My Great Grandparents in 1900: Enoch and Ella May Biddle

 This is the 2nd post in a series looking at my great grandparents, focusing particularly on the 1900 census. In this case we'll be looking at Enoch Franklin Morris and Ella May Biddle. They were my great grandparents on my mother's side. Their daughter, Ethel, was my grandmother.

Enoch Franklin Morris (1877-1938) was born in Jennings County, Indiana, as was his wife, Ella May Biddle (1872-1965). This is rural southern Indiana. The biggest city in Jennings County is North Vernon, which in 2020 had a population of 6608. In the 1900 census, the 23 year old Enoch Franklin Morris lived in Columbia Township (population today is still under 1000), in the northeast corner of the county.

Enoch and Ella May got married in 1898. In the 1900 census Enoch is listed as a farmer. He can both read and write (not always a given). The same is true of Ella May. Their first child, daughter Lanora, is only nine months old at the time of the census. Enoch was a farmer and later also a trustee of the Zenas, Indiana, High School.

Enoch Morris' earliest known ancestor was Robert Morris, a soldier with the 52nd Regiment (British) during the Revolutionary War. With the permission of his captain, he married Mary Crawley in the St. Michael's and Zion Church (Lutheran) in Philadelphia in 1778. His son, the first Enoch Morris, served under Captain Zechariah DeWitt in the War of 1812. You can see Captain DeWitt's Oxford, Ohio, homestead here.

Making the same trek that my Pittman ancestors made from Pennsylvania to Ohio and then to Indiana, Enoch's father, John Franklin Morris, was the first to settle in the Hoosier State, sometime in the 1850s.

As for the Biddles, Ella May was descended from German immigrants in Pennsylvania (misnamed the "Pennsylvania Dutch"). The first to be born in America was Andrew Biddle, a carriage maker who was born in Gettysburg in 1747. The name was originally spelled Bittel. Ella May's grandfather, Daniel Henry, first came to Jennings County in the 1860s. As for Ella May, she bore 5 children and lived to be 93. I remember when the telegram came to our door in 1965, telling my mother that Ella May, her grandmother, had passed. It was the only telegram I can remember our family receiving.

Enoch and Ella had 5 children together. There was Lanora, born in 1899, who was a school teacher and never married and lived to be 98 years old. Then came Arnold Riley (b. 1900) who lived to be 93, then Rhoda Lucretia (b. 1905), Ethel (b. 1909) and Harold Franklin (1915). My grandmother, my mother's mother, was Ethel. She married Orval Pittman in 1931.

Enoch and Ella May is buried in the Westport Cemetery, in Decatur County, Indiana. 

Here's Ella May in her later years:



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