Marriage of Eliza Ennis and Alonzo Benjamin Yates

[Lisa in California]

Were first names handed down in your Ennis family?  If so, were any of Eliza's children's names not common in the Ennis family?  Perhaps they could have been handed down from Alonzo's family (thus providing a clue for his family members)?

[Erato]

Their names were:  Jeremiah, Emma, Mary, Ellen Rebecca, Anna, John, George, Hugh Hubert, William, Sarah, Gertrude, Rufus Alonzo, Frank Charles, and Elizabeth Edith.

I don't have enough previous generations to know which were traditional.  Maybe Jeremiah, Hubert and Rufus stand out as a bit unusual.  Certainly Mary, John, George, Hugh, William and Elizabeth had been used before.  But it has always seemed to me that when my ancestors [not just the Ennises] got 'Americanized,' they started getting oddly innovative with names and gave up many of the old standbys.

[Erato]

Me again.  I was just rereading the page and:
"...marriage...Eliza Ennis, in 1848. Miss Ennis, some time previous, had run away from home..."

Eliza would have been quite young to have run away "some time previous" to 1848.  Perhaps a first attempt at running away was in 1848?  Maybe no one knew when the event occurred and just came up with 1848?  I think the story may be true; we just need more proof.

The Ennises only arrived in Wisconsin from Amherst Island, Ontario in 1848.  They had been in Canada for about eight or nine years.  John's naturalization document says they arrived in the fall of 1848.  They had apparently traveled up the Great Lakes by boat and then up the Fox River to Buffalo Twsp.  They were among the first wave of people who came when that section of Wisconsin [called the 'Indian Lands'] was opened up to settlers.  So it is very unlikely that Eliza ran away in 1848.  It wasn't exactly a trackless wilderness but it was sparsely populated log cabin country without well established roads and she was only nine years old and would have had no idea where Wyocena was.

[burbachl]

I found your post while googling information on our house, owned by Willis W. Haskin. The house was built in 1848 and was supposedly a stagecoach stop and boarding house. We, too, have read the story about Eliza and Alonzo.

[Erato]

Wow, that's pretty cool.  What does the house look like now? Has it been extensively modernized, or does it still retain much of its original character?  What's the kitchen like where Eliza toiled over the dirty dishes?

[burbachl]

It remained in the Haskin family for 100 years. The barn burned in 1947. The Hill family bought it around 1960 and ruined it by making it into a duplex . So it has been modernized (if you call 60's modern). Another owner restored it to a single family in 2000 and we bought it in 2016. We put in wood floors downstairs, removed carpet and sanded upstairs, etc. Are we able to attach photos on this website? I have a very grainy scanned photo of the house in about 1880-1890.

[Erato]

Yes, you can attach a photo.  I'd love to see what the place looked like even though it's only very remotely connected in any way to me.  Eliza was my gg-aunt.  I have no pictures of her or of Alonzo; no pictures of her outraged father, John Ennis, either.  The Ennis farm was about 15 miles north of Wyocena, on the west side of Ennis Lake, in what is now part of the John Muir County Park.  When they returned to Wisconsin, Eliza and Alonzo had a farm just a bit further north in Packwaukee Twsp. They had 15 children, some of whom settled down in Columbia County.

[burbachl]

Wowza, that is some great information. We are currently scanning any old photos we can get our hands on to add to Recollection Wisconsin so the pics I have will be added! I will let you know if I stumble across any further information. Unfortunately our local historical society is poorly organized and not digitized. I tried to attach but the site said the file was too large to attach - uuuugh.

[Erato]

You have to reduce the size of the image to post it here.  Make it about 600 pixels wide and less than 500 kb.

You can see where Eliza came from here:  https://muirboyhoodhome.stqry.app/story/189603
There's a video about a third of the way down the page.