William Chappell (1800 - 1870)

One of the first things I learned about my ancestry is that there are a lot of William Chappell's! There are 13 of them that I've found so far, going back to the year 1800. For this post, I'm going to focus on the oldest that I've found so far, born in about 1800.

William Chappell, my 3x great-grandfather, was born about 1800 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Thomas Chappell and Mary Walton (though there are some discrepancies in the records - more on that in another post). He married Margaret Willett on 18 March 1832 at the Old St. George Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia, and had at least five children. On censuses in 1850 and 1860, he is listed as a farmer, though Philadelphia City Guides after 1865 list him as a broom maker. Broom making appears to have been a family trade - two brothers and a nephew were also broom makers. He died on 5 May 1870 from chronic diarrhea, marked with a simple death notice in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

William lived most of his life in Bensalem, Pennsylvania. He appears to have been a horse owner, from an ad that ran in the Philadelphia Public Ledger in 1839. The property on the Bristol Turnpike mentioned in the ad was apparently sold in 1859 to Charles Walton of the Byberry Waltons (a topic for another post) for $865. William and Margaret moved then to Kingwood, New Jersey, to live with his brother Thomas for a time. Sometime before 1865, they moved to a place on North 2nd Street in Philadelphia, where he lived the remainder of his life. He was buried in American Mechanics Cemetery, where he would be to this day if they hadn't turned the cemetery into low income housing.

American Mechanics Cemetery

American Mechanics Cemetery was a cemetery founded in the mid-19th century in a then-rural area of Philadelphia, at 22nd and Diamond Streets. After the Civil War, urban sprawl reclaimed the rural areas outside the city, including the area around American Mechanics Cemetery and other nearby cemeteries. One hundred years later, the cemetery had been neglected and fallen into serious disrepair, and was considered no longer suitable for a final, eternal resting place. So in 1950, the Cemetery Association voted to sell it to the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

PHA bid out the relocation, and the bodies were to be removed and reinterred to Philadelphia Memorial Park in Frazer, Chester. When they started building the Raymond Rosen Housing Project though, they found that not all the remains had been moved, not by a long shot. As more bodies were found, they were moved to a mass grave at Lawnview Cemetery in Rockledge. Even years later, after the Raymond Rosen towers were torn down and a playground and school were in their place, more bodies were found. The poor handling of the graves speaks to the corruption of the era when it came to handling cemeteries that stood in the way of "progress."

The poor handling of the graves has made finding the final resting place of your ancestors extremely difficult; there are really no records of who went where, or where their new plots are, that is if they weren't relocated to a mass grave.

There are records from their original burial tho. The Chester County Historical Society came into possession of a bunch of boxes of original records. If you think you have a relative that was buried there, you might at least be able to get a little more information. The record here for William, for example, gave me a big clue about the rest of William's siblings. For a long time, William Chappell (1800) wasn't just the oldest William Chappell in my family tree, he was the oldest Chappell. This record gave me a hint about the rest of his family - the plot was owned by John H Chappell, who is not one of William's children or any other relation that I had come across at that time. I've since learned that he is William's oldest brother; this record was an early clue about William's own ancestry.

References:

• A Journey Into the Past blog
• Find A Grave entry for American Mechanics Cemetery
• Old Images of Philadelphia

The 1860 Census

The 1860 census that William appears on has presented a few mysteries, a few of which have been cleared up but one that still remains.

The first mystery - and one that initially kept me from even accepting this record as being for "my" William - was this: what is he doing in Hunterdon County, NJ? Every other record I had found to that point showed him living in Pennsylvania, and I had records from both before and after 1860. But, combined with what I now know about his property sale from "Byberry Waltons : an account of four English brothers, Nathaniel & Thomas & Daniel & William Walton", moving to NJ at that time makes a bit of sense.

But who he moved in with is the second mystery - who is Thomas Chappell? I had assumed it must be a brother, but, as with the cemetery record, I had no real concrete evidence of that. I have since learned it was in fact his older brother, but I'll talk about that when I write about William's father, Thomas Chappell.

Finally, who is Noah? He is grouped with other children of William, so presumably he is a child of William. But, there's no other record of him that I've been able to locate. Someday, hopefully, I'll be able to uncover who he really is, but for now, he remains a mystery.

A bonus mystery on this census is, who is the 25 year old William? He may be William's (1800) child, but I think it is more likely that he is a child of Thomas, because of where he is in the list, and the fact that he was born in NJ. Sadly, it has been tough to piece together much information about Thomas to this point.

The Children of William and Margaret

William and Margaret had several children together:

• John Thompson Chappell, born 1831, died 1915, married Angeline Scull
• William Frederick Chappell, born 1836, died 1917, married Emma Lentz
• Emma Chappell, born 1839, died 1866, married Willard Ward
• Charles L Chappell, born about 1842, died 1866
• Margaret Chappell, born 1845, died 1862
• Noah Chappell (maybe), born about 1849, died after 1860

Three of their children - John Thompson, William Frederick, and Charles L - served in the Union Army during the Civil War. I hope to tell their stories soon.