John Wallace Anderson
also known as Wallace (presumed family form); the only son of Rev. Anderson with documented descendants
b. 1864-06-21, Venice, Washington County, Pennsylvania
d. 1953-07-01, Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania (buried Anderson Farm, Leeper, Clarion County)
He was the second-eldest of the six Anderson children and the first son — born at Venice, Washington County, Pennsylvania on 21 June 1864, three weeks before Sherman’s army would close on Atlanta. His father Rev. Abraham was thirty-two; his mother Nancy Jane had been pregnant with him through the Battle of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, and Cold Harbor. He carried his Presbyterian-minister father’s first name and the family’s distinctive Wallace middle (his elder sister Anna Janett would marry a Kelso who used the same middle name — “Wallace” was a regional Scots-Presbyterian family name in southwestern Pennsylvania, not coincidence).
The Emporia marriage
His first marriage took him west. On 21 May 1888 in Emporia, Lyon County, Kansas, he married Mary Ellen Lloyd — born 1859 in Ontario, Canada. The Kansas wedding location is the surprise of his record. Emporia in 1888 was a railroad town on the Kansas Pacific line, a center of cattle-shipping and the home of the State Normal School (now Emporia State University). What John Wallace was doing there at 23 — whether he was working the railroad, teaching at the Normal, or simply visiting family who had moved out — is the queued question. Mary Ellen herself had been born in Ontario but appears to have come into Pittsburgh’s orbit by the time of her death; she died in Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, on (year only) 1896, age 37. The death-in-Pittsburgh-after-a-Kansas-marriage pattern suggests they had moved east to a Pittsburgh-region life after Emporia, possibly when his father aged in Venice and his sister Anna Janett married William Kelso in 1891.
The second marriage
He was 32 when Mary Ellen died. He waited four years. On 27 April 1900 in Pittsburgh, he married Inez Lucretia Keefer — born 13 July 1878 in Perry Township, Clarion County, PA. She was fourteen years younger than he was. Clarion County is in western Pennsylvania, north of Pittsburgh near the Allegheny River; the Keefer family was from one of the small townships of the county’s farming and oil-region geography. Inez died 21 November 1946 in Oil City, Venango County — Pittsburgh’s oil country, the heart of the Pennsylvania oil rush that had defined the regional economy since Drake’s 1859 strike at Titusville.
The Anderson Farm
John Wallace died 1 July 1953 in Pittsburgh at age 89 — outliving Inez by almost seven years and his first wife by fifty-seven. His burial place is recorded in Dale’s tree as “Anderson Farm, Leeper, Clarion County, Pennsylvania” — meaning by the end of his life he had family land in Clarion County, near Inez’s birthplace, that became the family’s burial ground. That this farm bears the Anderson name suggests it was either passed down to him from a Pennsylvania Anderson line or established by him; either way, it is the one family-property reference of his record. Leeper is a small unincorporated community in Farmington Township, Clarion County.
Position in the family
He was the only son of Rev. Abraham’s six children to leave a documented family line through the GEDCOM. The other son, William James (b. 1875, twelve years younger), has no marriage or descendants documented in Dale’s tree. Of the daughters, only Alice Gertrude — Chuck’s great-grandmother — has the continuing line to the present.
He is Chuck’s great-great-uncle on the paternal side.
Sources: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — John Wallace Anderson (L7T7-JM2); Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Mary Ellen Lloyd (LKZM-D32); Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Inez Lucretia Keefer (MZMD-1B4).