Jabez Omsted Chart

Contributed by Dave Mason

There has been, and will continue for many years, confusion over the first three generations of the Captain Jabez Olmsted’s family. Dave Mason created the chart and information below as a help to other descendants who are confused over the wives of two of Capt. Jabez’s grandsons, Israel (#1-3-8) and Gideon (#1-11-1) who married Cooley sisters; the other children in the families are not extended in this chart.

Walt Steesy

Awhile ago I received an e-mail from Family Search (the LDS website) about an Omstead ancestor of mine, Gideon Omsted. The e-mail indicated that new info was found about Gideon’s wife Elizabeth Cooley who had re-married to Joshua Fairchild.

I knew this was wrong as Gideon Omsted had married Elizabeth’s sister, Abigail Cooley. It was actually Gideon’s cousin Israel Omsted who married Elizabeth.

And after moving to Canada, Elizabeth (Cooley) Omsted apparently divorced Israel to marry Joshua. In my research I found numerous (many, many) family trees on the internet with this error and commonly calling him Gideon Israel or Israel Gideon. It seems that people saw that both Gideon and Israel’s birth years were 1757 and evidently assumed it was the same person. However, they are first cousins as their fathers were brothers.

This led me on the research that created the limited table below of the direct Omsted families. This table is pretty rudimentary but I did find original vital records to verify the dates and places. My goal was to have a ready reference if similar questions arose in the future. This table may be useful to others who are researching the family. I have corrected the data of Family Search but as that website is open to anyone, it may once again become polluted by someone who hasn’t done their research.

Another item of note was that the surname spelling in the majority of the documents did not have the “l” or “a”; that came at a later time in the family line. And for that matter, my ancestors never adopted the “l” in the surname but did use the “a” starting with Gideon’s children, including my third great-grandfather Jacob Omstead and my second great-grandfather Nelson Gideon Omstead. I know that the family name has been standardized to Olmsted or Olmstead by others and I only mention this because in doing internet searches it may require using multiple spellings, especially on WikiTree. WikiTree doesn’t always bring up alternate spellings of a surname when it is the second letter that is missing or added.

Dave Mason, 25 November 2018

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