It was 1841 when George E. Pless grandfather, Henry Andrew (Frederich Heinrich Andreas) Pless purchased 240 semi improved (somewhat cleared) acres on the Grand River Indian Trail, west of Brighton in Genoa Township. (Section 11, SW NW ¼, north of Hughes Rd.; sec. 12, E ½ SW ¼, Euler Rd.; Sect. 13, W ½ NW […]
John Sutherlands grandparents, Col. Castle and Nancy Ann, were both born in New York in the last decade of the 18th Century. His father, Solomon, was the youngest of 11 children. By 1828 Castle and Nancy Ann were in Washtenaw County in Ann Arbor and Scio, where Solomon was born, 1833. By 1834 Castle owned […]
A Brighton native and resident for seventy-eight years, Persis Cook died Tuesday, October 4, 1983, in Clearwater, Florida, where she had been living since retiring from her second teaching career in 1968. She was 93 years old.
“Brighton, although not the oldest, is by no means the least considerable of the townships of the County of Livingston. Like many other townships it had, at first, no separate organization, but composed an important part of the Township of Green Oak, and it was not until April, 1838, that it was accorded a distinct […]
Born in Cambridshire, England, Joseph, b. 1831 and James, b. 1833, Peach were the two older of the seven of the ten children of Charles, b. 1807, and Ann Ankar, b. 1812, who made the ocean voyage to America. (The others were Robert, Mary Ann, John, Sarah and Hannah.) Arriving in New York in 1854, […]
Henrys father, Jacob, came to the U.S. in 1832, with brothers Phillip and Charles and sister, Mary Magdelene as very young children. Their parents, Charles C. and Maria Catherine Nadig came by sailing vessel, an ordeal of which our imagination is incapable. In the early 1830s German immigrants constituted a major portion of the stream […]
Of the early settlers to the Brighton Area, many were of a moral caliber, which assumed a responsibility to the community and the young state. Among them was John Gilluly, son of Irish-born parents, Thomas and Ann. John was born in Massachusetts. Research indicates John taught in the Brighton School District in 1845, 46,57, 59. […]
When husband William Henry died at 48 in 1835, it may be assumed his mercantile business in Hamburg, Germany, was sold. Perhaps the proceeds enabled Henrietta to bring her family to America. She and the children, William H. (21), Emma (15), Edward G. (11) and Charles E. (8) spent 10 weeks crossing the briney deep.
Eldad Spencer Field, with brother-in-law Norton Wait, came to Michigan within ten years of the completion of the Erie Canal. (The convenient and economical route over the Appalachian Mountains in New York opened the way for settlers to pioneer in Michigan Territory. Early Livingston County census records indicate a family of Fields in each township.)
As early as 1837, German Lutherans had settled in southeastern Livingston County. By 1842, they began meeting for public worship services, under the leadership of the pioneer Lutheran missionary in eastern Michigan, the Rev. Frederick Schmidt (born Sept. 6, 1807, in Wuertemberg, Germany; died August 30, 1883 at Ann Arbor).
