Heritage Research: what the research finds

Silas White Leonard's own 1850 census entry gives him a plain-sounding occupation, "Music Teacher," in Charlestown, Clark County, Indiana, but that single line understates a much more particular kind of work, one that put him at the center of how the American frontier's Restoration Movement churches actually sang.

In 1848 Leonard co-published The Christian Psalmist with A. D. Fillmore, a young singing-school teacher and composer whose musical gifts had shown themselves early: family accounts describe him singing harmony on his father's knee at two or three years old, teaching singing schools by sixteen, and composing his own music soon after. By the time he and Leonard produced The Christian Psalmist together, Fillmore was twenty-four, and the book would go on, by his own biographer's account, to have "a more general circulation than any other of his publications," a claim entirely consistent with the roughly 560,000 copies eventually printed. The likely division of labor fits the pattern of the era: Fillmore supplying original tunes and the technical craft of shape-note notation, Leonard contributing text selection, doctrinal vetting, and, as an established preacher already working the Indiana-Illinois circuit, the distribution networks that got the book into congregations' hands.

What made the book distinctive was its use of "shape notes," a notation system, invented in New England around 1800, that gave each scale degree its own note-head shape (triangle, square, diamond, and so on) so that singers with no formal musical training could learn to read music by sight, matching shape to syllable to pitch. The system had cooled in its birthplace but found what one historian calls "a suitable new home in the frontier areas of the South and West," where it fit the culture of small, self-taught rural congregations perfectly. For the Restoration Movement specifically, a tradition of "plain," often non-instrumental worship that depended entirely on congregational singing to carry a service, a well-designed shape-note hymnal wasn't a convenience, it was infrastructure. The Christian Psalmist filled a real gap: the movement's earliest hymnbooks had been words-only, no music at all, and tunebooks like Leonard and Fillmore's represented the next stage, teaching entire congregations to sing in parts for the first time.

That teaching happened not in a classroom but on the road. A "singing school" in this era was typically a short run of evening sessions, a few weeks, several nights a week, held in a schoolhouse, church, or private home, with the teacher boarding with a local family and paid partly in cash, partly in kind. Leonard would have carried his tunebooks from town to town on horseback or by wagon over rough roads, teaching solfège and shape-reading by night and very possibly preaching on Sundays in the same communities: the two roles, music teacher and Gospel preacher, weren't separate jobs so much as two faces of the same itinerant, deeply relational work. Singing schools doubled as one of the era's major social institutions, a place where young people gathered, courted, and a community's musical and religious life took shape together; the traveling preacher-teacher who ran one became, for a few weeks at a stretch, one of the most central figures in a small town's life.

Leonard carried that work from Charlestown, Indiana to a farm near Centralia, Illinois by 1856, trading full-time itinerancy for a home base from which to keep traveling, a pattern common enough among singing masters once family and farming pulled at the same time as the road. He died in 1870, having spent more than two decades putting a hymnal into the hands of congregations across the Midwest that, by any reasonable estimate, taught hundreds of thousands of people how to read music well enough to sing together, a legacy considerably larger than the modest "Music Teacher" line the 1850 census gave him.

That legacy left its own paper trail. A Louisville bookseller's advertisement, running in the Courier-Journal through the spring of 1849, lists The Christian Psalmist for sale barely a year after publication, real evidence the book found shelf space in the region's book trade almost immediately. Leonard revised and enlarged the book himself not long after: a surviving copy, written up in an Indiana newspaper's local-curiosity column in 1957, carries a title page crediting the new edition to "Silas W. Leonard" alone, copyrighted 1850 and printed by Horton & Griswold of Louisville, stereotypers. On its flyleaf, in a hand belonging to neither Leonard nor Fillmore, someone had written "Miss Mary Pavey's book bought April 1, 1857," an ordinary Indiana reader's own small act of claiming a book that would still be worth writing a newspaper column about a century later. It outlived its own century twice over: a second Indiana paper's "swap" column from September 1974, a hundred and four years after Leonard's death, records a reader offering "an 1854 music book by Silas W. Leonard, written in numbers" in trade for Civil War histories, still circulating as something worth keeping and trading more than a century on.

The land in Württemberg was never going to be Gustav Adolph Meebold's to inherit, so at nineteen he crossed an ocean instead. He was born 2 November 1850 and baptized eight days later in Sulz am Neckar, a small town in the Oberamt Sulz district of the Kingdom of Württemberg, then still an independent German state a generation before unification. He grew up in a place and a generation with a structural problem: Württemberg's farms weren't easily subdivided, so younger sons in large families routinely came of age with no realistic path to inherit enough land to support themselves. Population growth on top of periodic bad harvests deepened the pressure, and most German states of the era required military service that plenty of young men were glad to leave behind. Set against all of that, America offered cheap or free land, higher wages, and, by the late 1860s, a well-worn and increasingly organized way to get there.

Gustav left in 1869, at nineteen. The likely route for a Württemberger of that year ran overland by rail to Bremen, one of the two ports, with Le Havre, that southern and western Germans favored over Hamburg, then a steerage-class steamship crossing of roughly seven to ten days, a real improvement over the sailing ships his parents' generation would have known. Most German arrivals of that era landed in New York and passed through Castle Garden, the immigration station that operated from 1855 until Ellis Island opened in 1892, before continuing inland by rail. Nothing in the surviving record fixes Gustav's own ship or exact arrival date, but this was the ordinary path, and Chicago was where it brought him.

He didn't drift the way some immigrants did. Chicago in 1869 was one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, a rail and industrial hub with steady demand for labor and, just as important for a new arrival, an already-large German-speaking community: German churches, German newspapers, German social clubs that eased the landing. Chain migration mattered too; once people from a particular corner of Württemberg had settled somewhere, letters home describing real opportunities pulled relatives and neighbors to the same address. Gustav's own choice fits that well-documented pattern rather than standing out from it. What does stand out is how completely he stopped moving once he got there: an 1878 city directory, an 1888 directory, an 1881 marriage license, an 1892 voter registration, a 1904 directory, the 1910 census, all place him in Chicago without interruption for over four decades, a striking contrast to how restlessly his own descendants would later move around the country. He was doing more than just living there, too: a real estate transfer column from February 1899 shows him selling a Belmont Avenue lot for $4,000, and another from August 1905 shows him buying a parcel on Oakley Avenue, in the Lake View neighborhood, for $1,900, a nineteen-year-old arrival with no land of his own back in Württemberg who'd become, by middle age, a man who bought and sold Chicago real estate.

He married Louisa Herman on 9 August 1881, in Cook County. Her own origins are still unknown; the same searches that pinned down Gustav's exact hometown came up empty for hers, an asymmetry that isn't unusual in genealogical research, since a husband's naturalization and property records tend to leave a thicker paper trail than a wife's. Their first child likely came and went within the marriage's first year: a Chicago mortality report from August 1882 records the death, at ten days old, of an infant named Louisa Meebold, after her own mother, at a Carroll Avenue address not otherwise on record for the family. By 1910 the couple were settled at 5052 Barley Avenue in Chicago's 26th Ward with the youngest of their five children, Charles, then a teenager, alongside Agnes, Julius, who would grow up to be the one sibling who left Chicago's German community behind, settling in Niles, Michigan and spending his working life at the Kawneer Company there, Sophie, and Rosa. Sophie's own 1922 passport application, sworn as she prepared for missionary work in Bulgaria, turned out decades later to be the single richest surviving record of her parents' story. She wasn't the only one of Gustav and Louisa's daughters to answer that kind of call, and it turns out she wasn't even the first: a 1943 Chicago Tribune item covering a church's golden-anniversary reunion names the main speaker at the banquet as "Agnes Meebold Christian, for 30 years a missionary in China," meaning Agnes, the eldest daughter, went out around 1913, the same moment the Student Volunteer Movement was sending its own peak numbers of young, college-educated Americans to China, and had already been doing this work for a decade before Sophie's own passport application, going on to do it for two decades more. A Congregational family like theirs would almost certainly have gone out under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, the denomination's own foreign-mission body since 1812, and Agnes's own three-decade China career ran straight through the era's real upheavals: the last years of the warlord period, the Nationalist Revolution of the mid-1920s, the Japanese invasion from 1937, and the disruption or internment that followed Pearl Harbor for Americans caught in occupied China. A sixth sibling, Louise, turns out to have had the longest and most dramatic missionary career of the three. The earliest item in a full sweep of her brother Charles's own newspaper mentions, dated 1939, catches her mid-furlough: already twelve years into her China service by then, working under the American Board of Foreign Missions as a special representative of Illinois's Congregational and Christian churches, and having personally lived through a Communist incursion into the Fenchow area in 1936 and the Japanese invasion the following year. Twelve years in 1939 puts her own departure for China at around 1927, a full generation before the 1952 item that first brought her to light, which turns out to describe not her introduction to the work but her eventual displacement from it: twenty-five years in, boarding a ship in San Francisco for a new posting in the Micronesian Islands, not an idiosyncratic reassignment but part of a well-documented wave, after the 1949 Communist victory, foreign missions were squeezed out of China entirely within a few years, and sending boards scattered their displaced China staff across Asia and the Pacific rather than simply bringing them home. Three sisters, one calling, spread across four decades and, between Agnes and Louise, the same country and very nearly the same forced departure. Louise and Sophie were still unmarried a decade later, in 1962, when Charles's own obituary named them together, "Miss Louise and Miss Sophie," by then both settled in Elgin, Illinois; Agnes, married to a man named Christian by 1943 at the latest, had settled by then in Claremont, California. Gustav became a naturalized U.S. citizen before the Cook County court around 1890, and died in Chicago on 4 October 1911, at sixty, forty-two of those years spent in the one city he'd chosen as a nineteen-year-old with no land waiting for him at home.

Charles and Rachel: a marriage that kept moving

The youngest Meebold child, Charles Ludwig, grew up in that same Chicago household, born August 22, 1895. Rachel Mildred Worrell, born February 13, 1901, grew up across the same city, the daughter of John and Luella Worrell, one of at least six children, and by 1920 was working as a stenographer for a college, living with her parents on Champlain Avenue.

Charles's early twenties were shaped by the largest event of his generation. He registered for the WWI draft while living in Wheaton, DuPage County, a tall, medium-built young man with brown hair and gray eyes by his own card's description, and served overseas: passenger records show him departing Hoboken, New Jersey on May 10, 1918, and not returning until May 31, 1919, through Bordeaux, France, arriving in the war's final, bloodiest months and staying more than six months past the Armistice, long enough to place him among the units held for occupation duty or the slow work of closing depots and shipping equipment home. Whether Charles spent that year in front-line combat or in the Services of Supply logistics operation that kept a port city like Bordeaux running hasn't been pinned down by a specific unit record, but the shape of an American soldier's year in that window is well documented enough to say: whatever his job, it placed him inside the machinery of the war's climax and its long aftermath.

Charles and Rachel married on October 30, 1920, in Chicago, he 25, she 19, her stenographer's job ending, as was typical for the era, with marriage. Their son Richard was born in Chicago the following September. Unlike Gustav, the family did not stay put: Evanston by 1933, Winona, Minnesota by the mid-1930s, confirmed independently by both a city directory and a census record, and West Palm Beach, Florida by 1940, where Charles worked as a shop foreman in a city just then climbing out of its own Depression-era collapse.

Rachel's own life in West Palm Beach turned out to be more than just raising a large family. Her civic leadership starts earlier than the YWCA years she'd become best known for: a May 1943 item catches her presiding over a Women's Society of Christian Service meeting at First Methodist Church, planning that June's spring choir concert, the same June found her teaching the beginners' department of the church's own Vacation Bible School and presiding again at a mid-month meeting where the society, after hearing a report on the annual Methodist conference at Lakeland, voted to send a subscription of the missionary magazine World Outlook to the Coast Guard's SPARS trainees, and by month's end a reception for the church's returning pastors names her outright "president of the Women's Society of Christian Service," a real title, not just a meeting chaired, a year and a half before the YWCA introduction that would define the rest of her public life. The pattern held through the summer: a late-July all-day WSCS meeting, Rachel presiding as usual, voted to send that quarter's undirected donation to China and to sponsor a Black delegate to the Youth Conference, and the day's program, a skit on leadership training in the Orient, was performed in part by her own daughter Lucile, a small, direct echo of her husband's aunts' own China-missionary careers showing up in the next generation. She had a musical side too, not just an organizing one: that same July, a different congregation's social club program styles her "Mrs. Charles L. Meebold, contralto," singing three numbers for the town's Three Score and Ten Club, and a 1947 Easter cantata would later name her a soloist again. That YWCA introduction is well documented in its own right: a December 1944 open house, previewed days ahead in the same paper as being held specifically "to introduce the new general secretary, Mrs. Charles L. Meebold," honored her alongside the YWCA's own advisory board at the Y's building, just weeks before Christmas. It marked a real shift, not just a new club to add to the list: most women's civic organizations of the era ran on volunteer boards, and "general secretary" meant something different, the chief professional officer of the local association, a salaried administrator running daily operations and answering to that same board rather than sitting on it. For a woman in West Palm Beach to hold that job continuously into the late 1950s meant a measure of economic independence and formal authority genuinely rare for her era and place, a step up from, not a replacement of, the church leadership she'd already built. An April 1946 West Palm Beach Woman's Club program meeting quotes her as "executive secretary of the YWCA," giving a talk on "Work of the Girl Reserves" alongside reports from the Junior Red Cross and the Boy Scouts; that September, a "Y Team Plans Party" item names her "YWCA executive director," supervising a junior high Y Team's activities. By May 1950 a women's club benefit canasta party had raised $193.50 for the Y, and it was Rachel, styled this time as its "secretary," who stood up to thank the donors and spell out where the money would go: repainting the interior of the Y's own residence, and aid for the segregated "Negro YWCA Vacation Bible School" across town, a small, concrete window into how Jim Crow's separate civic infrastructure actually got funded in postwar Palm Beach County. Her civic reach went beyond the Y itself: by January 1953 she was presiding over a planning meeting for the Florida Chain of Missionary Assemblies, an interdenominational gathering that pulled in Methodist, Baptist, Episcopal, and Christian church representatives alike, and a 1957 tea still found her carrying the title "director," eleven years after the first record of it, discussing a fundraising campaign already past its halfway mark. The stenographer from Champlain Avenue had become a working civic leader in her adopted city, with newspaper mentions of "Mrs. Charles L. Meebold" stretching from the early 1940s through 1961. Her daughter Jean followed the same path early: a March 1945 item catches the two of them at the very same YWCA-affiliated club ceremony, Jean freshly married and just being initiated, Rachel already presiding, sixteen years before Jean would head Greenville's Green Hill Garden Club in her own right.

Charles and Rachel raised at least six children: Richard, Jean, Doris, Lucille, and Phyllis. Their world was upended on November 16, 1943, when Richard, by then a First Lieutenant and pilot, was killed in a training-flight crash at Buckingham Army Air Field, one of sixteen men lost in two nearly simultaneous accidents at the same base that day, their only son, married just sixteen months. That same week, a Palm Beach Post society column reported Rachel presiding over the WSCS's regular Tuesday meeting exactly as usual, the paper giving no indication of what the family was facing; a few lines away on the same page, a second brief item noted that some other church event had been called off "because of word of the sudden death of Lt. Richard Meebold, son of the president, at Fort Myers," the first time the paper identified her that plainly by her civic title alone. Twenty-five days later, his sister Jean married Glenn Ellis, and the name Richard carried forward into a later generation of the family. By 1947 another daughter, Doris, was in her second year at Scarritt College in Nashville, training for full-time Christian service as a director of religious education, an echo of her great-aunts Sophie's and Louise's own missionary callings a generation earlier, this time closer to home.

Charles died April 8, 1962, at 66, after an extended illness, still at the Jessamine Street address, twenty five years after he'd come to West Palm Beach from Minnesota; Rachel outlived him by more than two decades, dying in August 1983. Between Gustav and his grandchildren, three generations of this family crossed a continent's worth of American geography: Württemberg to Chicago, then Chicago to Wheaton to wartime France to Evanston to Winona to West Palm Beach, the first generation staying put once it found solid ground, the next following work, then following the family that grew up around them.

Every other immigrant line in this family's tree so far has come from Germany, or traces back to England and Cornwall. William Drewry Silvey may be different: a family tradition, recorded on his own Find a Grave memorial, places his birth on February 18, 1752, in Fetteresso, a parish near the coastal town of Stonehaven in Aberdeenshire, on Scotland's northeast coast, which would make him the first Scottish ancestor found in the Ellis family tree. That specific birthplace is not yet independently verified, and a closer look at where it comes from (see the note at the close of this chapter) means it should be read as a family tradition for now, not a settled fact.

Fetteresso sits in Scotland's Lowlands, not the Highlands, which points toward a specific, well-documented emigration pattern rather than the more famous story of Highland Clearance evictions. Northeast Lowland Scots of William's generation left home for quieter, more economic reasons: rising rents, short leases, and the "improvement" movement's farm consolidations squeezing tenant families out of secure prospects. Contemporary accounts from exactly this Inverness-to-Aberdeen corridor cite "extravagant rents extracted by landlords" as the reason given for the era's steady outflow of people. Against that, the Carolina backcountry offered what home increasingly couldn't: land a man could actually own, in a region wage differentials made the crossing worth the risk, a laborer in America, by some contemporary reckonings, could earn in a day and a half what a Scottish worker made in a week.

Almost nothing is known about his crossing itself. No ship, no port, no date survives in any record found so far. What is known comes from his own Find a Grave memorial and a matching Find a Grave Index entry, which agree closely on the birth and death years already suggested by a family tree: he died in 1789, in Laurens County, South Carolina, in the upcountry region that, through the mid-to-late 1700s, absorbed wave after wave of Scottish and Scots-Irish settlers moving inland from Charleston and other Atlantic ports, many of them clustering together and rebuilding the same Presbyterian congregations and community structures they'd left behind. His death (just six years after the Revolutionary War's end) places him squarely in that settlement generation, a Scot who found his way to the Carolina backcountry sometime in the third quarter of the eighteenth century and never left.

He married Margaret Mahon in 1772, whose own origin is on far firmer ground than his: born in 1750 in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the daughter of Joseph Mahon and Eleanor Duvall, an Irish immigrant couple who had settled in Maryland a generation earlier. Whatever brought William to the Carolina backcountry, Margaret's own family had already made an Atlantic crossing of its own, just to a different colony first. She outlived him by decades, dying in 1845 at Fairburn, Fulton County, Georgia, at about ninety-five, and was buried at the Silvey Plantation Cemetery alongside their son Drewery Hampton Sr., a generation after he had carried the family from Carolina into Georgia.

His son, Drewery Hampton Silvey Sr., carried the family forward into Georgia, dying in 1860 in Fairburn, Fulton County: his own life independently documented across four separate record collections, a Find a Grave entry, actual Fulton and Campbell County cemetery records, a Georgia probate record, and property tax digests spanning multiple years in the 1850s. That son's own son, Drewery Hampton Silvey Jr., would go on to become the most extensively documented figure on this whole tree: a Union-loyalist farmer whose Southern Claims Commission case file describes Sherman's own army camping on his land during the fall of Atlanta, and Kilpatrick's cavalry taking from it again two months later, on the march that opened the drive to Savannah.

Three generations, then: a Scottish immigrant who settled the Carolina upcountry before 1789 as part of a well-worn economic migration out of Lowland Scotland; his son who moved the family into Fulton County, Georgia by the 1850s; and his grandson who lived through the Civil War in that same corner of Georgia, on the losing side of the war his own state fought but the winning side of the loyalty question the Southern Claims Commission was built to judge. The family's Scottish beginning, once invisible, is a real possibility worth telling, but not yet the settled anchor this chapter once claimed for the whole line.

A note on why this chapter now hedges where it once didn't: a deeper research pass traced William's Fetteresso birthplace, and the six further generations his own memorial names back into it, to a single Find a Grave contributor's family tree, built in a few days in April 2022 and citing nothing but itself. That same chain styles several generations "Sir," "Lady," and "Sir Knight," titles that can't actually run consecutively in a real family the way they do here, and includes at least one marriage recorded at an impossible age. None of that touches William's own well-documented American life, his death in Laurens County, his son's and grandson's independently sourced Georgia lives, only the specific claim of exactly where in Scotland, and from exactly which Scottish family, he came. That detail now stands as family tradition, not established fact, unless an actual Scottish parish record turns up to confirm it.