ancestor-sketch
Way family among early settlers in Noble County (newspaper clipping)
Newspaper biographical sketch by Burns Harlan, Times Regional Editor, of Edward Taylor Way (1812–1879, Isle of Wight to Noble County) and his wife Anna Ellison (b. 1821, Coppull, Lancashire), enumerating their nine children — the deep-time English emigration of the Way line into Ohio. Preserved in Chuck's family papers with handwritten genealogical annotations.
The “Way family among early settlers in Noble County” newspaper clipping — written by Burns Harlan, Times Regional Editor — is the central biographical record of the English-immigrant Way family that brings the Way name into Chuck’s maternal Davis line. The clipping has been preserved in Chuck’s family papers with handwritten margin annotations by an earlier-generation family genealogist, settling several disputed family details. It is one of the four key family-papers documents on the Davis-Way side of the archive (alongside the Anderson 1894 letter, the Wildermuth-Fleming Heritage, and the Belle Way 1901 wedding portrait).
What the clipping documents
The clipping draws on the 1887 Watkins’s History of Noble County in describing the Way family as part of the early English-immigrant farming generation that broke ground in southeastern Ohio in the 1840s and 1850s. Its substantive content covers:
- Edward Taylor Way (1812-1879) — born on the Isle of Wight, England, the founding emigrant of the Way family branch in Noble County, Ohio. The Isle of Wight is a thirty-mile-wide chalk-down island off the south coast of Hampshire, four miles across the Solent from Portsmouth — one of the great working-class agricultural and naval emigrant counties of mid-nineteenth-century England.
- Anna Ellison (b. 1821, Coppull, Lancashire, England) — Edward’s wife, of the Lancashire cotton-mill belt south of Preston. The Way-Ellison marriage of 27 January 1845 at Morgan County, Ohio is the Isle-of-Wight-meets-Lancashire crossing that founded the Way line in Ohio.
- The nine Way-Ellison children: Elizabeth, David R., Mary A., Abagail, Edward E., Henry, Sarah E., Emily J. and William M.
The handwritten margin annotation
A handwritten note on the clipping, in an earlier-generation family hand, annotates the eldest daughter:
“Elizabeth, the oldest, was married twice. Her first husband was Lindley Yarnall.”
The Yarnall name brings a Quaker-and-Welsh-origin Pennsylvania-and-Ohio surname into the Way-Ellison story — a research thread for the eldest Way daughter’s marriages.
What it does NOT document — the next generation forward to Chuck
The clipping covers Edward Taylor Way’s generation and his children. It does NOT directly enumerate the next generation (the grandchildren), through which Chuck’s direct line runs:
- Edward E. Way (1851-1924) — Edward Taylor’s eldest known son, married Tacy Elizabeth Matthews in 1872 and fathered ten children
- Victoria Anna Way Davis (1874-1903) — Edward E.’s eldest daughter, Chuck’s maternal great-great-grandmother, who married William Armstrong Davis and became the mother of Homer Edward Davis
- Belsora “Belle” Way Wickens (1880-1912) — Edward E.’s younger daughter, whose 25 September 1901 wedding portrait is the family-papers document that surfaces the rest of this generation
A clarification June 2026
Earlier passes of this archive misread the clipping — in the absence of the family-papers wedding portrait, I had inferred that Victoria Anna Way (born 1874) was the daughter of Edward Taylor Way directly. The 1901 wedding portrait identification legend, most likely annotated by Dorothy Marie Davis Wildermuth (Chuck’s maternal grandmother), labels Edward E. Way as “great-grandfather” and Tacy Matthews as “great-grandmother” — making them Victoria’s parents and Edward Taylor + Anna Ellison her grandparents. The GEDCOM trace (June 2026) confirms this generational placement.
The clipping is therefore the biographical document of Chuck’s maternal three-times-great-grandparents and four-times-great-grandparents — the deep-time English emigration of the Way line into Ohio. It is the documentary anchor of the Way-side family of Crooked Tree Cemetery, Noble County, Ohio, where four generations of the line are buried.
Scan
A high-resolution scan of the original clipping is pending. The substantive content above is sufficient for the family-papers reference; the original clipping itself, with its handwritten annotations, will be added to this page when scanned.
Sources: Newspaper clipping in Chuck’s family papers, shared June 2026 (the clipping survives as a single newspaper sheet with handwritten margin annotations); Eesley/Wildermuth GEDCOM tree (June 2026 trace) for the cross-checking of the generational placements; the 1887 Watkins’s History of Noble County on which the clipping draws.