As usual when I am bored with trying to break through a brick wall I roam around in the family tree until I find a distant relative to play with. The Newville’s, also spelled Novel or Novell, were from Halfmoon township, Saratoga county, New York in the mid 1700’s. John Newville was my fifth great grandfather. His daughter Phebe would marry John Oakley and this line would come down through my maternal grandmother. The Newville’s, like so many, over time spread out and went in various directions including Minnesota and Iowa. From Census records I can tell that Amos Newville, born in 1800, moved to Iowa between 1850 and 1870. It amazed me that at a point in his life that he would have been settling down he picked up and moved that far away.
Ancestry.com has terrific information on the inhabitants of Iowa from 1836 – 1925. Iowa did their own Census and included in that Census the parent’s names, including the mother’s maiden name. This makes it incredibly easy to verify if you are trooping down the correct line. Not only did I find maiden names but married names of the children in the line. Not all of the Census years have that much detail but the ones that do help further the research.