Matilda Boots Hartzell
Matilda Boots Hartzell, wife of David Daniel Hartzell. Photo taken in 1884, when she was 33. I love the buttons! This is another photo from a xerox (from Ruth Salley Johnson, my father's first cousin.)
Matilda "Tillie" lived more than 100 years. She was born September 25, 1851, in Sturgis, Michigan. Her parents were living in the tiny town of Burr Oak at the time. What were they doing there? Her father was in the building trades, perhaps he had work there. And Highway 12, the main road west, runs through the Sturgis area (before that, it was the main Indian trade route, and today is parallel to the Indiana Toll Road, US Interstate 80/90.) I found them in the Sturgis genealogical society records. Her father, Benjamin Franklin Boots, was born in New York in 1825 and died in Rossville, KS in 1892 (he is buried in Gorham, NY.) They lived in Michigan from 1848 to 1855, when they moved to Butler and then to Waterloo (1857) Indiana. Then they returned to NY, where Tillie's mother died in 1871 (buried in Gorham, N.Y.) In 1871 her father moved with Tillie and her youngest brother Melvin to Rossville, Kansas, where her brother James Boots had moved in 1870. Matilda and David Daniel were married on Feb. 21, 1875. Her father went back to Indiana to live with another brother, but returned to Rossville to live with David and Matilda until his death in 1892. A lot of back-and-forth.
More about the Boots family on the "Other Families" page.
