215th birthday
For members of the Kidder family
David Franklin Kidder was born on September 7, 1809. Today is his 215th birthday.
He was Gary’s 4th great-grandfather, an ancestor on his paternal line.
David was born in New York (probably in Erie County near Lake Erie); his parents were Stephen and Catherine Elizabeth Kidder. He had at least one older brother, Gideon, and at least one little sister, Achsah. His father, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, died around Christmas in 1812; David was only three years old.
We don’t currently know much about his early life, but by the age of 20 he was living in rural Washington County, Ohio. That’s where he married his wife, Catherine Barnhart, on March 21, 1830. The couple had their first surviving child, a son named Rufus, in the summer of 1835. They would eventually have a total of at least 10 confirmed children together (perhaps as many as 12).
David filed a land patent for a little under 40 acres in what is now Independence Township there in Washington County, Ohio in July of 1844. He and his family lived on this small farm until sometime after 1860. David worked as a miller — a person who grinds grain to make flour — during this time period.
By the summer of 1880, David and his wife had moved just across the Ohio River to rural Pleasants County, West Virginia. Some of their adult children lived near them there, too. David was now working as a cooper — a person who makes and repairs wooden barrels. Interestingly, the federal census for this year marks David as being “maimed, crippled, or otherwise disabled”; we currently don’t know what his physical disability was or the story behind it.
David Franklin Kidder died of dysentery on June 17, 1889 at the age of 79. At the time he was living on a boat on the Ohio River near what is now the town of Chester, West Virginia (across the river from East Liverpool, Ohio). His body was sent back down river to his family; he was buried in Clay Point Cemetery.
A small collection of documents gives us this sketch of the life of David Franklin Kidder. We don’t know his whole story; we don’t know what his personality was like or the details of his relationships or how he was perceived in his community. But we can take this opportunity to remember him as an ancestor. Happy 215th, David.