Like Father, Like Son

Back in mid January, I wrote a blog post about my 3rd great grandfather Leander Wells, man on the run. I wrote of his desertion from the Union army during the Civil War, roaming around the country as a carpenter and finally his gruesome demise of being burned to death as a night watchman of a train station in Wyoming. Not posted back then was the newspaper headline seen above.

He ended up being buried in Boone, Iowa next to his wife who had died 16 years earlier but I didn't know the reason why she was buried in Boone, a place they hadn't left a paper trail and was across the state from where they lived at the time. I theorized that perhaps one of their parents were living there at the time since the newspaper article on wife Mary Ellenor Well's death said she had been there visiting when she died. 

By dumb luck, I stumbled upon a new to me website that contains hundreds of historic New York newspapers that you can search by county, date and search term among other things. I started off looking into Mary Ellenor's father Winter whom I have also written about before almost two years ago. I didn't find any articles about him but I did find an article about Mary Ellenor Well's mother-in-law Mary Ann Shaw Wells that answered the question posed above in the second paragraph.

Meriana or Moriana isn't a town in Iowa that I can find but for every town that exists today, there are two or three more that don't. Her name, her husband's name and her age all match up plus I have a clipping from an Iowa newspaper that says she died in Boone so I'm confident that she was there at the time and thus why she is buried in Iowa and not by her husband Peter in New York.

Speaking of Peter Wells, husband to the above Mary Ann Shaw Wells and father of previous blogged about Leander Wells, I accidentally turned up an article on him. I knew he ran an inn in St. Lawrence, New York up along the Canadian border for some years but I didn't know he worked around trains like his son. I also didn't know that he suffered an equally gruesome death in that profession. I guess it ran in the family.