Ebenezer Kelley

Ebenezer Kelley was the father of Johnson B. Kelley and the grandfather of Martha Kelley. He was born 2 October 1763 in Somerset County, New Jersey, the son of Samuel Kelly and Eunice Hough — a birth in the last years of colonial New Jersey, a dozen years before the Revolution.

New Jersey to the western-Virginia frontier

On 2 December 1790 he married Rachel Johnson (1769–1855) in Allegany County, Maryland — the far-western tip of Maryland, in the Appalachian uplands. Rachel was a daughter of Robert Johnson and Mary Vannoy, one of the large Johnson families that had moved down from Hunterdon County, New Jersey into the same mountain country. The marriage place marks the family mid-migration: born in coastal New Jersey, married in western Maryland, and settled at last across the ridge in the part of Virginia that would become West Virginia in 1863.

Ebenezer and Rachel raised a large family — the GEDCOM records some twelve children, among them the eldest, Johnson B. Kelley (b. 1810). He died 18 May 1816 in what is now Barbour County, West Virginia (then still Randolph County, Virginia), only about fifty-two, and was buried at the Elliott Cemetery in Meadowville, Barbour County — the same mountain burying ground that would hold Rachel and several of her Johnson kin.

Source: family FamilySearch / GEDCOM tree (Dale Eesley). Vital dates, places, and parentage drawn from that record; the migration reading follows the recorded birth (New Jersey), marriage (Maryland), and death (western Virginia) places.