The ENOS family (variant spellings include ENAS/ENUS/ENNIS/ENUS/ENIS/EINES/ENS, etc. many others) is one of my maternal grandfather’s line of ancestors that I discovered this past summer when researching the SNIVELY family who will be the subject of another post.
In the fall of 2016, I went to Harrisburg, PA in order to visit the Pennsylvania Archives since I have discovered that many of my maternal ancestors who came to Toledo have ancestry from that state.
The SNIVELY family, I have traced them to Columbia, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania and believe they may have originally lived in Franklin County, PA which was where a large amount of white SNIVELY’s lived.
The female ancestor who married into the SNIVELY family was named Mary Ellen ENOS. Her surname was spelled in so many different variations over the years that it was ridiculous how much time I spent trying to find out what the heck her name really was!
I first started tracing her after finding the death certificate of her son Granville Lee SNIVELY Sr. He is pictured below with his second wife – my 2nd great grandmother Reva MORRISON SNIVELY MYERS and their oldest child Lucille.
His death certificate shown below stated that his mother’s maiden name was EINSES. This was one of the weirdest names I had ever come across. I thought maybe it was some sort of strange French name due to the reference regarding Montreal, which is in Quebec, the French speaking province of Canada. However, I could not find anyone who married Grandville’s father Jeremiah SNIVELY whose last name was EINSES. The second time I found reference to Mary was in Grandville SNIVELY’s marriage records. He was married twice, the first time to a woman named Mary CHANDLER. The marriage records from Michigan also stated that his mother’s maiden name was EINES, which was similar to EINSES but I could not find anything about Mary other than these two entries for her son Grandville SNIVELY who is my 2nd great grandfather.
Over the past 5 years, I have started a trend of not only performing searches on direct ancestors – like grandparents and great grandparents, but also on their brothers, sisters, cousins, etc. I knew that Grandville SNIVELY’s father was named Jeremiah SNIVELY, also known as Jerry SNIVELY. The SNIVELY’s originally were from Pennsylvania, as stated above. They moved to the Chatham-Kent area of SE Ontario, Canada in the 1850s.
I searched for Canadian births of SNIVELY surnames and saw Grandville along with a younger brother named Nathan SNIVELY. Both were born in Ontario between 1865 and 1870. I did some digging into Nathan (1870-1906), which I had not done before, to see if I could find his marriage and death records, among other sources and found his marriage record to wife Mary TRUSBLOOM. In that record below, it stated that his mother’s maiden name was Mary ENOS.
I did another search for Mary with the surname of ENOS and discovered her listed with her parents – Nathan Bailey ENOS and mother Julia Ann ALLISON ENOS in Chester County, Pennsylvania on the 1850 Census of the US. She was listed also on the Canadian Census of Ontario in 1861 with her parents in the same area where the SNIVELY family had also moved to in Canada.
I had to do a manual search through the Ontario, Canada marriage records due to them not being able to be queried at the time on the Family Search website. Knowing that Grandville was the oldest child based on Census records and him being born in 1868 due to a birth record I found, I browsed through each year of marriage records from 1863 through 1870 until I found an entry showing that Jeremiah SNIVELY married Mary ENESS on November 30, 1867. Her parents were listed as Juliana and Baly ENESS and she was born in approximately 1844 in the United States.
Since finding a connection to the ENOS family via Mary, I have been doing a lot of research into this line on my family tree. Recently I discovered that the father of Nathan Bailey ENOS was Ceasar ENOS via the Chester County, PA “Poor School Children” records. Chester County, PA is now one of my favorite places in my genealogical research since they have a wealth of information on their own site, for free that you can peruse and obtain reference material on one’s family.
I have discovered through the Chester County records along with Census records that Ceasar ENOS was a free black person who was originally from the state of Delaware. He was born in approximately 1780 and lived in Sussex County, Delaware before moving to Chester County, PA. Both of these areas are very close to each other geographically.
I also discovered due to that trip to Harrisburg, that Nathan Bailey ENOS lived in a community called Hinson Village or Hinsonville, Pennsylvania, which was a community of free black people where Lincoln University (PA) is currently located. Lincoln University was this country’s first established Historically Black College/University (HBCU) and was founded in 1854 and was formerly called the Ashmun Institute.
Nathan Bailey ENOS was enumerated in this community with his wife Julia and six of his children in 1850. A review of deeds at the Pennsylvania Archives showed that Nathan Bailey ENOS (called Bailey ENOS/ENICE) purchased land from a man named Jesse HINSON in Chester County, PA in 1843 for $200. He sold the land in 1847 for $400 to a John BURNS. I believe that Bailey ENOS and his family moved to the Chatham-Kent area – the Buxton Settlement in Canada around 1851-1854. Bailey was enumerated on census records and land records in Canada from the 1860s-1870s. He then came back to the United States in around 1879-1880. He was enumerated in Monroe, Michigan with his wife and some of his children on the 1880 US Census. Unfortunately, I have yet to find his death certificate, but I am pretty certain that he died in Michigan. UPDATE: I discovered later in 2017 Nathan Bailey ENOS died in Flint, Michigan on June 21, 1891. This was listed in Flint’s city directory found on Ancestry dot com. Most of his children moved to the Ypsilanti area first, then to other parts of Michigan. Mary ENOS SNIVELY died in Ypsilanti in 1880, per the previous post regarding obituaries and death records, in 1880 of tuberculosis. Her death notice below was posted on a blog about the black history of Ypsilant, Michigan called South Adams Street @ 1900:
Her son Grandville SNIVELY later moved to Flint, Michigan where he divorced his first wife Mary CHANDLER. There he met Reva MORRISON who is my 2nd great grandmother and his 2nd wife in the picture above. They later moved to Toledo in the early 1900s.
In researching the ENOS family, I have been fascinated with Hinson Village/Hinsonville and its history. Bailey ENOS initially bought his land in Hinsonville from Jesse HINSON whose father – Emory HINSON Sr., founded Hinson Village in the 1820s when he became the first black owner of land in that part of Pennsylvania. I have been trying to figure out how these families were connected or if they were related over the course of my research. UPDATE: Around January/February of 2017, I also “met” online a distant cousin who is related to me via the ENOS family. She is also related to the founder of the Dawn Settlement for escaped slaves and free blacks in Ontario, Canada named Josiah HENSON. HENSON is who the fictional “Uncle Tom” in the novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” is based upon.
Currently I am at a mysterious sort of roadblock that I am slowly climbing up and around in regards to the connection between the HINSON and ENOS families. I checked out a book from the University of Toledo Carlson Library called “Hinsonville, A Community at the Crossroads – The Story of a 19th Century African American Village.” In this book there is not much mentioned about the ENOS family except deed information showing where Bailey’s land was and a mentioning of the fact that he bought the land he owned from Jesse HINSON who was the son of Hinsonville’s founder Emory HINSON.
The author, on page 20 describes that not much is known about the HINSON family. Many African Americans believe that this HINSON family is also related to the HENSON family of Maryland, of whom the famous explorer – Matthew HENSON was the first black man to go to the North Pole descended from. Emory HINSON Sr. of Hinsonville was also from Maryland but not much is known about his life. On page 20 of the latter mentioned book it is stated as follows:
Ironically, although the hamlet bears Emory Hinson’s name, his small family did not remain long in the area. By 1841, Hinson’s wife had died. In keeping with what appears to have been a pattern among widows and widowers in that rural community, Emory Hinson remarried within three years, taking a woman named Keziah as his second wife in February 1844. Keziah had been born in Delaware in 1795, but the county and local records reveal little more about her except that she did not bear any children to Emory, or at least none was ever listed in their household. To be sure she was already forty-nine years old when they married. Then after her husband’s death in 1852, she left Hinsonville.
Bailey ENOS purchased his land in Hinsonville and moved to that area around the time that Keziah married Emory HINSON Sr. On page 21 of this book, it was stated that one of the early presidents of Lincoln University – Horace Mann, wrote that Emory HINSON Sr. sold his lands in order to move to Upper Canada in 1851. Bailey ENOS and his family also moved to “Upper Canada” which is what SE Ontario was referred to at the time, in the early 1850s. During that time Josiah HENSON was already living in Ontario and had established his community of colored/black residents in the same area that they moved to. It is uncertain if he was a relative of the ENOS and HINSON families of Hinsonville and more digging is needed on this but I am excited to look more into the mystery.
The site I mentioned in another post – freeafricanamericans.com also has an entry about a free ENNIS/ANNIS family of Delaware and Maryland and I believe that Bailey and Ceasar ENOS are connected to the family detailed on that website. I am hoping that eventually I can find out more information linking the ENOS family and the HINSON families and other free families that lived in Chester County, PA and the Dawn and Buxton Settlements in Canada.
UPDATE: My maternal grandfather graciously submitted a DNA sample to assist in my genealogical research and via his results we confirmed the biological connection to my “new” cousin mentioned above who is also related to the HENSON/HINSON family. His results have also shown a strong connection to a white/European ancestored family with surnames of FOLMAR and LANSDALE. Because the white FOLMAR family primarily resided in South Carolina and then in Alabama, I believe that the LANSDALE family may be related in some way to Cesar ENOS or his wife Jane who were the parents of Nathan Bailey ENOS. Nearly every “shared” DNA cousin match for my grandfather and my black/African American cousin I “met” online also share a relationship to the descendants of John Nicholas FOLMAR (1785-1840) and his wife Elizabeth LANSDALE FOLMAR (1789-1835). Elizabeth’s father – Isaac LANSDALE (1760-1847) was a Revolutionary War veteran and he was supposedly born in Delaware. The LANSDALE family have a long lineage in the colonial era in Delaware and Maryland, places where the ENOS family also resided so the DNA matching makes me believe that this line of my family are in some way related to the LANSDALEs. Further review of DNA results is ongoing and I am building a tree of the LANSDALE family to see if anything turns up.
Black In Toledo 