Biographical Details
Date of Birth: October 10, 1824
Birth Location: Ridgeway, NY, USA
Major Study: Law
Graduation Year(s): 1850
Degree(s) Earned: Bachelor of Laws
Date of Death: December 19, 1902
Death Location: San Jose, CA, USA
Alfred Wheeler
Life Experience
Alftred Wheeler was born in 1824; his mother, Eunice, died that same year. His parents had only been married six years. Wheeler had one full sibling, an older brother. His father remarried and had a son when Wheeler was ten, but the stepmother died four years later. Wheeler left home at age fifteen or sixteen to become an apprentice at a newspaper. About this time, his father remarried again and had three more children over the next three years. At age nineteen, Wheeler quit his job, and as Charles Chapman described it, “went on a tramp,” traveling America and Canada for the next four years, doing odd jobs, eventually visiting “nearly every State and Territory in the Union,” according to Wylie. Wheeler then entered IU in 1847 and obtained his law degree in 1850.
Wheeler spent his working life in the newspaper business, working his way up from pressman to compositor to foreman to associate editor to editor of the St. Joseph Valley Register. He then worked as treasurer and bookkeeper for the South Bend Tribune. From 1867 to 1875, he was county auditor. Wheeler died in 1902.
Marriage and Family
Wheeler met and married his wife, Elizabeth Ruth Garrison, in 1849. They had eight children over a span of twenty years. Their children went west, living in Idaho, California, and Oregon after they reached adulthood, as did Wheeler’s elder brother. Sometime after 1890, the Wheelers moved to California as well, settling in San Jose. Elizabeth died the same year as her husband in 1902.
References
- Wylie
- Findagrave.com
- ancestors.familysearch.org/en/
- southbendtribune.com/news/opinion/viewpoint/south-bend-s-missing-history/
- Chapman, Charles C., et al. (1880) History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (Chicago: Blakely, Brown & Marsh)