The Stephens Family: A Genealogy of the Descendants of Joshua Stevens

In Short

This volume is a detailed family genealogy documenting the lineage and spread of the descendants of Joshua Stephens, a Revolutionary War patriot born in Pennsylvania in 1733. Compiled through ancestral interviews, regional public records, and personal correspondence, the book traces how a single pioneer family expanded across Pennsylvania, Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Indiana, and into the far West. Beyond listing vital dates and marriages, it records oral histories of frontier living, Revolutionary service, and family migrations, preserving the perishable legacy of an early American bloodline for future generations.

The Story

The chronicle opens with the earliest origins of the family in the eighteenth century, acknowledging the semi-legendary accounts of three Welsh brothers—Joshua, David, and Ebenezer—who immigrated to the wilderness of Berks County, Pennsylvania. The documented history takes firm hold with Joshua Stephens, Jr., born in 1733 in an isolated region populated by wild beasts and neighboring early American figures like the Lincoln and Boone families. Raised on a frontier farm, Joshua becomes an adept hunter and marksman. As a young man, he relocates south to Chester County near Valley Forge, marries Priscilla Humphreys—a member of the local Seventh-day Baptist community—and fights for the patriot cause during the American Revolution.

Following the war, the family's westward trajectory begins in earnest. Joshua pulls up roots and moves his wife and children to Warm Springs, Virginia, then to Lexington, Kentucky—where his distant relation Daniel Boone visits him—before settling in Ohio around 1798. His children and grandchildren establish homesteads in Ross, Franklin, and Shelby counties, clearing land, manufacturing brick, and establishing farms around the village of Hardin. Joshua spends his final years living alongside his adult sons, wearing his old Revolutionary War greatcoat and hunting deer at local salt licks into his eighties before dying at age ninety in 1823.

As the nineteenth century progresses, subsequent generations disperse across the rapidly expanding nation. Joshua's son Ebenezer David farms in Shelby County after running away from a tanning apprenticeship in his youth and serving briefly in the War of 1812. Daughters and sons marry into local families like the Moores, Vandevers, Gaskills, and McClishes, building towns such as Mooresburg, Indiana, serving as county judges, and fighting in the Civil War.

By the late nineteenth century, the eighth and ninth generations scatter far beyond the Midwest. Members of the family establish roots in Texas, Missouri, Nebraska, Arizona, and California. They become newspaper editors, lawyers, college presidents, orange growers, and legislative councilmen. Through painstaking correspondence and visits to old graveyards, the author collects these divergent branches back into a single historical record, closing the narrative with a detailed map of the ancestral burial plots in Hardin, Ohio.

How It Unfolds

The colonial frontier Joshua Stephens is born in 1733 in the wilderness of Berks County, Pennsylvania, to Welsh parents. He grows up hunting, sharpening his marksmanship, and living near the ancestral families of Daniel Boone and Abraham Lincoln.

War and early migration Joshua settles in Chester County, marries Priscilla Humphreys, and fights in the Revolutionary War. After independence, he moves his family through Virginia to Kentucky, where he re-engages with Daniel Boone, before pushing into Ohio.

Settling the Ohio country The family establishes roots in Ross and Shelby counties, Ohio, clearing farmland and burning brick for early settlements. The aging Joshua spends his last days in Hardin, telling war stories to his grandchildren before his death in 1823.

Midwestern expansion and conflict In the mid-nineteenth century, sons and daughters found new settlements like Mooresburg, Indiana, and assume roles as local judges, farmers, and tradesmen. Several descendants enlist in the Union Army during the Civil War, fighting in major battles and serving in veteran corps.

The far western frontier By the late nineteenth century, the family reaches the Pacific and Southwest, taking up professions in journalism, law, politics, and agriculture in California, Arizona, and Nebraska. Author Bascom Stephens collects the scattered lineages into a unified record, which printer Alonzo Bower later publishes.

The People

• Joshua Stephens (Jr.) desires a life of outdoor independence and frontier enterprise. Bound by the limits of early wilderness life and the disruptions of the Revolutionary War, he constantly adapts by migrating further west, ultimately passing down a rich tradition of pioneer longevity to his vast family.
• Ebenezer David Stephens wants autonomy over his career and trade. Impatient under a harsh tanning apprenticeship in Kentucky, he runs away to join his father in Ohio, overcoming early poverty to become a successful farmer, veteran, and respected landowner in Shelby County.
• Columbus Cecil Stephens aims to achieve professional and political distinction in the developing American West. Hindered by long distances and tough travel conditions, he walks over 1,500 miles overland to California, eventually earning law degrees and serving in the Arizona Territorial Legislature.
• Bascom Asbury Cecil Stephens seeks to rescue his family's history from total erasure. Confronted with lost records, uncooperative relatives, and vast geographic distances, he tirelessly gathers oral testimonies and church registers to compile the genealogy.

In Its Own Voice

"Berkes was then a 'howling wilderness' full of Indians and wild beasts."

The author describes the rugged Pennsylvania environment into which the family patriarch was born in 1733.

"His grand-children remember how the old gentlemen used to sit around the fire-place while they teased him by slyly pouring corn into the huge pockets of his old Revolutionary Army coat."

A vivid family tradition captures the gentle domestic life of patriarch Joshua Stephens in his final years in Ohio.

"Desiring for myself a copy of the generalogy of the Stephens family I found on investigating, that a number of printed copies could be secured at the cost of one typewritten one..."

Printer Alonzo Smith Bower explains his practical motivation for publishing and distributing the compiled family history in 1910.

What It's Really About

Beneath its systematic lists of names and dates, the book is a study of the American migratory impulse and the fragility of historical memory. It argues that a family's identity is forged through physical movement—from transatlantic journeys to the westward movement across forests, plains, and deserts. The narrative explores how local communities are built from pioneer grit and how individual sacrifices in war and settlement shape the broader republic. Crucially, the text wrestles with the threat of forgetting; it functions as an urgent attempt to anchor fleeting oral traditions, lost graves, and scattered descendants to a tangible, permanent record before time dissolves their connection to a shared past.

Why Read It Today

This work will appeal to historians of the American frontier, genealogy enthusiasts, and readers fascinated by nineteenth-century pioneer life. Reading it feels like sifting through an old family chest filled with handwritten letters, legal ledgers, and worn photographs. The text carries a quiet, unpretentious charm, balancing bare factual entries with sudden, vivid glimpses of human drama—unsolved disappearances, runaway apprentices, riverboat accidents, and political fights in frontier legislatures.

Readers must navigate the inherent difficulties of the genealogical format, including dense numbering systems, repeated family names, and long lists of birth and death dates. The prose also reflects period perspectives and casual references to frontier violence. Yet what remains after putting the book down is an overwhelming sense of scope: a grand, ground-level view of how ordinary families cleared the forests, crossed the continent, and quietly built the modern American landscape.