I believe that the solemn couple in this photo are my maternal grandfather’s parents, W.H. (William Henry) Smith and Lizzie (Mary Elizabeth) Siglin. Recently, I’ve been experimenting with code to create animations from genealogical data. Using this process to look at what I know about this side of the family, I came to feel that W.H. and Lizzie were practically destined to meet. They were born in 1852, one month apart, in Pennsylvania, William in Bloomsburg, just down the Susquehanna River from Lizzie in Ransom Township. Their families both headed west to Lee County, Illinois. William’s ancestors are in green, Lizzie’s in purple.
Lizzie’s parents and maternal grandparents all came west together in 1855. They may have been motivated by the Illinois Central Railroad’s mass advertising campaign aimed at getting farmers and tradesmen in the east to buy the railroad’s land in Illinois (Gates, 172-173). What most likely clinched the deal is that one of Lizzie’s uncles made the same journey a few years previously. According to family historian Eleanor Siglin Filean, Uncle Jacob, a farmer, left Pennsylvania because the soil on his farm was so poor “he had to carry a spade of dirt a rod [5.5 yards] to cover a hill of corn” (Siglin Filean, p. 8). He must have given a generally favorable report about life in Illinois, though I wonder if he had some pointed things to say about the travel conditions. Just before they left Pennsylvania, Lizzie’s parents had her and her sister baptized, perhaps as a spiritual safeguard in case the trip proved fatal (Presbyterian Historical Society).
William came west later, at some point before he and Lizzie married in 1878. You can see his mother, Eliza Bousch Smith, trailing him. All three of his siblings also ended up nearby.
If I include siblings and neighbors in the animation, you can see that Lizzie’s and William’s people were part of a larger community all heading west. Sibling follows sibling, parent follows child, neighbor follows neighbor, taking on incalculable risk in hopes of a better life.
Special thanks to the Lee County Historical and Genealogical Society. Gathering the data for these animations would have been much harder without the online index databases they make available to their members.
Next time: the Federal legislation without which my maternal grandmother’s parents probably wouldn’t have met.
Works cited
Gates, Paul Wallace. The Illinois Central Railroad and Its Colonization Work. Harvard University Press, 1934.
Presbyterian Historical Society; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; U.S., Presbyterian Church Records, 1701-1907, volume 1833-1879, Bald Mount Presbyterian Church. Accessed 8/14/2023 on Ancestry.com.
Siglin Filean, Eleanor. Siglin Family History. Anundsen Publishing Company, 1971.
