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8
YOUTH
one of my mother's lines— the Voorhees family— from across the Channel in Holland. I am sure this is a typical American story, duplicated thousands of times.
That the Hays family of Indiana stems from sturdy Scotch-Irish emigrants—many of whom came early in the eighteenth century to Virginia through the port of Philadelphia— is evidenced by the census records of 1850 for Beaver County in southwestern Pennsylvania. My father was certainly Scotch-Irish in physical characteristics. Here is the first statement that my grandfather, Harrison Hays, was born in Virginia, May 22, 181 8, and his wife, Elizabeth Rowles, in Ohio on July 7, 1824. Suggesting early pioneering by the clan, the 1790 census of Washington County, Pennsylvania (part of which formed the later Beaver County), shows both a John Hays and a William Hays living there.
Further listings in the 1850 census show four of the early children: James, six; John, five (my father); Margaret Ann, two; and Jacob, six months. At this time Harrison Hays (his given name is my middle name) was a farmer in Black Hawk, South Beaver Township, about seven miles north of the Ohio River and three miles east of the Ohio state line. And here he remained until about 1859, when— now with a family of eight children— he crossed over into Ohio, settling in Middletown Township of Columbiana County, in the farming district of Achor, near Negley, where he is buried. I prize the photographs of the stone shafts bearing his name. And, most of all, a photostat of pages in their big family Bible— starting with a record of their marriage on February 9, 1843, followed by the names and birth dates of their twelve children, from 1844 to 1865. All these births, plus two of the deaths— and several of the eleven marriages recorded on separate pages— are almost surely in Harrison's Spencerian handwriting. If so, there is indication that he was a man of some education. This seems to be borne out by the fact that at least three of five sons who grew to manhood went to college— two of them taking honors at Mount. Union College, Alliance, Ohio, which fortunately was not over thirty-five miles from home.
From many historical records we know that Hays families, under several spellings, were well represented among early settlers here in America, both Catholic and Protestant, the first coming by the middle of the seventeenth century. Some had reached Pennsylvania from Ireland by 1728. They have spread into all of the forty-eight states. There is considerable evidence that the root family was originally French, and Huguenot, but that they settled and were naturalized in England and Ireland. In this country the name Hays frequently appears among the early settlers in New Jersey, from which whole bands of families moved out to the "Red Stone" country in southwestern Pennsylvania, where Grandfather lived. They loved to move along.
Similarly, the Rowles family was early found in New Jersey, Mary