Edward Taylor Way

Edward Taylor Way is Chuck’s maternal four-times-great-grandfather on the Way line and the English-immigrant founder of the Way family branch that brings the Way surname into the Davis line through his grandson Edward E. Way and great-granddaughter Victoria Anna Way Davis.

From the Isle of Wight to Noble County

Edward Taylor Way was born 11 September 1812 on the Isle of Wight, England — a thirty-mile-wide chalk-down island off the south coast of Hampshire, four miles across the Solent from Portsmouth. Per Robert Earl’s genealogy, he was a son of William F. Way and Harriet Rowlands, and came to America in 1820, at about eight years old, with his father, mother and a sister; the family landed at Norfolk, Virginia and settled in the Duck Creek Valley of Washington County, Ohio (his father, a blacksmith, later moved to Wood County, Virginia, where he died in 1846). Young Edward grew up poor, for a time working Peter Taylor’s farm for a third of its product; in 1833 he sold his only possession, a horse, to make the first payment on 40 acres at Crooked Tree in Noble County, and by hard labor built that into a 600-acre estate. He was a Methodist whose “word was as good as his bond.”

The two marriages

Edward Taylor Way was married twice — a fact the archive’s earlier account, drawn only from the children’s roster, had missed:

First, to Elizabeth Raney, in 1834. Elizabeth was born in 1821 and died ten years into the marriage, in 1844, buried in the Taylor Cemetery near Crooked Tree. Two sons were born of this marriage — one in 1838, one in 1841 — both of whom died at birth and were never named.
Second, to Anna Ellison (b. 28 June 1821, christened 22 July 1821 at Coppull, Lancashire, England), in 1845. This is the marriage that produced the nine Way children, and the line that runs to Chuck.

The couple settled in the Crooked Tree / Jackson Township area of Noble County. Their son Edward E. Way (b. 14 May 1851) is Chuck’s direct ancestor through Victoria Anna Way Davis → Homer Davis → Dorothy Davis Wildermuth → Terrie Lee → Chuck.

The Way family newspaper biography

The clipping “Way family among early settlers in Noble County” — preserved in Chuck’s family papers with handwritten margin annotations by an earlier-generation family genealogist — is the substantive biographical record of Edward Taylor Way and his family. It enumerates his children as Elizabeth, David R., Mary A., Abagail, Edward E., Henry, Sarah E., Emily J. and William M., and carries the genealogical note:

“Elizabeth, the oldest, was married twice. Her first husband was Lindley Yarnall.”

The 1887 Watkins’s History of Noble County records the Way family as part of the early English-immigrant farming generation that broke ground in southeastern Ohio in the 1840s and 1850s. Edward Taylor Way is the founding generation of the Way family in Ohio.

Death and the Way-name line going forward

Edward Taylor Way died 20 December 1879, age 67. Per the Beverly Dispatch, he had started from his Crooked Tree home for Marietta that day, taking the cars (the railroad) from Dexter City — but before the train reached Macksburg he was dead, of supposed heart disease. He was buried in the Crooked Tree Cemetery, Noble County. By that date his son Edward E. Way had been married to Tacy Elizabeth Matthews for seven years (since 1872), and his granddaughter Victoria Anna Way had been born (1873) and was six years old. Edward Taylor lived to know the granddaughter through whom the Way name would enter Chuck’s direct maternal Davis line, even if she would not survive to know her own son Homer past the age of three.

The Way connection runs from this man — English emigrant, Isle of Wight to Noble County, Ohio — forward in time five generations to Chuck.

From the Isle of Wight to Noble County

The two marriages

The Way family newspaper biography

Death and the Way-name line going forward

See also

Appears in