Friday, August 15, 2008

Hiram G. Ellison

Hiram G. Ellison was born 1843 in Berkshire County, Massachusetts, the son of Hiram P. (b. 1808) and Betsey (b. 1820).

Hiram (elder) was born in Massachusetts or Canada and married Vermont born Betsey sometime before 1837 when they were living in New York. The family resided in New York for some years but between 1843 and 1849 moved to Massachusetts and by 1850 were living in Lenox, Berkshire County, Massachusetts where Hiram worked as a sawyer. They eventually left Massachusetts and moved westward, settling in western Michigan. By 1860 Hiram (younger) was working as a gardener and living with his family in Grand Rapids’ Third Ward, where his father worked as a teamster and his mother as a domestic.

Hiram G. stood 5’8” with gray eyes, dark hair and a dark complexion, and was 18 years old and possibly living in Ionia County when he enlisted in Company D on May 13, 1861. (Company D was composed in large part of men who came from western Ionia County and Eaton County.) He was reported absent sick in the hospital, probably in Maryland, in July and August of 1862. He supposedly deserted on September 21, 1862, at Upton’s Hill, Virginia, but was in fact discharged for chronic rheumatism on September 20 at Fort McHenry, Maryland.

He reentered the service on February 12, 1864, in Company B, Second U.S. Sharpshooters, at Jackson, Michigan, and was mustered in on February 22. Hiram was transferred to Company B, Fifth Michigan infantry on February 18, 1865, and was discharged, possibly for disability, on June 21, 1865, at Chester, Pennsylvania. (There was also one Hiram Ellison who served in the Twenty-seventh Michigan infantry, another unit which produced sharpshooters.)

At some point after the war Hiram returned to Michigan. His father, who may have remarried Massachusetts native Sylvia (b. 1832) was living on a farm in Campbell, Ionia County in 1870. Hiram (elder) was apparently married to one Catharine and living in Campbell, Ionia County in 1880. Hiram (younger) may have been living in Lowell, Kent County in 1890 and was living in Michigan by 1891 when he applied for and received a pension.

No comments: