Person:Thomas Stark (24)

Miller County Website: http://www.stormloader.com/kvernon/10stark.htm

Thomas G. Stark and his wife raised their large family on Section 35, Township 44, Range 13, Cole County, Martha Stark, was the first to arrive on January 7, 1825, sixteen months after marriage; and thereafter came: Mary, Isaac, James, Nehemia, Charity, John Mulkey, Rebecca, Nancy, Ebenezer, and William Thomas.

Leah Vernon Stark, the mother of the eleven children, died in 1849 at the age of forty-one.

The 1850 census of Cole County shows the widower, Thomas Geary Stark, at age forty-nine with nine of the children still in the household, and with farm land valued at $2,000.00. The following year, November 9, 1851, he married Mary Stephens Amos, who presumably helped him raise the young children.

In 1845, a northwestern strip of Cole County was cut off to form a new County, called "Montineau," which would thereafter be between Cole and Cooper. The Thomas Geary Stark farm remained barely in Cole County, but near the new Montineau County line. There may have been some confusion, in that the will of Judge James Stark, father of Thomas Geary Stark, was filed in Montineau instead of Cole.

Thomas Geary Stark died in February, 1863. He left no will, and his estate was administered also in Montineau County. His son, Nehemiah Vernon Stark was Administrator, and the securities on his bondwere John M. Stark, 0. H. Gest and Hiram Gest. By that time, many of his eleven children had long since moved farther west.