Person:James Sheehan (3)

James Sheehan was born in the Halfmoon Valley of Centre County, Pennsylvania, on July 17, 1819. He was the fifth of the seven children of James and Margaret Sheehan who would all grow to maturity. His brother, David, was ten or eleven years older, and he also had five sisters, three of whom were older and two of whom were younger.

James was still a boy when he and his family left Pennsylvania for Ohio, sometime between the years of 1829 and 1834. In 1835, when his father purchased 160 acres of land in Washington Township in Montgomery County, James was 16 years old. James and David probably helped their father together in the most difficult work of clearing the land that was to become the family farm.

Within a few years, however, James, the father, died. David and his wife, Lydia, whom he had married in 1836, settled on Hole’s Creek in Washington Township. The son, James, about 19 when his father died, remained on that part of the farm that was to become his one day, as did his mother. Margaret Sheehan would live for seventeen years after her husband died, and would spend all these remaining years on the farm. James, too, would remain on this farm all of his life.

In the first years after his father’s death James’s closest neighbors were his sister, Eleanor, and her husband Isaac Stansell. They had bought the land bequeathed to Eleanor’s brother and sisters, with the exception of the part that was bequeathed to James.

For many years after the death of James, the father, the household was comprised of James, the son; his mother, Margaret; and his sisters Jane and Kesiah. James’s sister, Margaret, had married in 1837 and his sister, Elizabeth, in 1839. Kesiah, nine years younger than James, would marry after she came of age, but Jane would never marry and died in 1850 at the age of thirty two. In the same year, after having had five children, James’s sister, Margaret, also died. Both Jane and Margaret were buried in the Sugar Creek Baptist Cemetery – Jane near her father, and Margaret in the plot of her husband’s family.

There is the possibility that James married someone named Mary Flenn about 1845, but this is not yet certain and further investigation would be needed for verification.

In September of 1854, James married Susan Jane Pine in Waynesville, about ten miles to the southeast of Centerville. James was thirty five, and a member of the Sugar Creek Baptist Church. Susan was twenty four, and a Quaker. Though Susan lived near Centerville at the time of her marriage to James, she was a birthright member of the Waynesville Friends.

After their marriage, James brought his young wife to live with him in the house that he had helped to his family build twenty years earlier, on the east side of what would one day be Sheehan Road.

Just six months later, just as the first winter of his marriage was turning to spring, James lost his mother. Margaret Sheehan, then seventy years of age, died in March of 1855. And just three months after that, there was another loss, and perhaps a sudden and unexpected one, when Susan’s father, Simeon, died in the middle of June. He was fifty six years old.

James and Susan Sheehan had five sons and one daughter. Their first son, Jason Lamar Sheehan, was born in 1856. Their second son George Milton Sheehan, who went by Milton and Milt, was born in 1858. Next was born Charles Warren Sheehan, in 1860, followed by William Albert Sheehan, in 1862, who went by Albert and Al. Sarah Elma Sheehan, their only daughter, was born in 1865. Nine years later, in 1874, when Susan Sheehan was almost 44 years old, she gave birth to her last child, a son, James Elmer Sheehan, who went by the name of Elmer.

Nine months following the birth of Elmer, in May of 1875, James Sheehan died. He was only fifty five years old.

James was laid to rest in the same cemetery where lay buried his father and mother and all of his sisters, with the exception of Kesiah. Eleanor, Margaret, Elizabeth and Jane had all preceded him in death. His brother, David, who had moved on with his family to make a home in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, would die just one year later.

At the Sugar Creek Baptist Cemetery, James Sheehan is buried in the 25th row, North end, #8. Susan Sheehan is buried in the 25th row, North end, #10. At the very back of the cemetery furthest away from Main Street, to the east of Main Street, look in the southeast quadrant for Sheehan and Stansell.

He is buried at 39d 38' 1575" N, 84d 9' 4174" W.