Jeremiah Carpenter - who served in the Revolutionary War - is our ancestor.

Our Carpenter Family History - and the challenge of getting it right.

We descend from an early American Carpenter family, which was based in New York and moved north and then west with the expanding settlement in the Colony and State of New York - and members of our branch later homesteaded in Northern Illinois and then in Dakota Territory.

My fifth great-grandfather was Jeremiah Carpenter, born in 1760 and a Revolutionary War Veteran - whose military service card is shown on the heading on this page - who after his service lived in Onondaga County, and then Erie County, New York. In fact, he moved to Erie County early enough that it was part of Niagara County when he first moved there ca 1816. Jeremiah left a revolutionary war pension file, and a brief probate - but those records did not give clarity about who his immediate family members were. More about that in a moment.

Jeremiah’s son Joseph - my fourth great-grandfather - was first shown in a will record in Onondaga County, moved with his family to Erie County where he is shown in numerous property records and in the 1840’s homesteaded in Chemung, McHenry County, Illinois - where he died in 1869. Joseph’s daughter Johanna, married Squire Slade Blodgett in New York, and they settled in Leroy Township, Boone County, Illinois - right across the county line from her father Joseph in Chemung. Their daughter Phoebe married George M. Nash of Chemung, and they homesteaded in Charles Mix County, Dakota Territory - later South Dakota. Phoebe Blodgett and George Nash were the parents of my great-grandfather (Elmer) James Nash. He and his wife Ida Kate Christensen had my grandmother Josephine Phoebe Nash. There are still family members in Charles Mix County - although my immediate family members came to the west coast during World War II.

Jeremiah Carpenter and his family were chronicled, along with his father Timothy Carpenter and his descendants in the 1976 Charles Lorain Carpenter book, “The Descendants of Timothy Carpenter of Pittstown, Rensselaer County, New York”, Timothy being my sixth great-grandfather. Unfortunately, Jeremiah Carpenter’s children were not listed correctly in the 1976 book and the incorrect family lives on all over the internet in family records files.

Three Carpenter cousins and I did research on who was correctly in the family and came to an understanding of the actual Jeremiah Carpenter family. I authored an article published in 2014 to correct the errors, and address the issue of faulty information that lives all over the internet.

At the launch of this family history website in December 2020 I started with a page containing the the basic correct information for Jeremiah Carpenter - which can be accessed by clicking the Carpenter heading above and choosing that page (or by clicking here). On that page, the article is posted, as well as a link to the correct family records file, and a family group sheet for just Jeremiah and his children.

I have now posted a second page, which is the detailed backup on how we got to the children of Jeremiah and Jane Shears Carpenter. I had distributed a version of this backup after the 2014 publication of the article on the correct Jeremiah Carpenter family - but with images added, it clearly and graphically tells the story.

As always, I welcome questions or corrections to any of the work done - and I should note Mary Vukman, Carol Carpenter, and the late Bonnie Huser, as distant cousins who assisted in the research.