From: Kim Hill
Sunday, October 14, 2007 1
Marianna Henry married Charles Emery Hill 29 June 1887. Charles was my
grandfather's older brother by three to four years.
Their parents, Isaac Emery Hill and Deborah Charlotte
Shaw had both been married before. I have a census
report with Isaac's children from the first marriage
living with he and Deborah, along with Deborah's
children from her first marriage to one Jedediah
Newcomb.
I can find nothing about Isaac's first wife, not even
her name. I have not found anything more about what
happened to their kids either. Jedediah went to
California to prospect for gold and drowned in a gold
camp known as Yankee Jim's. So we have Isaac and
Deborah getting together, both with children from
previous marriages and then having three of their own.
Josie, the first born, died at age sixteen. That left
Charles and my grandfather, Everitt Merrill Hill.
Isaac died 29 Nov 1880. Charles was fifteen or sixteen
and Everitt was twelve. Three years later, Deborah
moved with her two sons to Colorado to join her son,
Bethuel (Bert) who was there to mine for gold. I guess
they had gold on the mind.
They had some success. The family story is that Charles
and Everitt leased a played out mine for a few months (I
don't know what happened to Bert). On the last day of
the lease they hit a big nugget of gold and worked into
the night to get it out. They then hid it in a barrel
of molasses and headed for California where they sold it
and shared the profits. I'm not sure just when this was
but my grandfather said he went to college in Napa,
California at age twenty. This was probably in 1888.
It was a theological school. He met my grandmother,
Alfafata Kimball Hill (whose family was also from Maine)
there and then became a Methodist minister.
I guess this is when the brothers separated. Charles
married Marianna in 1887 and they must have spent their
lives in Nebraska. Everitt spent his life as a
Methodist minister, being assigned to many congregations
up and down the west coast and even in Mexico where my
father was born. He and Alfafata spent their retirement
years living with my parents in Federal Way, Washington
and died when I was five or six years old.
My direct line of paternal ancestors all lived and died
in Southern Maine from 1633 until Deborah took her sons
to Colorado in 1883. That's an amazing 250 years.
Deborah eventually moved to Napa, California herself and
died there in 1906.
Since this morning I discovered
that Deborah moved to Napa because she once again
followed her oldest son who was there as part of a
mercury mining operation