Clara (Peel) Eesley

Clara Peel was born in Topeka, Kansas, daughter of James and Ella Peel of Mount Sterling, Kentucky. She married William Eesley (Chuck’s great-great-uncle, one of Albert Robert and Jennie Goldie’s ten children) and settled with him at College Corner, on the Ohio-Indiana state line. They had one child:

• Frances Eesley (b. 1901) — m. H. Toney, a farmer near College Corner; one son named William E. Toney for his maternal grandfather.

The Sir Robert Peel claim

William Eesley’s c. 1916 obituary in a Butler County, Ohio memoirs volume describes Clara as “a lineal descendant of the eminent English statesman, Sir Robert Peel.” Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) was twice Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (1834–35, 1841–46), founder of the modern Conservative Party, founder of the Metropolitan Police of London (whose officers still take their colloquial names “Bobbies” and “Peelers” from his), and the prime mover behind the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws — the act that split his party but is now broadly credited with averting Irish-famine-era starvation in Britain and with founding the United Kingdom’s free-trade era. He is one of the most consequential British statesmen of the 19th century.

Whether Clara’s descent is documented or family-folkloric is so far an open question in this archive. Late-19th and early-20th century American family histories routinely embedded a connection to a famous British statesman or aristocrat without surviving the rigor of late-20th-century genealogy. The claim is recorded here as the obituary records it, and it is queued for research at the Peel Society and in 19th-century Kansas Peel-family records.

If true, the line Sir Robert Peel → ? → James Peel → Clara Peel → Eesley would be the most consequential English-statesman thread on Chuck’s paternal side.

Source: William Eesley obituary, c. 1916, Butler County Ohio memoirs collection — see the document page. Page is a stub.