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MEAD FAMILY HISTORY & GENEALOGY

Overview

I am beginning to collect various resources on my Mead family line. It has not been a focus for me as I have so much information to work with on the Bliley lines. However, I am getting so many requests for information on Mead family members that I decided to post some of what I have without embellishment.

Do you have a resource you would like considered for posting on this site? If so, drop me a line.

Charles A. Bliley
Updated: October 20, 12016

Contents

• Mead Genealogy Resources on Bliley.net
• Mead Memorial, Yongsville, Pennsylvania
• Darius Mead -- His Ancestors and Some of His Many Descendants
• Letters to Jehu Mead About Draft Dodging During the Civil War
• The Lives and Times of Charles and Mary Jane Mead Bliley (Booklet)
• Photo Gallery of Meads and Blileys for Identification

Mead Genealogy Resources on Bliley.net   

Below are several resources other than the Darius Mead family story on this Web site.

• Experimental Arrangement of the Genealogical Records of the Descendants of Darius Mead -- Author Unknown, Published Circa 1930s
  A 77-page genealogy based on Darius Mead, of Pennsylvania. Contents are scanned original typewritten text and processed for OCR that is suitable for searching.
  • Download PDF for Offline Viewing via FTP: PDF, 12 Mb
  • View Online in Browser w/PDF Plug-In: PDF, 12 Mb
• Mead Genealogy -- Believed to be published by Mrs. O.P. Bush, Warren, PA, USA, Circa 1939
  Contents are scanned original typewritten text and processed for OCR that is suitable for searching. This work also contains vital on several Bliley families.
  • Download PDF for Offline Viewing via FTP: PDF, 2.5 Mb
  • View Online in Browser w/PDF Plug-in: PDF, 2.5 Mb

Mead Memorial, Youngsville, Pennsylvania   

On July 25, 1940, a memorial to the Mead families of Youngsville, Warren and Crawford Counties, Pennsylvania was dedicated after three years of effort by the Mead Reunion Committee. My grandfather, Frank Anderson Bliley, was chosen to make the dedication speech. Click here for a more detailed description of the memorial and the dedication speech recording made in 1941. There are some winter photos of the monument taken in January, 2015, as I passed through Youngsville from Bradford to Erie, PA.

Darius Mead -- His Ancestors and Some of His Many Descendants   

This is a wonderful family history written by a Mead descendant, Rush M. Blodget, Senior, in 1937. It is a colorful and interesting story frontier settlers in Western Pennsylvania. Please check it out.

Letters to Jehu Mead About Dodging the Draft   

Apparently, Jehu Mead of harbor Creek Township, Pennsylvania (Wesleyville, PA area) was a Civil War draft dodger who skiddadled to somewhere in Michigan to avoid service. There were apparently thousands like him who were sought during the war, but receive amnesty after Confederate surrender. One letter was written in 1863 from his brother-in-law, Charles Bliley, and the second from his sister, Mary Jane Mead Bliley in 1865 just a two months after combat ended. These are very powerful letters and an important discovery, albeit a skeleton in our closet. It provides insight to family values, love and forgiveness; not to mention a direct connection with real history.

Since these are handwritten letters, I offer them in PDF format for offline viewing, as well as online viewing.

• Charles A. Bliley's Letter of January 7, 1863: PDF, 8.5 Mb / High-Resolution Online Gallery, 25 Mb; Low-Resolution Online Gallery, 1 Mb
• Mary Jane Mead Bliley's Letter of June 11, 1865: PDF, 3 Mb

The Lives and Times of Charles and Mary Jane Mead Bliley: A Scrapbook of Family Photos, Memoirs, Facts and Whimsy   

Charles and Mary Jane Mead Bliley were my great grandparents. In July 2005, I created a small booklet for family members based on items which I collected in the previous couple of years.

This 26-page/3,500 word booklet is a collection of family photos, interesting facts, extracts from their memoirs, and historical information on the community in which they lived their adult lives. Included are family photos and photos of their farm on Station Road in Harborcreek Township, PA.

A PDF version of the limited-edition paper booklet is offered online. The PDF has many high-resolution photos which you can magnify to see the details more clearly than is possible with the paper version. This is a relatively large file at 13 megabytes, but I am sure you will find it to be worth the download time.

• Life and Times of Charles and Mary Jane Mead Bliley
  • Download: PDF, 13 Mb
  • Online Version

Mead Family Photos from the 19th Century for Identification   

In the fall of 2009, I was contacted by Patty Mead of Cedar Falls, Iowa. She asked me to help her identify some photos of her husband's family. I agreed to give it a stab, and low and behold she sent me 47 lovely prints of photos in her collection that needed identification and some that she thought I would like to have. I was delighted with the number and quality of the photos, but I could only identify about six of the two-dozen unknowns. Believing that the more people who see these, the better the chances that we can identify all of them. So, here we go. Click here to view a rather large gallery of her photos.

Caution: All 47 photos are available through one single Web page and total 10 megabytes of data. This is heavy for slow or dial-up service, but the wait is worth it.