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Henry (Elijah) Lord (1788–1835)

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The man behind a one-sentence genealogy — Beers’s “Elijah Lord,” recovered from the court file, the census, and a German church register. Markers: verified against a contemporaneous or official record — a census schedule, an orphans’-court file, a church register read in the image, a newspaper of the day · confirmed by a retrospective or secondary source — Beers wrote in 1916, Elliott in 1906, Rupp in 1845 · corrects a common error · open/caution.

The pioneer settler whom the county genealogy calls Elijah Lord lived and died in the record as Henry Lord — Heinrich Lord of the Trinity Lutheran register, born September 11, 1788, dead at Pottsville on March 15, 1835. He headed a Pottsville household of eight children in 1830, and in April 1841 his widow Susanna told the county’s orphans’ court that he had “left issue Eight Children” — the count at which Beers’s sketch would one day set his family. Five of his sons worked one trade, carpentry, and built much of the town they grew up in. One of them, the Isaac who chose his own guardian at the 1841 court day, was born in the same years as the carpenter whose grandson Claude A. Lord served sixteen years as mayor of Pottsville. His family worshiped at Trinity Lutheran Church and baptized their children there; its register of the dead — the Register der Verstorbenen, kept in German — is the one record that gives the man himself a beginning and an end.

The name

Every record made in Henry Lord’s lifetime, and every court paper filed after his death, names him Henry. The census of 1830 enters him so; the church register of 1835 records the death of Heinrich Lord; and in 1841 his widow petitioned as “widow and Relict of Henry Lord late of the Borough of Pottsville deceased,” while two of his sons each petitioned as a son “of Henry Lord” — four namings of the father across three court papers, Henry every time. The name Elijah enters the record once, and late: in 1916, in Beers’s sketch of the Shellhammer family, whose subject’s wife was Henry’s granddaughter — born a full generation after the man died. A family usage, a middle name, or a simple slip of memory eighty years on — the sources do not say. The county’s printed genealogy fixed Elijah to him; the record he left says Henry.

The identification is not a guess but a count. Beers’s Elijah left eight children, the last two named William and Frank; Susanna Lord’s petition says her husband Henry “left issue Eight Children,” the two youngest minors named William and Franklin. Beers’s Henry-the-son was born December 23, 1819 — twenty-one years old, and so just of age, when the petitions of April 1841 name every child still a minor and he is not among them. Beers’s Isaac and Jeremiah appear in the file in person, each signing for his own guardian. One town, one surname, one total, the same four youngest names, and an elder son just come of age: the sketch of 1916 and the court file of 1841 describe one family.

A household on the record

The record first holds still for him in 1830: Henry Lord of Pottsville, a man of forty through forty-nine — he was forty-one — with a woman of thirty through thirty-nine and eight children in the house, six boys and two girls. A decade earlier the 1820 census had counted a Henry Lord household of seven in Schuylkill township — the old township east of the borough, from which Blythe would be erected in 1846 — a man and woman of the right ages with five small children; whether that family and the Pottsville family of 1830 are one, the schedules alone cannot prove.

The family’s trade is written across his sons: by 1850 five of them — Charles, Henry, Jeremiah, Isaac and William — stand in the census as carpenters in Pottsville, and Ella Zerbey Elliott’s list of the town’s “early builders, contractors and dealers in mountain stone, and carpenters” carries four Lords in a row: “Jeremiah, Charles, Isaac and Henry Lord.” Beers’s first volume credits a Charles Lord — the borough’s censuses carry one man of the name — with founding the planing mill that became the Sailor Planing Mill & Lumber Company. What the father himself did, no surviving record says; a trade that ran that wide through one man’s sons usually ran through the father, and the record stops one sentence short of saying so.

Henry Lord died on March 15, 1835, in the plain arithmetic of the Trinity Lutheran register of the dead: “Heinrich Lord geb. 11 September 1788 gest. 15 Merz 1835,” aged forty-six years and some months, the register’s own count ending in “und 4 Tagen” — and four days. He left Susanna a widow at about forty-two; the youngest child the later record names, the Benjamin of the censuses, was about one year old.

The widow and the orphans’ court

The census of 1840 finds the family without him: at Pottsville, a household entered simply as “Mrs Lord” — one woman of forty through forty-nine and five boys, two of them fifteen through nineteen, one ten through fourteen, one five through nine, one under five. No adult man. A few lines above her on the same page stands the name Saml Sillyman. (The same borough schedules carry a second “Mrs Lord,” a woman of thirty-odd living alone; the household of six is the one whose boys match the court papers to come. ) The youngest boy on the schedule, born after the middle of 1835, appears in no later record — the one member of the household the paper trail loses.

In April 1841 Susanna went to law for her children. Her petition to the judges sitting as an orphans’ court — signed with her mark, for the censuses twice record that she could not write — states that her husband “left issue Eight Children; Two of whom to wit William and Franklin are Minors under the age of fourteen years” who “have no Guardians to take Care of their persons and estates.” At Orwigsburg on April 17, 1841, before judges Strange N. Palmer and Samuel D. Leib, the court read the petition and appointed Samuel Sillyman — the neighbor from the census page — “as Guardian for the said William Lord and Franklin Lord to take care of their persons and estates.”

The same court day settled the two middle boys, by their own choice. Pennsylvania let a minor over fourteen choose his guardian, and two printed forms in the same file do exactly that: “THE petition of Isaac Lord Son of Henry Lord late of the Borough of Pottsville in said county, deceased … a minor above the age of fourteen years,” and its twin for Jeremiah Lord. Each was “admitted Chuses Samuel Sillyman as his Guardian,” and the court approved. Isaac signed his form in a practiced hand — the mother made her mark, the son wrote his name — and Edward Owen Parry witnessed both boys’ papers. Four minors, one guardian, one day; no will, no administration, and no Elijah anywhere in the county’s estate index.

That signature is the hinge of a longer story. An Isaac Lord “above the age of fourteen” in April 1841 was born between 1820 and 1827, and Pottsville’s 1850 census holds exactly one Isaac Lord: a carpenter of twenty-eight in the South Ward, born about 1821–22. That carpenter is the grandfather of Claude A. Lord, mayor of the city for sixteen years — his own son’s death certificate names him. One town, one name, one age window, and the 1841 form stands where the mayor’s line runs back into this family: son of Henry, ward of Sillyman, brother of the seven others.

It is the one link in the chain no single document makes. What would close it is a paper naming Isaac’s father and his trade in the same breath — a church register, a deed, a will — and none has surfaced. Anyone who finds one settles a fourth Pottsville generation.

The eight children, afterward

Charles was head of his own Pottsville household by 1840 and a carpenter of thirty-six in 1850, living with his wife Leah; the planing mill Beers credits to his name passed to other hands, “afterwards becoming Weed & Sailor.” Henry, born December 23, 1819, carpentered and contracted “to the end of his days.” He kept a lumber yard at Fourth and Callowhill Streets, captained the Washington Artillerists, and died at 509 West Mahantongo Street on February 7, 1889, his notice directing “Interment at Presbyterian Cemetery.” Beers lays his father in the same ground. Jeremiah, twenty-five in 1850, boarded with his young wife Mary and their infant daughter in the North West Ward, a carpenter. William, twenty-two in 1850, likewise a carpenter, lived three doors from Jeremiah with his wife Rebecca and their year-old Ellen M. Isaac — the petitioner above fourteen — stands in the 1850 census as the South Ward carpenter whose line his grandson’s page carries onward. The youngest the petition calls Franklin; the widow’s censuses of 1850 and 1860 call her youngest Benjamin, born about 1834, a laborer at sixteen and a young father by twenty-seven — one boy under two names is the natural reading of the records. Seth and Peggin rest on Beers’s sentence alone — no census, register, or court paper carries either name.

The family’s church wrote its memory into the next generation. At Trinity Lutheran, Henry the son baptized William Frances in 1844 and a daughter Susanna in 1846; William baptized a Susanna in 1851; Charles an Emma Susana in 1852. Beers says the boy William fell at Gettysburg. Three sons, three daughters given the widow’s name. And in 1865 Henry’s second family brought Mina Hannah — Minnie — to the same font — on the natural reading of register and sketch together, the Minnie H. who married James M. Shellhammer, and the reason the county’s printed record calls her grandfather Elijah at all.

Susanna herself stands in the record to 1860: her own household beside her son Henry’s in 1850, and then, at sixty-seven, a place in Benjamin’s young household — the record’s last firm trace of her.

The grave, and the ground above him

Beers is direct: “He is buried in the Presbyterian cemetery.” The death came in 1835, in the years of the town’s first burying ground — the Centre Street plot John Pott had given it, cleared in 1895 with its remains moved mostly to the Presbyterian Cemetery, as the founder’s own page tells it. A sentence written in 1916 fits either road to that ground — a first burial there, or an 1895 removal into it — and no stone, plot record, or Find a Grave memorial has surfaced to decide; his son Henry’s 1889 notice directing interment in the same cemetery is the family’s nearest fixed point there.

Eagle hill, and the question above him

Above Henry the record thins to a single sentence of Rupp’s, printed in 1845: at the present Port Carbon, among “the pioneer settlers of this portion of the anthracite region,” stood “Shadrack Lord, father of Mr. Lord at Bayhill,” who “had settled on Eagle hill.” A man born in 1788, as Henry was, belongs to exactly the generation of that unnamed son — a child when the first families took the ground, a grown “Mr. Lord” by the time Rupp wrote — and the 1820 census sets a Henry Lord household in Schuylkill township, the parent township of the later Blythe, east of the borough. But Bayhill is a place no other record names, Rupp names no son, and no document joins Shadrack’s family to Henry’s. The join stays open, as it stands on the pioneer-settlers page.

What the records do close is the man himself. A name that existed in one printed sentence of 1916 now has a birth, a death, a church, a widow who signed with her mark, eight children, and a court day at Orwigsburg: Heinrich Lord, 1788–1835 — Henry to the court, Elijah to a granddaughter’s memory — whose sons built the town’s houses. Between Rupp’s Shadrack on Eagle hill above him and the mayor on Garfield Square below, the Lord family of Pottsville has a founder the record can name.

Sources

Frequently asked

Who was Elijah Lord?
The pioneer-settler grandfather in Beers's 1916 sketch of the Shellhammer family — "a pioneer settler in Pottsville" who "died in the borough," father of Seth, Charles, Peggin, Henry, Jeremiah, Isaac, William and Frank. The records of his own lifetime give the man himself: Heinrich (Henry) Lord, born September 11, 1788, heading a Pottsville household of eight children in 1830, and dying at Pottsville on March 15, 1835, in the death register of Trinity Lutheran Church. In April 1841 the orphans' court counted his issue at the same figure Beers would — "Eight Children" — and its file names four of them.
Was his name really Elijah?
Every record of his own lifetime names him Henry — the census of 1830, the Trinity Lutheran death register of 1835 in the German form Heinrich, and the three orphans'-court petitions of 1841, his widow's and two sons', four namings across three papers. "Elijah" appears only in Beers's county genealogy of 1916, set down eighty-one years after his death from the family of a granddaughter born a generation later. The name may preserve something real — a middle name, a family usage — but nothing found in the record supports it, and everything legal about the man says Henry Lord.
When and where did Elijah Lord die?
March 15, 1835, at Pottsville — as Heinrich Lord in the death register of Trinity Lutheran Church, which gives his birth as September 11, 1788. Six years later his widow's court petition still described him as "late of the Borough of Pottsville deceased." Beers's statement that he "died in the borough" agrees.
Who were Elijah Lord's children?
Beers lists eight: Seth, Charles, Peggin, Henry, Jeremiah, Isaac, William and Frank, "all of whom lived and died at Pottsville." The court file counts the same total — his widow's 1841 petition says he "left issue Eight Children" — and across its three petitions names four: Jeremiah and Isaac, minors above fourteen who chose their own guardian, and William and Franklin, minors under fourteen for whom the court appointed one. Charles and Henry stand in the censuses and in Beers with their own families; the widow's later censuses return her youngest as Benjamin, born about 1834 — the Franklin of the petition under his other name, on the natural reading. Seth and Peggin rest on Beers's sentence alone.
Is Elijah Lord an ancestor of Mayor Claude A. Lord?
The mayor's line is documented back three generations by state death certificates — Claude A. Lord, his father Harry W. Lord, and Harry's father Isaac Lord, a Pottsville carpenter born about 1821–22. Henry stands one step beyond that, and the step is a court record rather than a certificate: the orphans'-court petition of April 1841 is signed by an Isaac Lord who calls himself "Son of Henry Lord late of the Borough of Pottsville in said county, deceased" and "a minor above the age of fourteen years" — born, that is, between 1820 and 1827. Pottsville's 1850 census holds exactly one Isaac Lord in that window, the carpenter. No document yet found names Isaac's father and his trade together, so the join rests on the age and the singularity of the name; the article sets out what would close it.
Where is Elijah Lord buried?
Beers says "He is buried in the Presbyterian cemetery." He died in 1835, in the years of the town's first burying ground on Centre Street — the plot John Pott had given the town, cleared in 1895 with its remains moved mostly to the Presbyterian Cemetery, as this site's John Pott page records. Beers's sentence, written in 1916, fits either a first burial or an 1895 removal; no stone or cemetery record has surfaced to decide, and his son Henry's 1889 notice directing interment in the same cemetery is the family's nearest fixed point there.
Who was Susanna Lord?
His widow — born about 1793 in Pennsylvania by her census ages, and the petitioner who brought the guardianship of her four minor children to the orphans' court at Orwigsburg in April 1841, signing with her mark; the censuses mark her unable to read or write. In 1850 she kept her own household next door to her son Henry's; in 1860, at sixty-seven, she lived with her youngest son Benjamin — the record's last firm trace of her. Her name went forward: Henry and William each baptized a daughter Susanna at Trinity Lutheran, and Charles an Emma Susana; a Susanna Lord confirmed there in 1838 is, if the bare register entry is hers, the widow herself.
Was Elijah Lord related to Shadrack Lord, the pioneer on Eagle hill?
Rupp's 1845 history puts Shadrack Lord on Eagle hill among the first families at the present Port Carbon and calls him "father of Mr. Lord at Bayhill," a son Rupp does not name — and the chronology would fit this family: Henry Lord, born in 1788, was a child of the settlement generation, and the 1820 census finds a Henry Lord household in Schuylkill township, the parent township of the later Blythe, before the Pottsville records begin. But no record joins the two families: Bayhill is unidentified, the 1820 household is not proven to be this Henry, and no document names Shadrack's children.