Joseph Hill Chenoweth

Joseph Hill Chenoweth was born 30 December 1832 in Pleasant Township, Franklin County, Ohio — the third child and third son of Elijah Chenoweth, Jr. and Nancy Chenoweth, in the same Pleasant Township just south of Columbus where his daughters Lillie Dale (1877) and Scioto Mafry (1871) would also be born. He married Mary O. Timmons in late 1864 in Franklin County (this archive records 25 November 1864; Jon Egge’s structured record gives the date as 1 December 1864 — the two are close enough to plausibly be the marriage license vs. ceremony dates, but the question is open). Together they were the parents of at least five children: Lillie Dale (the Chenoweth matriarch who married into the Eesley line), Scioto Mafry (the medical pioneer of family memory), Howard Glen, Elsie, and Dwight Kennedy.

Civil War service — Union

Egge’s structured record names Joseph Hill as a Union veteran of the American Civil War — the Military: Civil War: Union field on his page — and the Chenoweth Family Association independently records the same, cataloguing him in the family’s [THOMAS: ELIJAH] line as a son of Elijah Jr. and Nancy and confirming the 1832 Franklin County birth and 1910 death. Two independent genealogies thus agree he served on the Union side. He was 28 when the war started in April 1861 and 32 when it ended in April 1865; his marriage to Mary Ohio Timmons in late 1864 falls in the final winter of the war. He was one of three of Elijah Jr.’s surviving sons to serve on the Union side — alongside his older brothers Thomas (1828–1908) and John Wesley (1831–1889).

His specific regiment and his enlistment and discharge dates remain open. A July 2026 pass across the Chenoweth Family Association records and the Franklin County genealogical sources confirmed the Union service but did not surface the unit; the best remaining leads are the 1880 History of Franklin and Pickaway Counties, Ohio (the Pleasant Township section) and the Ohio Genealogical Society’s Ohio Civil War rosters.

(He should not be confused with Major Joseph H. Chenoweth, the VMI graduate and Confederate officer of the 31st Virginia Infantry killed at Port Republic in June 1862 — a different man, and a distant cousin in the wider Chenoweth family. Our Joseph Hill Chenoweth is the Ohio Union veteran, 1832–1910.)

Later life and burial

He died in June 1910, age 77, and is buried at Otterbein Cemetery in Blendon Township, Franklin County, Ohio (the cemetery is in Blendon Township; Westerville sits inside the same township). The same cemetery would hold his daughter Scioto twenty years later, and his wife Mary — who outlived him by nine years (d. 2 May 1919 at Grove City, per Egge) — is also buried there.

He is Chuck’s great-great-grandfather along the path that runs through his daughter Lillie Dale to Will Eesley and onward.

The only image of him in the family archive is a formal portrait dating roughly 1865–1870, scanned from the Chenoweth family album his great-granddaughter Roberta Burnes inherited through the Burnes-Eesley line. The scan reached Aunt Maggie Eesley’s Four Generations deck from that album. The resolution, in Maggie’s note, is “barely good enough to enlarge image” — he is at the edge of what photographic preservation reaches for this generation. Roberta has also noted that the album holds a photograph of his father Elijah Chenoweth — queued for the next round of digitization.

Per Roberta’s June 2026 album review: his tintype appears in the album alongside Mary Timmons’s as a side-by-side pair — consistent with the two having been taken at or near their 25 November 1864 marriage, the kind of bride-and-groom companion tintypes common in the mid-1860s. The two-portrait pairing is likely the Joseph-and-Mary marriage record in visual form.

Sources: Maggie Eesley, Four Generations of the Eesley Family (PowerPoint archive); deck ID JHC001 en; portrait provenance the Chenoweth family album held by Roberta Burnes. Structured record: Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Joseph Hill Chenoweth (KCBL-7P4). For the broader Chenoweth surname network in America, see the Chenoweth Family Association — comprehensive online genealogy of Chenoweth descendants that connects into this archive’s Chenoweth-line ancestors back through John K. Timmons and into the colonial-era Chenoweth/Maryland lines.