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Rev. H. O. Sheldon
Table of Contents S#5124 Reverend Henry Olcott Sheldon S#5124 Reverend Henry Olcott Sheldon
Born - Hartford, Connecticut, 15 September 1799 Probably the best known, if not foremost, among the Sheldons early in Ohio was S#5124 Reverend Henry Olcott Sheldon. He moved from Genoa in Cayuga County, New York in 1819 and first settled on a 100-acre farm in Peru Township in about six miles south of Norwalk. He moved from his Peru farm to a residence in Norwalk in 1833; to Berea in in 1836; to Roscoe Village in Coshocton County in 1853; to Loudonville in the southern part of Ashland County in 1854; to Sidney in Shelby County in 1858; and to Oberlin, Ohio in 1867. He married three times; first to Ruth Bradley, second to Mrs. Eleanor Robinson and third to Mrs. Pamela Hall. He had seven sons and five daughters, all born to his first wife. Two sons and a daughter died young. Rev. Henry O. Sheldon was a vigorous, driving man who made things happen. He kept a life-time journal, and these leather-bound volumes of manuscript diary are now preserved in the Firelands Museum in Norwalk. A Methodist preacher, he traveled on horseback three and four thousand miles a year covering the Wayne Circuit of Michigan, the North Ohio Conference and the Central Ohio Conference for the Methodist Church. He was agent for the Norwalk Seminary, traveling and lecturing extensively in the eastern part of the country. He was a prime mover in an unsuccessful attempt to organize a Christian Community and a Manual Labor School where the property of the individual members became the property of the organization. He was an early advocate and promoter in the founding of Ohio-Wesleyan University at Delaware, Ohio, Baldwin Institute, forerunner of Baldwin-Wallace College at Berea (a town whose name he suggested) and Oberlin College at Oberlin, Ohio. Rev. Henry Olcott Sheldon has been called the "Tom Paine of Ohio Education". He was buried in the College Cemetery in Oberlin, Ohio.
Rev. H. O. Sheldon spent a lifetime collecting and documenting information on Sheldons. He organized this information into what he called The Sheldon Magazine. From June 1855 until October 1857, he published four volumes as proof copies sent to his correspondents for corrections and additions. It was never intended to be a final product. Rev. Sheldon wrote in the Preface of Volume I: After the MS. [manuscript] has been in the hands of the printers more than three years (the delay and slow progress having been accounted for), we commence the publication of that part of the Sheldon Magazine, which comprises the list. Rev. Sheldon noted elsewhere that the price of the revised work, not less than 480 pages on fine paper, with biographical and historical notes, postage pre-paid, is $3.00 in advance. He intended to publish a fifth volume but this, and the final publication of the first four volumes was never accomplished during his lifetime. The Sheldon Family Association, with revisions and updated indexes, reprinted Volume I in July 1973, Volume II in October 1965, Volume III in November 1962, Volume IV in February 1961, and the previously "unprinted" Volume V in July 1957. In his "Historical Preface" to the "Unprinted" Volume V, S#5297x6-2 Carew Sheldon writes: His [Rev. H. O. Sheldon] type and property were lost during the Civil War. About 1882 he sent out a printed postal card from Oberlin, Ohio asking for revised data. He said that he had 17,000 names obtained by over 3,000 letters and years of travel. The NEH&GRegister, January 1883, 37:90 printed the same announcement and that "this work will soon be put to press". He had died two weeks before, aged 83 years, and his obituary appeared in the next issue. Volume VI was located and published in 1969. In the "Preface" to Volume VI, S#6770x4-1, Leland Locke Sheldon, Editor and Transcriber, writes: This completes the printing of approximately 1000 additional Sheldon Families and their connections which the Rev. Henry O. Sheldon had written into his personal copy of his four original pamphlets between 1857 and 1882. These notations were between the printed lines in their appropriate places or on pages numbered 141 through 158r, in his handwriting and followed the same form used in his other folios. Rev. H.O. Sheldon intended that in each line in these pamphlets, seven important items of genealogical value be available to researchers. All seven items appear in the designated columns unless the data is not available at the time of publication. The explanation of each column follows:
Some volumes of The Sheldon Magazine are out of print. The Genealogy Committee of the Sheldon Family Association has decided not to reprint the Magazine. Instead, a project is underway to enter The Sheldon Magazine and other genealogical material held by The Sheldon Family Association into a computer format. The final plans for publishing this material, in excess of 50,000 names, have not been finalized.
Rev. H.O. Sheldon devised a unique numbering system for Sheldons. He explained this system in the "Preface" to Volume I: Every descendent has a number. The numbers are all placed mathematically; 100 upon each double page. The last number by cutting off the 00, being the number of the page: so that all the numbers, except the last, will be found upon the page preceding the hundreds in the number; as, all below 100 on the first page; above 500 and below 600 on the sixth page. Hence 01 with the hundreds will always be found on the top of the left side; 25 at the middle, 50 at the bottom, 51 at the top right side, 75 at the middle. To facilitate tracing descendants, the reference designates the side of page; reference to the right side having r added. A * instead of a reference figure, denotes descendants whose names we have. S#5297x6-2, Carew Sheldon, added to this explanation in Volume 5 to show how Sheldons are numbered who are not listed in the original Sheldon Magazine: As described in the original Preface of the 1855 which is reprinted in the section of Indexes, the S#s in Vol. V indicate the page and line where the Sheldon head-of-family can be found in Vols. I to IV as a child along with his parents and other data including a cross-reference to Vol. V. As an example, S#5297 will be found on page 53 on the 47th line of the right-hand page, since they are numbered in duplicate with 50 lines to a page. There were 11,250 S#s for that many possible families as of 1855. No higher S# will be used. Thus, numbers preceding the "x" show the last person in the original magazines including the descendant's page and line position. Numbers following the "x" indicate generations after the last original entry and the sequence of birth of the descendant within a specific generation. Today, we often see the pound sign (#) replaced with a hyphen (-), as in S-5297,or no character at all between the "S" and the first digit of the Sheldon number, as in S5297. The use of the hyphen between generations, as in S5297x-3-2-1, is also not commonly used, rather the birth order of the generations is run together, as in S5297x321. If the birth order exceeds 9, for this example let's assume we want to indicate the eleventh birth child, the digits are placed between hyphens, as in S5297x321(11). Adopted descendants are indicated with the letter "A". When the Sheldon Family Association began to convert its records and files to a computer format, a new numbering system was necessary. S9759x71 E. Mark Sheldon, the author and developer of the Sheldon Family Genealogy System and great-grandson of Rev. H. O. Sheldon, explained his computer numbering system in the Introduction of his four volume Master Index Set: This number is unique to the Sheldon Family Genealogy System and compatible with the numbering system developed by Keith M. Sheldon for his book John of Providence. The computer number is in the form of an alpha character followed by a series of the numbers or letters. The initial alpha letter will be a "G", "I", "J", "R" or "W" and indicates the Sheldon line of descendant as noted in the table below. Each subsequent letter or number represents a generation and the birth order in that generation for purposes of this system. Since a generation is represented by a single character, numerical characters would limit family size to 9 children. To alleviate this problem, capital letters "A" through "V" are used to represent the tenth through the thirty-first child. To date [1989] the largest family has been 23 children.
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