Mary O. (Timmons) Chenoweth

Mary O. Timmons was born in March 1845 in Ohio, daughter of John K. Timmons and his wife Elizabeth “Betsey” (maiden surname not yet recovered). The structured record gives her name as Mary O.; Aunt Maggie Eesley’s Four Generations archive expands it to Mary Ohio with the etymology note that “Ohio” means “beautiful river” in the Iroquoian tongue from which it was borrowed — given to her, the family memory holds, “to honor the state in which she was born.” Whether her middle name was actually Ohio on her birth certificate or whether the family had expanded the initial O. into a meaning over the generations is itself a small open question worth flagging.

The Egge record names her mother Elizabeth “Betsey” ? — the given name plus the family nickname survived in the structured record but the maiden surname did not. This is one generation deeper on the Timmons side than this archive had reached before tonight. A pass against the 1850 or 1860 Ohio census for John K. Timmons’s household would likely surface Elizabeth’s full name; she would have been alive in those years (Mary was 5 in 1850).

She married Joseph Hill Chenoweth in late 1864 in Franklin County, Ohio — this archive records 25 November 1864; Jon Egge’s structured record gives 1 December 1864. The two dates are six days apart; they may represent the marriage license vs. the ceremony, or one may be a transcription error. The marriage falls in the final winter of the Civil War, six months after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox had effectively ended major hostilities. Joseph Hill himself served in the Union Army.

She is documented in Aunt Maggie’s deck as Maggie’s great-grandmother — which makes her Chuck’s great-great-grandmother through the line that runs Mary O. → Lillie Dale → Will Eesley → Charles McMaster Eesley → Chuck.

She died 2 May 1919 in Grove City, Franklin County, Ohio (per Egge’s record) and is buried at Otterbein Cemetery in Blendon Township — nine years after her husband Joseph Hill, in the same cemetery.

Children — five, in order of birth

Per Roberta Burnes Walker (June 2026, drawing on Aunt Mary Eesley Bean’s research notes):

1. Howard Glen Chenoweth — eldest. Not yet a person entry.
2. Elsie Chenoweth — second. Not yet a person entry.
3. Scioto Mafry Chenoweth (1871–1930) — third. Named after the Scioto River (the Ohio river-name being a family habit); the woman of Maggie’s “first women medical doctors” line.
4. Lillie Dale Chenoweth Eesley (1877–1970) — fourth. The Chenoweth matriarch who married into the Eesley line and the Lillie of the 1922 cross-country letter to her son Len.
5. Dwight Kennedy Chenoweth (1880–1957) — youngest. Not yet a person entry; died in Biloxi, Mississippi. Lillie’s beloved brother Dwight of the c. 1900 diptych.

The two photographs

Two correctly-identified portraits of Mary Timmons Chenoweth arrived in this archive in June 2026, transmitted by Roberta Burnes from the family album she inherited through the Burnes-Eesley line — the same album that holds the 1860s handwritten Chenoweth family register and her 1862 teacher’s certificate.

Mary as a young woman, c. 1862–1865

The portrait at the head of this page is a tintype of Mary as a young woman — probably late teens or very early twenties, with center-parted dark hair pulled back, a small bow tie at the throat, and a checked-fabric collared dress. The tintype process and the decorative gold-and-cream paper mount place the photograph in the early-to-mid 1860s — the years bracketing her 1862 teacher’s certificate (age seventeen) and her 1864 marriage to Joseph Hill Chenoweth (age nineteen). She is, in this portrait, a young Ohio woman teaching school during the second year of the Civil War, two years away from the marriage that would carry the Chenoweth line forward into the Eesleys.

Mary in old age, c. 1900–1915

The second portrait shows Mary in her later years — an oval-framed studio photograph with thin wire-rim spectacles, dark beaded Victorian bodice, hair pulled back in a tight bun. The framing style and dress place it in the first decade-and-a-half of the twentieth century, when she was in her mid-fifties to early seventies. She died in 1919.

Together the two portraits frame more than fifty years of her life — from the seventeen-year-old teacher in Civil War Ohio to the elderly matriarch of a household that would carry the Chenoweth name into the Eesley generation through her daughter Lillie Dale.

A retraction, June 2026

The portrait that previously appeared on this page — carried into the archive through Maggie Eesley’s Four Generations deck under the label Mary Timmons Chenoweth — was reviewed against Roberta Burnes’s family album and is not Mary Timmons Chenoweth. It is a friend of hers, labeled as such in Roberta’s album, and was misidentified somewhere between the album and Maggie’s deck. The misattributed scan is held back from this page until the friend’s actual identity is known.

The two tintypes side-by-side — likely a wedding-era pair

Roberta has flagged (June 2026) that the two tin-types of Joseph Hill Chenoweth and Mary Timmons appear alongside each other in the family photo album — matched as a pair, in adjacent positions. This pairing strongly suggests they were taken at or near the time of their 25 November 1864 marriage — the kind of bride-and-groom companion tintypes that were common in the mid-1860s. The two-portrait pair is therefore the Joseph-and-Mary marriage record in visual form.

What else Roberta’s family album and the Mary Bean papers hold

Roberta has flagged that the album and adjacent materials include:

• A photograph of Joseph Hill Chenoweth’s father Elijah Chenoweth — the deepest documented Chenoweth ancestor in this archive’s keeping.
• A photograph of Mary’s own father.
• Mary’s 1862 teacher’s certificate — a separate artifact, not bound in the album.
• The 1860s handwritten Chenoweth family register — a separate artifact, also not bound in the album, that anchors the Chenoweth Family Association’s online genealogy.

(Correction, June 2026: the family register and teacher’s certificate are separate artifacts, not bound in the family photo album, as an earlier pass of this page implied. They sit alongside the album in Roberta’s keeping.)

Aunt Mary Bean’s research and the manila-paper scrolls

Roberta has also flagged (June 2026) that she now holds all of Aunt Mary Eesley Bean’s research, letters, hand-written notes, and correspondence — the working materials Mary used to create the Eesley Family History. Among them: rolled-up manila-paper scrolls with penciled-in family-tree notes in neater handwriting than Mary’s, which Roberta suspects may have been written by Mary’s mother — Lillie Dale Chenoweth herself. If confirmed by handwriting comparison against Lillie’s letters, the scrolls would be the earliest extant Chenoweth-side family-tree document in the family’s keeping, possibly drafted by the daughter-of-Mary the rest of this page describes.

The scrolls reportedly contain “at least one or two errors” Roberta does not yet remember — a routine caveat for hand-drawn family trees of that vintage.

Sources: Mary Bean, Eesley Family History; structured record Dale Eesley / FamilySearch — Mary O. Timmons (KCCC-MTP); portrait retraction and incoming-photograph notice from Roberta Burnes, June 2026; the five-children birth-order roster and the wedding-tintype-pair observation from Roberta’s June 2026 email after she received Aunt Mary’s research papers.