Hezekiah Frank Finney Ancestry, Hillsdale County Michigan

August 21, 2022

This is my great great grandmother, Ethel. She died many years before I was born, but the story of her ancestry has intrigued me ever since I began doing family history research in 2016. Ethel's mother, Abigail Ida Finney (née Zeluff) died around 1890, when Ethel was just a toddler. Abigail Ida was only 18 or so when she died, having been married to Hezekiah Franklin Finney in 1887 when she was just 15 years old. Their marriage took place in Reading, Michigan, a tiny town in Hillsdale County. The bare facts of this story, particularly of Abigail Ida, have haunted me ever since I learned about her, and her story has remained largely a mystery to me: I have not yet seen a death certificate for her, and the 1890 census, which could be very useful in determining when she may have died and what her life might have been like leading up to her death, is largely gone due to 1921 fire. Recently, however, I have had the amazing privilege of seeing several plat atlases from Branch and Hillsdale Counties, dating from 1872, 1915 and 1916, all of which have allowed me to flesh out a bit more of Abigail Ida and Ethel's family. Here, I'll combine my findings from these plats with some of the information that I have access to through my Ancestry.com account, with the hope of creating a more complete picture of this aspect of my family tree. In this post, I'll specifically focus in on Abigail Ida's husband and Ethel's father, Hezekiah Frank Finney.

This photograph can be found on the first page of the Illustrations section of the 1916 Hillsdale County Atlas. The caption, as you can see, says that this is H. F. Finney, or Hezekiah Frank. This is the man Abigail Ida married when she was fifteen years old and the man who is Ethel's father. Comparing this photo with the photo of Ethel above reveals that this man is most definitely her father.

I can't say for certain why the photograph of Hezekiah is in this plat atlas, nor specifically the year it was taken, but if it was taken right around the time the plats were created, he would have been about 60 years old. Turning to the maps themselves, I stumbled across this little gem:

As you can see in fine print in the upper lefthand corner, Hezekiah Finney was living on land owned by Mrs. A. P. Hosmer. I suspect that Hezekiah may have routinely hired himself out as a farmhand to make a living, an idea made more plausible when Census data is taken into account. In 1900, Hezekiah and his second wife, Emma Hower, were living in Fayette, Hillsdale. In 1910, Scipio, Hillsdale. In 1916, this plat places them in Cambria township near Bankers, and by 1920, they were living in Ward 4 of Sturgis, St. Joseph County. Why did Hezekiah move around so much? Was he a farmhand? Possibly.

As one might expect, Hezekiah was not in residence on the Hosmer farm in 1872, as evidenced by the plat from that year (photograph below). He would only have been around 16 years old in 1872 and likely still lived with his parents, though I know little to nothing about them aside from their names, which were Romanta and Mary (née Johnson) Finney.

And that really concludes what I know about Hezekiah Frank Finney. It's not much, but it's given me much more tangible evidence of his life than I previously had, so I'm happy.