Harriet E. Smith
Raised as Hattie Smith in North Bloomfield, Ohio, she married Herbert Stetson in Earlville, Iowa. Their five children were born in Iowa before the family relocated to Montana after 1900
Teaching was a career path for three sons of deacon Josiah T. Stetson
Insights from an 1897 biographical sketch
Where did Herbert meet Hattie?
Besides the fact of their marriage, I've found no other record that places Herbert in Ohio or Harriet in Maine.
Isetta's mother Harriet Smith descended from the Mayflower family of John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley
When I showed my Stetson results to Twyla, she was interested to learn that Cornet Robert Stetson arrived in Plymouth Colony shortly after the Mayflower. But what about the family members who were actually aboard the original Pilgrim ship?
Those would be the famous couple of John Howland and Elizabeth Tilley, whose history and genealogy are well documented. How did the Stetson family intersect with this famous Mayflower family?
Isetta Stetson's father Herbert Stetson was a ninth generation descendant of colonial American Cornet Robert Stetson
It took some doing, but I've succeeded in tracing the Eilertsen-Bennett family's Stetson lineage back to Cornet Robert Stetson, who settled Scituate, Massachusetts in the Plymouth Colony in the first decade after the Mayflower landing.
The chart shows the family identifier code used by the Stetson Kindred of America, which has published official genealogies for more than 100 years. Cornet Robert is Stetson number 1 and members of each subsequent generation are given by birth order.
Herbert E. Stetson
Maine educator who went west and raised a family in Iowa. They later resettled in Montana, where Herbert managed a mercantile store
Herbert Stetson's death reported
April 30, 1924 obituary in The Butte Miner
What was a "protracted sojourn?"
From 1882 to 1903, ship manifests of alien passengers to the United States included in column 10 a designation as "transient, in transit, or intending protracted sojourn."
It is the last designation that we see on the early Eilertsen manifests. Indeed, not just the Osmundsens but seemingly every one of the passengers and crew on those sailings was intending a protracted sojourn in America.
The Peyton family homestead in Traverse County, Minnesota
James V. Bennett spent his formative years living with his sister Sarah (20 years older than he) and her husband Thomas Peyton on the Peyton farm in Traverse County, MN. It is unclear why he (along with his favorite sister Lizzie) chose to leave their mother and father in favor of this arrangement.
James V. Bennett encounters a Native American
Another piece of family lore relates to James Bennett's time on the Peyton farm. During one of his extended visits, he encountered a group of white settlers torturing a Dakota man, dragging him by a rope affixed to the back of a horse. Grandpa Bennett was allegedly so disturbed that he confronted and fought the torturers, insisting on the man's release.