Johnson B. Kelley
b. 1810-07-25, Randolph County, Virginia (later West Virginia)
d. 1886-12-24, Taylor County, West Virginia
Johnson B. Kelley was the father of Martha Kelley and the eldest son of Ebenezer Kelley and Rachel Johnson. He was born 25 July 1810 in Randolph County, Virginia — in the mountain country that would become West Virginia in 1863.
On 17 January 1830, not yet twenty, he married Sarah Yoak in Randolph County. Together they had a large family — the GEDCOM records ten children, among them Martha Kelley along with Deborah Ann, John Wesley, Melvina, Amanda, Almira, Isaiah, Hester Ann, Alta California, and Rebecca. (He later married a second time, to Nancy A. Stevens.) The daughter named Alta California is a small marker of the era’s westward pull — a mid-century Appalachian family naming a child for the far Pacific coast.
He lived his whole life in the western-Virginia / West Virginia highlands, dying 24 December 1886 — Christmas Eve — in Taylor County, West Virginia, at seventy-six. Through his daughter Martha, this branch of the Kelley line runs forward into the family’s later Appalachian and Ohio generations.
Source: family FamilySearch / GEDCOM tree (Dale Eesley). Vital dates, marriage, and children drawn from that record.