THOMAS LIVESLEY
had four older siblings when he was born (John had died as an infant). In 1841, when he was almost two, brother William joined him but his older sister Elizabeth, was taken away at 6 1/2 by illness the same year. Then the children were all boys save Mary, who at eight inherited many babysitting duties. Imagine the trip to America that fall, with the three youngest at 4, 2 and 1. So Thomas leaned to walk and talk in the wilds of Ohio, far from the comforting, old grounds of Cheshire. All his life his speech bore an American twang.

They were then 30 miles from Cleveland, farming, making friends, making the best of it. Ohio was an odd mix of new and old in 1841, on the frontier but growing with established values and architecture. Lincoln was a 32 year old lawyer in Illinois. Men wore frock coats and beaver hats but knew their way around axes and horse care. There was schooling for youth amid stumps everywhere, streets were mud and women carried parasols. Long before Horace Greeley said it, the west was the place to go for the adventuresome. The land for development seemed boundless. Of the 17 million people living in the U S at the time, 1 million lived in Ohio.

That year the transcendentalists set up Brooke Farm in Massachusetts. The Texas settlers from America were fighting the Mexicans. Forty-seven people went overland to California. The prairie was an unbroken sea of grass and buffalo. Britain and the U s shared the Oregon country. John Tyler was President and Ohio was very far from Washington. In 1843 sister Betsy came along, the only one of Tom's siblings to be born in America.

After four years the parents abruptly moved back to Northwich for ten more. Thomas was six. So from six to sixteen - ten formative years to say the least - Tom was an English boy in the ancestral country. This is where he went to school and we presume developed his interest in engineering. And Cheshire was indeed pulsing with the Industrial Revolution just then. Railroad mania gripped the country, factories of all kinds were being built, ships from Liverpool touched colonies all over the globe. Again he lived an odd mix, an old town that pointed to its Roman leavings, where the Livesleys went back several generations, surrounded by great change and hopeful modernity. We speculate that he and his friends had large dreams and aspirations, that nothing was beyond the imagination. There was family too: brother Alfred came along in 1847, grandmother Betty died in 1850, oldest brother Sam was in and out when home from sailing and in 1854 married Margaret in Great Budworth.

In late 1855 George and Esther's friends bid them goodbye again as they set out for America permanently. Mary was now a 22 year old woman, Thomas 16, Alfred 8. The grown up family, English but with an unusual independence, was in New York Dec 31 and Wisconsin before June. They went farther west this time, again on the frontier. Wisconsin had become a state in 1848 and Ironton was founded shortly thereafter. Everything around them was fresh and raw. On the way they were briefly in Ohio and here apparently Thomas, only 17, left the family. The modern world must have beckoned, things mechanical had called him away from farming. We don't know just where he went, only that he was in Ohio many years.

SUSAN ANN ACHER
He was 21 when the Civil War started but we have no record of him serving. At 27 (1866) he married 19 year old Susan Archer in Columbus, Ohio. He was a machinist and we have speculation that he was in Columbus because of war work. Susan was born to Benjamin and Mary Archer and grew up in Greenville PA (near Pittsburg); why she was in Columbus we don't know. The 1880 census finds him back in the Milwaukee area; there too in 1900: "Thomas Livesley, age 61, living as boarder in home of James Cauley; married 33 years, machinist, worked all 12 months, can read and write English."

After the war Thomas and Susan made their home in Michigan and had six children, only three of whom though lived past infancy. They did not accompany his parents and siblings on the move to Nebraska in 1869 though Seward County records show Esther quitclaimed her 80 acres there to them in 1880. We also know from deeds that brothers Tom and George bought a lot in Crete together in 1871, that he bought out George's half in 1873, then sold the whole thing in 1887. In the 1870's Thomas and Susan were in Michigan; in the 1880's, Wisconsin.

We don't know yet why Tom was living at the Continental Hotel in Portland, Oregon 1890-1. But he did stop in Gifford's photo studio and make the one and only image we have of him, a distinguished looking portrait of a man with long beard. It is said in her obit that Susan moved to Woodburn "after her husband died" but this isn't true. The couple became estranged somewhere in here. She may have left him. The census says, "deserted." Other references say, "separated." Whatever, when second son Philip came out to Oregon in 1901 he sent for mother Susan and sister Flo to join him, which they did in 1904. There's no sign of dad being with them. We have record of his death in West Allis (near Milwaukee) Wisconsin on May 17, 1917, at 73[sic-38] years.

Susan Acher Livesley lived many years in Woodburn with their two youngest and their families and died there in 1936. She was well known by many, including her nearby nephews T. A. and Charles. Her son Philip became mayor. She is credited with being one of the founders of the Woodburn Library where she worked the twelve years 1914-26.

@2000 by Sam Bush; reproduced on this website with permission