sister to John’s third wife, their sister Martha with her husband, Thomas Moore, and their nephew, Christopher.
Mary Warren Gardner (1602-1678) was the daughter of Thomas Warren or Warryn, Jr., a wealthy merchant of Southwold, England, and a widow when she married Rev. John Youngs in Salem, Massachusetts about 1639, two years after he had escaped England and arrived in Salem. Being John’s third wife, Mary assumed the care and nurture of his seven young children. After they arrived on the desolate shore of Long Island, she and John had two more children, BENJAMIN, born in 1640, and Christopher, born in 1642.
Here is the quintessential pioneer woman—stepmother to seven children, mother of two babies of her own in two years, living in a small log cabin with oiled paper to cover the windows and protect eleven people inside from violent winter winds, rainstorms and blizzards, few neighbors to help with childbirth and illnesses, little way to obtain supplies, few livestock and no crops to harvest and store in the beginning, relying on the advice of natives with tamed wolves to find enough food to survive. A spinning wheel would have been useless because she would have had no supply of yarn in those early years, but her needle must have been busy mending what clothing they had, especially their woolen cloaks and hats, and perhaps making clothes for the babies out of a bolt of cloth brought from Salem. What did she do for diapers? What did she feed all those hungry children? How did they bathe? How, indeed, did they survive?
Their faith and their determination to be free of religious persecution must have given them the strength to carry on, winter and summer, year after year, slowly building more substantial dwellings, farming the land to harvest grain and crops that could be stored in root cellars against the winters, planting saplings ordered from England on the ships that often went down in storms, fashioning tools, shearing sheep for wool, making candles from tallow (fat from cows or sheep), the only source of light other than the light from the hearth. Their lives were very simple and they worked together, including the children, who had to help with whatever tasks they were capable of, starting at a young age. They ate from wooden bowls called trenchers, they drank water hauled from the creek in wooden buckets, they stewed rabbit and venison with herbs and bulbs the natives taught them to use, they made tea from the bark of the willows that grew along the creek. They prayed and sang hymns and believed they would survive…and increasingly, many did.
Rev. John Youngs died on February 24, 1672. His third wife, Mary, survived him and was executrix of his estate. His son, Capt. John Youngs, Jr. was sent to Massachusetts to hire a new minister, but down through the history of Southold, Rev. John Youngs, the first minister and founder of the town, was always held in high regard and fond memory.
In 1674 Southold reluctantly submitted to becoming a part of the Colony of New York, then held by the Dutch. They had tried to be attached to the Colony of Connecticut but failed. At the center of the political fight was Capt. John Youngs, Jr., one of eight commissioners appointed to settle the boundary between New York and Connecticut, and from 1689 to 1693 he was also colonel of the Suffolk County Militia and later a judge.
The redoubtable Mary Warren Gardner Youngs died in 1678. Most of her husband’s land had been divided among his older sons. She left the homestead and remaining land to her son, Benjamin, along with two oxen, two cows, six sheep, ten swine, her great brass “kittle,” and all her chains and irons belonging to house, cart and plow. The family had accumulated significant goods in the nearly forty years they had worked the land of Southold. Presumably both John and Mary were buried there. By the census of 1698 there were thirteen Youngs households. Eight of two generations of Youngs men had served in local militias.
The Puritans from Southwold, Suffolk County, England, had realized their dream of freedom. What they never understood was that their dream ended the freedom of the native peoples whose land they occupied and lifeways they changed forever.
BENJAMIN YOUNGS I, son of Rev. John Youngs, was born in Southold in 1640, the first direct ancestor born on American soil. Through the 17th century, the family name had been spelled Yonges, Younges, Youngs and Yong, sometimes different ways in the same document. This was common in the early years of many immigrant families. In 1675, for instance, Benjamin’s name was shown on the Southold tax list as “Beniam Yongs.”
Benjamin inherited the family homestead in 1678 and probably continued to farm the land while also taking part in the political affairs of the town. In 1674, he had been elected Town Clerk and Recorder of Southold, an office to which he was re-elected every year until he died.
He married a woman named Elizabeth Tuthill, also a Southold native, born in 1643 to one of the couples who had come with Rev. John Youngs to Southold, and they had four children: John, born about 1676, BENJAMIN, born 1679, Eliza, and Christian, a girl. Christian was usually a girl’s name in England and Colonial America.
Benjamin Youngs died in 1697. His wife’s date of death is unknown.
BENJAMIN YOUNGS II, second son of Benjamin, born in 1679 in Southold, was the third generation of the Young line in America, the second generation born here. Apprenticed by his father at the age of 16 to a weaver named John Abrams, weaving was his occupation throughout his life. In 1713 he traded land he had acquired for a house and home lot for his wife and large family. In 1715 he served in Militia Company No. 3 under his cousin Benjamin, the captain. Like most of his siblings and cousins, he stayed in Long Island his entire life.
Mercy Landon was born in 1682 to Daniel Landon and Ann Lobdell. She and Benjamin were married in 1703.
Benjamin and Mercy Landon Youngs had eight children: Benjamin III (1705-1707), Christian (1707-1707), Isaac (1708-1768), Seth (1712-1761), Joseph (1715-“lost at sea”1747), Lydia (1717-?), Anna (1719-1748), and ISRAEL (1721-1786).
Benjamin died in Aquebogue, Long Island in 1768, 90 years old. Mercy’s date of death is unknown.
ISRAEL YOUNGS, third generation born in America, was born in Southold in 1721. In 1761 he bought a farm a few miles west of Southold, in Franklinville, New York where he accumulated significant landholdings. When Selah Youngs wrote his history of the family in 1907, descendants of Israel still owned the original homestead. Franklinville, now Laurel, New York, is a “hamlet within the town of Southold” according to its website, so Israel and his family were still living very close to the Youngs’ original home. Israel was a school teacher, known as “Master Youngs,”and in 1775 declared his support for the Revolutionary Congress. How Israel received sufficient education to enable him to become a schoolmaster is unknown. Perhaps his mother, Mercy, taught him.
Jemima Brown, wife of Israel, was born in 1735 in Southold to Thomas Brown and Elisheba Sherry. Her parents were Dr. William Brown and Katherine Solomon Williams. William Brown’s father may have been Richard Brown and his mother Hannah King or Kinge. Based on a passenger list, Hannah was born in 1629 in England and came to Massachusetts in 1635 with her father, William Kinge, her mother Dorothy, then 34, her sisters Mary and Katheryn, and her brother William.
Israel and Jemima were married at Mattituck, Long Island in 1755.
Israel and Jemima Brown Youngs had four children: JOSEPH (1756-1837), Israel (1757-1836), Thomas (1763- 1838) and Jemima (1766-1850) who married Peter Corwin.
Israel died January 26, 1786 in Franklinville, New York. Jemima died in August 7, 1809 in Franklinville.
JOSEPH YOUNGS, fourth generation, was born in Franklinville in 1756, a carpenter who moved away from Long Island to reside in Killingworth, Connecticut, directly north across Long Island Sound from Southold — possibly because he had fallen in love with Chloe Griswold, whose family had lived there for four generations. They were married in 1781. In 1796 he settled in Eatonville or Eaton’s Bush, Fairfield Township, New York, and owned a grist mill, house and cabinet shop. Selah Youngs describes him as: “a gentleman of the old school, a Federalist in politics, dignified, upright, and strict in his religious duties as a member of the Methodist Episcopal Church.”
Chloe Griswold, born in 1759 in Killingworth, was a descendant of Edward Griswold of Warwickshire, England, and his wife, Margaret Unknown. They had emigrated in 1639 with a company of Puritans led by Rev. Ephraim Huit, a noted Puritan preacher and writer, who had been censured by the Bishop of Worcester. Edward was active in the new community, serving two terms as a deputy to the General Court and a justice of the peace. He and Margaret lived first at Poquonock but moved to Killingworth in 1663 where he was instrumental in organizing the town and became its first deputy to the General Court. He established the first church there and was its first deacon as well as serving on a committee to establish a Latin school at New London. He also acquired substantial land. They had twelve children. Margaret died in 1670. Edward lived to be 84.
Edward and Margaret Griswold’s youngest son, Deacon John Griswold (1652-1717), was a leading citizen of Killingworth and a captain of militia in the Narragansett War. He married, first, Mary Bemis, then Bathsheba North (1654-1736), daughter of Thomas North, also of an early Puritan family. He and Bathsheba had twelve children, including Walter Griswold (1700-1745) who married Sarah Patience Wright (1703-1734). Walter and Sarah had eight children, among them Capt. Walter Price Griswold (1729-1824). He married Chloe White (1736-1821), daughter of Capt. Elisha White (1706-1778) and Ann Field (1712-1752), and they were the parents of Chloe Griswold who married Joseph Youngs.
Joseph and Chloe Griswold Youngs had eleven children: Joseph (1782-1875); Walter Griswold (1784-1865); Anna (1785-1787); Henry (1786-1803); Nancy (1788-1845) who married William Bateman, then Jonathan Freeman; Charles Price (1790-1883); ELISHA WHITE (1792-1882); William Brown (1794); Phebe H. (1796-1829) who married Edward Hovey; George B. (1800-1885); and Horace (1802-1882).
Chloe Griswold Youngs died in 1805, having borne eleven children in 20 years and leaving two children under five and nine older ones.
Joseph Youngs then married Elizabeth Short (1769-1863) and they had four children: Chloe (1806-1807), Leonard (1808-1825), Glover (1811-1876), and Capt. Benjamin (1813-1872). Elizabeth Short Youngs managed to raise all those step-children, along with four of her own, and live to be 94.
Joseph Youngs died in 1837 in Eaton Bush, New York.
ELISHA WHITE YOUNG, fifth generation, was born in 1792 in Killingworth, Connecticut, one of Joseph’s fifteen children. He is described by Selah Youngs as a mechanical genius who invented a machine for cleaning and preparing wheat for grinding in 1837, “still the best in use 70 years later.” According to Youngs, Elisha was a Universalist and a Democrat…a dramatic change from his Puritan roots. For an unknown reason, before 1840 he moved his family 600 miles west to settle in Geauga, Ohio. This would have been the classic pioneer covered wagon journey, over difficult roads, crossing rushing rivers, facing danger around every curve. Geauga had only been settled in 1798, so it was still a frontier town, certainly more hospitable than Southold had been when his ancestor Rev. John Youngs crossed he Atlantic in 1640, but a good deal less developed than Killingworth.
The fascinating question always is, Why? Why turn his back on the area his family had lived in for six generations spanning two hundred years? The lure of acquiring land, but this was long before the Homestead Act? The romance of wilderness life? The challenge of leaving everything known behind and plunging into the unknown? A spirit of adventure had not been a hallmark of the Youngs in America up to that point, and even the first immigrant had undertaken the dangerous voyage across the Atlantic, not out of a thirst for adventure but to escape persecution for his religious beliefs.
Sarah Hill, Elisha’s first wife, is a mystery. Neither her birthdate nor her parentage is known at this writing. They married February 8, 1818.
Elisha and Sarah Hill Young had six children: Elisha S. (1819-?) who married Sarah Greenfield; William H. (1820-1886); Ann M. (1822-1897) who married Rev. Abraham Reeves, Methodist clergyman; George B. (1824-1850); CHARLES PRICE (1826-1882); and Sarah P. (1829-?) who married James E. Freeman, son of her aunt, Nancy Young Freeman. She died in 1829, leaving six children under ten years old, including an infant.
In 1833 Elisha then married Lovica Rider Lapham (1801-1883). She had been born in New York, some miles north of Killingworth. They had five more children: Electa Jane, who married Lewis Todd; Hiram; Caroline; Lovicy; and Amelia or Amanda.
By 1850 Elisha was listed on the Geauga County, Ohio federal census as a millwright with five children in the household, including a boy and two girls under the age of five and one boy between 10 and 14. His older sons Elisha, William, George and Charles were living elsewhere.
Elisha White Young died in 1882 and Lovicy died in 1883. They are both buried in the Overlook Cemetery in Parkman, Geauga County.
A note about names: Not only did Elisha Young leave his family’s past behind him when he moved west in 1840, the stray “S” at the end of the surname Youngs was left behind too.
CHARLES PRICE YOUNG, the sixth generation, was born in 1826 in Killingworth, Connecticut, the fourth son of Elisha and Sarah Hill Young (although his tombstone says he was born in New York state). He bore the given name of an uncle and a cousin, complicating genealogical work ever after. His middle name Price evidently came from his great-grandfather Walter Price Griswold. He always said he was Welsh, but by the sixth generation he was now mostly English.
He had been 14 when his father moved the family west to Ohio, so perhaps that inspired a love of travel and adventure. Only a few years later, he and his brother George left their family in Ohio for the California gold mines, sometime before the strike of 1849. Before they left, his brother had married Susan Ann (“Susannah”) Close, a Meadville, Pennsylvania girl of German heritage. Unfortunately, George was stricken with cholera in California and died November 10, 1850. Susannah’s granddaughter said that her grandmother recounted how she heard George call her name three times at the very moment, they determined later, that he died.
Family legend has it that Charles wrote to Susannah’s father, Jonathan Close, saying he would like to marry Susannah in his brother’s place and to please send her to California. The response was that if Charles cared enough for the girl to marry her, he could very well expend the effort to journey back to Pennsylvania and get her himself. He did.
Susannah Close was born March 23, 1826, in Harmonsburg, Pennsylvania, to Jonathan Close (1777-1871) and Eva Magdalena Cunkle (1782-1854). Jonathan was the first generation to be born in America. His father, Ernest Klose (1738-1805), was born in Esslingen, Wittenberg, Germany before his father Leonard Melchior Kloss (1708-1776) and mother, Anna Margaretha Stetler (1710-1800) emigrated to America in 1738. Ernest Klose married Catharina Barbara Suter (1741-1798) from Oldenburgh, Germany, also a first generation immigrant. Eva’s father, Andreas Kunkel (1742-1804), had emigrated from Hessen, Germany with his wife Anna Maria Schelhammern (1750-1810), also from Hessen. So Eva Cunkle was also the first generation of her family to be born in America. Thus, Susan Ann Close was only the second generation born here on both her father’s and mother’s side and was pure German.
The Klose and Kunkel families settled in Pennsylvania and were of the group of German immigrants called “Pennsylvania Dutch”. The word “Dutch” does not refer to the Dutch people or the Dutch language, but to the German settlers known as Deutsch (in standard German) and Deitsch (in the principal dialect they spoke, Palatine German). Most emigrated to the New World in the 17th and 18th centuries from regions that were later to become the countries of Germany and Switzerland. According to Wikipedia, during the Revolutionary War the “Pennsylvania Dutch” composed nearly half of the population of Pennsylvania and generally fought on the American side. (Many German names beginning with K were eventually changed to C, so Kunkle became Cunkle and Kloss/Klose became Close).
Jonathan and Eva Cunkle Close had thirteen children in 26 years: Catherine (1799-1880) who married Adam Struble II; Samuel (1801-1892) who married Esther Shiffer (1797-1860); Esther “Hettie” (1803-1887) who married James McGuire (1794-1884); Rosannah (1805-1879) who married Peter Brown (1801-1874); Sarah (1805-1844) who married Daniel Smith (1806-1846); Jeremiah (1807-1898) who married Sarah Harper (1820-1862); Daniel (1809-1887) who married Grace Beatty (1811-1900); Jonathan (1811-1889) who married Anna Harper (1816-1866); David (1813-1846) who married Anna Maria Smith (1815-1845); Rachel (1815-1893) who married Edmund K. Randolph (1808-1878); Joel (1818-1897) who married Lydia Lewis (1831-1912); Mary (1820-1850) who married Chauncey Smith (1819-1891); and SUSANNAH who married Charles Price Young.
Of the children, Susannah was particularly close to her older sister Rachel. Rachel and Edmund Randolph had one daughter, Salina (1839-1925), born in Pennsylvania, who married Adelmorn Hargrave “A.H.” Goodrich (1820-1895) born in New York. Eleven of the Close children lived their whole lives in Pennsylvania. One had moved to Illinois before he died. Susannah was the only one who came west, but it appears that Rachel’s daughter Salina migrated to Placerville, perhaps to live with her aunt Susannah. Salina and A. H. Goodrich were married in El Dorado County, so he had trekked west as well. Their son, Donald Hargrave Goodrich (1875-1949) was born in Placerville and married a Placerville girl, Edna Patterson (1881-1967), called “Owie.” Susannah’s and Rachel’s grandchildren Don and Helen Goodrich and Vida Ray were good friends throughout their lives. Helen Goodrich taught school in Placerville for many years and spent summers in a cabin at the south shore of Lake Tahoe.
Eva Cunkle Close died August 19, 1854 in Harmonsburg, Pennsylvania. Jonathan Close died April 13, 1871 in Harmonsburg. They are buried in the Linesville Cemetery.
Susannah Close married Charles Price Young on March 7, 1859 and left for California on April 11th according to an unidentified genealogy handwritten in flowing script that appears to be late 19th century. Charles, a carpenter, took his bride to California by wagon train to settle in Sacramento while the Gold Rush was fading. He had had bitter experience at the mines losing his brother to cholera, so he wisely chose to provide services to the miners instead of mining for gold himself and bought a farm. Unfortunately a Sacramento-area 1860-61 flood wiped them out. Desperate to start over, he left Susannah living in a boarding house working as a seamstress to support herself and possibly two children and crossed back over the Sierra Nevada to try to get carpentry work in Virginia City where silver had recently been discovered. He never quite got there. The pretty little Nevada town of Genoa, tucked into the foot of the eastern scarp of the mountains, must have needed a carpenter.
Charles worked hard and was soon able to bring Susannah and their children to Genoa and build them a home. He was the proprietor of the Genoa Drug Store where the lucky townspeople could purchase “new drugs, chemicals, patent medicines, fancy notions, cutlery, fishing tackle, stationery, choice confectionery, cigars and tobacco, candy and nuts, Diamond dyes, flaxseed, sulfur, borax, aluminum, resin, fly powder, sassafras bark, saffron, potash, chloride of lime, Canary seed, cuttle bone, sewing machine oil, herbs, roots and barks and other articles too numerous to mention.” In the late 1880s his son Malan was listed as Dr. M. W. Young, Druggist.
Eventually Charles and Susannah were able to buy 280 acres of land on Kingsbury Grade, the road that led from Carson Valley up to Lake Tahoe, where they ran cattle and grew berries and vegetables to sell to the other settlers and businesses that were springing up in the valley and around the lake. They spent summers at Tahoe, and in 1902 he bought a small property on the south shore called the “Star Lake Hotel”, both a hostelry and a general store. It was named after a smaller lake at 9,000 feet in the high alpine forests, a favorite, if rigorous, hike. The store on the ground floor had a large sitting room with a pot-bellied stove. Out front was a well and a scale decorated with pine boughs. There were three cottages to rent.
At 6’3” with sideburns and a goatee and a warm, welcoming personality, Charles was a very successful innkeeper. With lively, generous Susannah by his side, they were an important part of the early history of settlement at the lake. Shortly before he died July 8, 1907, he and his two grandsons bought 33 acres of additional meadow and lakefront property.
Charles and Susannah Close Young had two children: MALAN (1860-1911) born in Freeport, California; and Perle (dates unknown). The 1880 Census says Malan was born “about 1860”, the 1900 Census says he was born in 1859, and the 1910 Census says 1860. Census information is usually self-reported. The rather unusual given name of Malan was English but does not appear earlier among ancestors’ names. Although Perle is always referred to as a boy by descendants, the name is definitely a girl’s name whether spelled Perle or Pearle. A third child of Susannah’s, Homer O. (?-1873), is documented to have been born in Pennsylvania, which suggests the possibility that he was Susannah Young’s son with her first husband, George Young. In that case he would have been born before 1850 when George died of cholera, and would have traveled with Susannah and her second husband, Charles, when they made their covered wagon journey to Sacramento in 1859.
Perle died very young. Homer was killed by accidental gunshot when a hunter said he mistook him for a deer in the woods near Carnelian Bay, Lake Tahoe. Susannah thought the hunter was a rival for the girl Homer loved and that the shooting was deliberate, but nothing was ever proved.
In the family archives there is a tantalizing photo of another infant, labeled with the name Elisha Young, Charles’ father’s name, and the year 1856, but nothing is known about him.
Susannah Close Young died October 4, 1917 in Bijou, South Lake Tahoe.
MALAN WILTON YOUNG, seventh generation, was born in 1860 probably near Sacramento. He was around 5’10,” slender and fair, loved life and people and was an eager student who was drawn to the medical profession. He is said to have studied under a Dr. Smith in Placerville and then at the University of the Pacific, which had been chartered as California Wesleyan College in Santa Clara in 1851 and moved to San Jose in 1871. He then studied medicine in San Francisco, possibly at the Medical College of the Pacific which later became the Stanford Lane Hospital.
He married a Placerville girl, Margaret Rowlands, August 15, 1882, and opened his practice in Genoa in the mid-1880s.
Margaret Rowlands was born March 28, 1862 in Fort Wine, California to Mary Anne Morgan (1838-1907) and Richard Rowlands (1836-1900), a mining engineer. They had been married in 1858 in Meigs, Ohio. The Rowlands ancestors came from Bull Bay on the north coast of the Welsh island of Anglesey, and from Holyhead off the east shore of the island. Richard’s father was another Richard Rowlands, born 1801 in Holyhead, Anglesey, Wales; death date and place unknown; and his mother was Cathrine Parry (1801-1875) who spent her life in Anglesey. His father was John Rowlands (1768-possibly 1864), also a native of Anglesey, and his mother possibly Mary Jones (1768-?) from Caernarvonshire, Wales. Vida Young Ray always made the point that her ancestors’ surname was spelled with an S at the end. Rowland without an S is usually English.
Morgan is also a Welsh name. Margaret Rowlands’ mother, Mary Anne, was the daughter of Daniel Morgan (1798-1956) from Carmarthenshire, southwest Wales, who married Margaret maiden name unknown (1816-1905); Daniel’s father was William Morgan (1760-1841) and mother Mary Parish (1774-1837), an Englishwoman; and William’s father may have been Henry Morgan (1706-1778) and his mother Joan Harry (1717-1805), although the dates are rather far apart. Perhaps there is another generation between William and Henry. All these ancestors except Mary Parish were Welsh, mostly from Glamorgan, Wales.
Richard Rowlands was a successful mining engineer. Perhaps his ancestors had been miners in Wales, known in the 19th century for its great coal, slate and metal mines. He and Margaret settled in El Dorado County in 1873, buying a large home in Placerville at what was then number 63 Coloma Street. He supervised California mines and researched and evaluated mines all over the country. Their granddaughter Vida remembered both Richard and Mary Anne as being cold and distant with all their grandchildren.
Richard and Mary Anne Rowlands had three daughters: Katherine “Kate” (1858-1911) who married George Steppe (1852-1930); MARGARET (1862-1919); and Sally (1864-1950) who married Richard Mitchell (1858-1949). Kate and George had a big, comfortable house in Placerville with a large garden and four children: Blanche M. (1882-1956), George R. (1887-1970), Arlene (1889-?), and Gladys (1891-1973). They often played with their cousins. Vida Young Ray had happy memories of picking blackberries, gathering fruit from the root cellar, drinking her aunt’s homemade root beer, and singing around the piano after supper. The adults spoke Welsh when they did not want the children to know what they were saying.
Margaret’s other sister, Sally, called Aunt Lal, and her husband Richard Mitchell also lived in Placerville with their only child, Richard Thomas “Ritchie” (1887-1949). Uncle Richard was an experienced Welsh miner who mined silver and gold in El Dorado County, a kind and generous man, much loved by all who knew him. Lal had a dubious reputation for being a malicious gossip. His niece Vida was very close to Uncle Richard. In later years as she and William Ray and their family passed through Placerville going and coming from the lake where they spent summers with her grandparents, they always stopped to say hello.
Malan and Margaret Rowlands Young had four children: GRACE EVELYN (1884-1917); Charles Rowlands (1886-1953) who married Glorene Dunlop (1908-?), then Irene Jones (1906-1959) and had one child, Jack Rowland Young (1916-2000) who married Geraldine Mundt (1917-2007) and had two children: Karen Gayle b. 1940 who married Edward Christenson and had a daughter Andrea, and Karen’s brother, Jeffrey Rowland; Wilton Richard (1889-1952) who did not marry; and VIDA MARGARET (1893-1992).
Always called “Doc,” for some years he was the only doctor and surgeon in town, a convivial soul who loved to talk and drink with friends, and had a very demanding profession. An avid reader and man of deep compassion, he struggled with the rigors of being a country doctor—long trips on horseback or driving a wagon over rough roads in all weather, late-night calls, irregular compensation, and the heartache of patients dying of illnesses he did not have the knowledge or means to heal. His children remembered hearing screams of pain from the front parlor where he had his office. There were no telephones, so people would drop off notes to request his help, and he must have often been gone all day and all night, too.
Margaret, with a sweet, undemanding disposition, tried her best but had four children to care for, along with an orphaned neighbor girl she took in, and eventually could not cope with the marriage. She left Malan in 1899 and took Wilt, Charley and Vida, only six, to live with her parents in Placerville. Grace, 15, helped her Young grandparents summers at the lake, and joined her brothers and little sister down in Placerville during the winters.
Doc wrote many passionate letters vowing to mend his ways and begging Margaret to return to him in Genoa, and finally in 1907 she did. By then, Grace was married. Vida was 14. In February, 1911, they were up at the lake when Margaret got word that her sister Kate had died. She skied to the ranch house on Kingsbury Grade, got a ride down to Carson City and took the train to Placerville in spite of having had several strokes in recent years.
In July 19, 1911, at age 52 Dr. Malan Wilton Young set out in a boat from South Lake Tahoe to attend a patient in Round Hill on the east shore. His boat was recovered but his body was never found, which often happened in that lake, being very cold and very deep. However someone said that he had been carrying quite a lot of cash with him and started the rumor that he had simply abandoned the boat and left. For years, his children thought he might return and looked for him wherever they went. His mother entered the date in the family Bible as “the day my son disappeared.” It seems improbable, however, that he simply ran away from his family and practice. It is likely he died on the dark and treacherous lake on his way to care for a desperate patient or that he was murdered for his money and his body disposed of in deep water off the east shore.
Malan Young was actually quite a remarkable man, the first of his family to go to college and a doctor who loved his profession and was devoted to healing others.
Margaret Rowlands Young lived another eight years and died May 15, 1919 in Placerville.
GRACE EVELYN YOUNG, eighth generation, was born in September, 1884, at Lake Tahoe, the first of Malan and Margaret’s four children. Dainty and blond with fine features, she had her mother’s sweet, compliant disposition and loved to read like her father. At 15 she went up to the lake to help her grandparents, Charles and Susannah Young, run their hotel and store. It was there one summer that she met William Ruth Ray who was traveling around the Sierras by horse and wagon with his brother Milton and a friend.
Grace and William were married in 1902 when she was 19 and she moved with her husband to San Francisco, possibly to live with William’s father. They had four boys in ten years and then, sadly, her health began to fail. The diagnosis was tuberculosis. Her mother tried to care for her and Grace had one more baby, a daughter Margaret, in 1916, but soon after the birth they had to face the awful truth that she was dying. She was sent to various sanatoriums, including one in Monrovia near Los Angeles where she stayed many months, completely separated from her family. Vida took the two youngest children to Placerville; the three little boys stayed in San Francisco with their father and a housekeeper. The picture of Grace lying alone in a strange place, far from her family, knowing she would never see her darling babies again, is heart-wrenching. And it must have been very hard on the children too. Her husband and sister had moved her back north to be cared for in the Bay Area. After much cajoling, the hospital allowed one visit from her children.
Grace Young Ray died May 7, 1917, only 33 years old.
VIDA MARGARET YOUNG, eighth generation, was born July 30, 1893, in Genoa, Nevada, the youngest of the four children, nine years younger than Grace. Younger sisters often look up to their siblings and are compared with them. Vida was an attractive girl, not with the delicate prettiness of Grace, but appealing nonetheless. As an adult she was a handsome woman, vigorous and intelligent.
She had many vivid memories of life at Lake Tahoe when she was a girl, how Gramma Rowlands had a six-inch feather bed that sat on top of a spring mattress and was straightened every day with a wooden rod. They used cut glass and “lusterware” (a type of porcelain with an iridescent glaze) at the table, with always a dish of preserved fruit in the center. Her grandmother used a cup with the name of the Welsh town of Llandovery in central Anglesey. Quart jars full of pickles and fruit were kept in a closet by the kitchen and lasted all through the winter. Butter and lard were kept in wooden firkins.
Up at the lake in winter, they buried frozen fish in the snow until they needed them, deep enough to protect them from hungry animals. Her brother Charley skied over to Gardnerville to get them fresh eggs and fruit. The ice house was lined with sawdust and filled with the summer’s supply of ice—big blocks cut from the Truckee meadows and handled with metal tongs. They had a wooden ice cream-maker. First, eggs, milk, sugar, flavoring and cream were boiled on the stove. Then the wooden crock was lined with ice and rock salt. Care had to be taken than no salt got into the liquid when it was poured in. Vigorous cranking for 10-15 minutes resulted in pure heaven.
Every sitting room had a black stove with a nickel top, marble ornaments and an “Isinglass window” (probably mica) to look through. Vida and her brothers had to stack the firewood along with their other chores. Her grandfather’s store at the lake had a porch with double doors and the store on the ground floor with its stove, a ring for people to put their feet on, and chairs all around. Tins of cookies and crackers sat on the counter. A glass display case held candy. The shelves held tinned meat, yardage, Levis and big, square handkerchiefs in bright colors. The native Washoe peoples still camped at the lake, their ancestral home, and they were eager customers at the store. A canvas-covered meat wagon, wet down, delivered fresh meat around the lake and down in Carson City.
In the summer at the lake, butter was kept in wooden kegs with saltwater on top at the dairy in the Upper Truckee meadows. They had a horse named “Puss.” She and Gramma Young would drive Puss in a carriage over to Bourne Meadows to buy vegetables and apples for the hotel and pick wild strawberries that grew all around there. They were very small but very delicious. Often the log houses along the lake were painted white. Besides the Star Lake Hotel, other resorts had tents on wooden platforms for visitors, lit at night by Chinese lanterns. There was a handcar on tracks at the Bijou pier. At one time the Youngs owned the shoreline from what is now the El Dorado Campground to the east side of Bijou and property inland as well. Property up near the stateline could be bought for pennies.
The dairy cows that flourished on the lush mountain grasses during summer were herded over the mountains and down to Latrobe in the El Dorado hills in the fall; it took five days. The trains to Tahoe City stopped November first each year; after that, it was a two-day trip to get to the lake by horse-drawn wagon. Later when they came up to the lake in a car, which had no windows, they would get covered with dust, dirt and sand. If a car ran into cattle on the way, the animals ruled the road.
Vida had hoped to become a doctor like her father and would have been a very good one…but fate intervened. First, her mother took her away from him at only six years old so she spent eight years of her childhood without him. And those must have been difficult years for a young child living in the home of distant, even cold, grandparents, who were probably shocked to suddenly have a daughter and her four children under their roof. Then her father disappeared in 1911 when Vida was 18, only four years after what had been a happy reunion. Not only was her mother now a widow in poor health who must have needed her daughter’s help, but her sister already had three small boys under the age of seven.
It is easy to imagine how Vida might have been enthralled by the romance between her beautiful older sister and the darkly handsome outdoorsman and inventor from San Francisco. Perhaps she visited them there and was dazzled by the big city and love for the babies that came in such close succession. Another boy was born in 1914, and soon it would have been apparent that her sister’s health was failing. Their last baby, a girl, was born after Grace was gravely il, and Vida and her mother were already caring for the four little boys. Was it a long-cherished love for William or compassion for the motherless babes that caused her to give up her own dreams and marry her sister’s widower?
Throughout her life, this indomitable woman led her family through heartache, change, business challenges, marriages, deaths and world crises. She was always a source of wise counsel, and especially her nephew/step-son Al relished visits to discuss politics, financial matters and world affairs with her. They were particularly close because he had been seven when his mother died, old enough to understand her illness and young enough to be crushed by her death. He always said that Vida treated him and his siblings exactly as she treated the son she and William had a year after they were married. All the children thought of her as their mother and gave Vida full credit for her hard work in bringing them up.
While William and his brother built the Ray Oil Burner business and then William invented a revolutionary home heater control and decided to move his family to Los Angeles, she directed the children’s lives, making sure they had a good education as well as their magical summers at Tahoe. When William decided to open a lodge on the south shore of the lake, it was she who managed it successfully, making sure the maids did their work to her standards, greeting guests, arranging for outings and excursions, all the while caring for six rambunctious boys and their little sister. It was her vision and absolute determination that resulted in most of them graduating from Stanford.
Her homes were always open to family parties, especially at Lake Tahoe where she lived first in a cabin next to Lakeland Lodge on the south shore and later on the east shore north of Zephyr Cove where she had the cabin moved. All her descendants loved Tahoe and spent part of every summer there, gathering on the shady deck overlooking the lake, pots of red geraniums and bright summer annuals on the steps, Stellar jays calling from the towering Jeffrey pines all around, green leaves of aspen fluttering in the late afternoon breeze.
She was a quietly commanding presence, calmly observing the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were drawn to be with her even if they little understood all that she had borne through the years of her long life. She died April 24, 1992 at the age of 99.
See the narrative “William Ruth Ray and His Ancestors” for the story of their life together and their children.
DNA Matches
DNA Matches in the Ancestry.com DNA database are verified between a living Young descendant and living descendants of Maria Carna, Jacob Klose, Jonathan Close, Eva Kunkel, Sarah Hill, Elisha White Young, Lovicy Lapham, Chloe Griswold, Walter Price Griswold, Chloe White, Elisa Bardt, Johann Barhdt, Johann Peter Kunkle, Johann Georg Kunkle, Anna Margartha Schuster, Anne Schelhammern, William Parry, Catherine Parry, Rebecca Gedney, Richard Rowlands, Mary Ann Morgan, Daniel Morgan, William Morgan, Mary Parish, Joan Harry, Mary Jones.
Memorials at FindaGrave.com (numbers refer to Find A Grave website)
Joseph Youngs #49480501 and Elizabeth Short Youngs #49480503 Eaton’s Bush Cemetery, Eatonville, New
York.
Elisha White Young #85057869 and Lovicy Rider Young #85057875 Overlook Cemetery, Parkman, Ohio. Their child Hiram W. Young #85057872 and his wife Eunice Bentley Young #85057870. (Graves of their
descendants and Lovicy’s parents can also be found on the FAG website.)
Charles Price Young #35805355 and Susannah Close Young #35810985 are buried with their children Homer and Perle in the Al Tahoe Cemetery, 790 Alameda Avenue in South Lake Tahoe, California.
Adelmorn Goodrich #35810948 Al Tahoe Cemetery, South Lake Tahoe.
Salina Randolph Goodrich #119995928 Placerville Union Cemetery, Placerville, California.
Don H. Godrich #119995928 Placerville Union Cemetery, Placerville, California.
Grace Evelyn Young Ray #107889985 Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Coloma, California.
Vida Young Ray is buried at Forest Lawn, Glendale, Little Garden of Devotion, Garden of Memories, Section 51, with all the children.
Sources
Additional information and interesting anecdotes can be found in:
“The Ray Family History” by Marcy Ray, 1984, based on interviews with Vida Ray.
“A Century of Rays” written by Rick Ray and Mary Richardson Ray in 1999.
Other Sources:
“Youngs Family: Vicar Christopher Yonges, His Ancestors in England and His Descendants in America—a History and Genealogy” by Selah Youngs, Jr., 1907.
“The Griswold Family: England-America, Vol. II—Edward Griswold” by Glenn E. Griswold, 1935.
“The Refugees of 1776 from Long Island to Connecticut,” by Frederic Gregory Mather.
“Whitaker’s Southold: History of Southold, L.I., Its First Century” by Rev. Charles E. Craven, D.D., Princeton University Press, 1931.
“Southold Connections: Historical and Biographical Sketches of Northeastern Long Island,” by Judy Jacobson, 1991.
“Dawes-Gates Ancestral Lines: a Memorial Volume Containing the American Ancestry of Rufus R. Dawes.” (Griswold information).
“Our Young Family” by Prof. Edward Hudson Young.
“North American Family Histories, 1500-2000.”
Connecticut Town Marriage Records, pre-1870.
“Early Connecticut Marriages” pub. Ancestry.com Operations, Inc.
“This New Man, the American”in “Southold Connections.”
New York Genealogical Records, 1675-1920.
New York Wills and Probate Records 1659-1999.
New York Genealogical and Biographical Record, 1893.
Pages from a family Bible written by Susannah Close Young that confirm dates of her marriage and of the day “my boy disappeared.”
“My Close Line: Leonard Melchior Kloss” by Sarah McCoy on Rootsweb.
“Snyder County Pioneers”.
Federal census reports for 1840, 1860 and 1880.
Southold: This link shows Youngs Street in modern Southold: https://goo.gl/maps/QyK9sJLxxptZ5qc36
Susan Welch Ray
March, 2023
rayandwelchhistory@gmail.com