🌿The Newberry Line: Service, Struggle, and the Echo of My Birthday
It’s more than a photo. It’s a page from the story of resilience, partnership, and the kind of love that weathered time and terrain. One snowy kiss… and a lifetime tucked into it.
Welcome to My Journey Through the Past..continued
In tracing the threads of my family history, I’ve come to see that ancestral memory is less like a ladder and more like a tapestry. Each strand—some faded, some vibrant—forms a portrait of lives shaped by choices, silence, hardship, love, and legacy.
At the center of this recent discovery is Russell C. Newberry, my great-grandfather on my father’s side. Born in New York in 1824, Russell came of age as America was rapidly shifting—settlement pushing westward, railways expanding, and civic identities forming.
At the age of 21, Russell married Sally Elisabeth Hennesey in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and together they moved between counties in Michigan, raising a family that included:
- Charles Newberry (b. 1850)
- Selden J. Newberry (1853–1933)
- Loretaus John Franklin Newberry (1855–1945)
- Peter Newberry (b. ~1856)
- Laura Newberry (1858–1898)
On December 20, 1861, Russell enlisted in the Union Army, a courageous act from a man who had six children at home and a country at war. But Russell’s story doesn’t end on the battlefield. It ends in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on March 2, 1864, with chronic alcoholism listed as his cause of death.
That same date—March 2nd—is my birthday, exactly one hundred years later in 1964.
I don’t take that lightly. It feels as if his story reached forward through time, handing me a thread to pull, a tale to tell. The day that closed his chapter opened mine.
His father, my second great-grandfather, was Garrett Newberry, born around 1802 in Chautauqua County, New York. Garrett lived in several New York towns including Ellery, Poland, and Ellicott, and passed away in 1851, the same year his father likely did.
Garrett’s wife—my second great-grandmother, Laura Guthrie—was born in Connecticut in 1784. She gave birth to Leman in 1813 and Russell in 1824, living to the age of 76 and dying in Ellery, New York in 1860.
The Newberry line extends even further back to Stephan Newberry, my third great-grandfather, born in 1778. He was part of the first generations formed in post-Revolutionary America. He fathered Garrett and Stephan Jr., and though I haven’t found record of his spouse yet, the existence of his sons paints the outline of a life filled with quiet legacy.
These men and women were not headlines. They were homesteaders, soldiers, survivors. Their stories—fragmented but enduring—live in me. And now, they live in the light.
Exactly one hundred years apart, my great-grandfather Russell’s life ended as mine began.
Perhaps that was a handoff. Perhaps the echo of his pain became my call to create. And so I write—this, and everything to come—as a form of homage, healing, and continuation.
Each ancestor is a chapter in the storybook of our soul. ~ Michelle Allen
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