Elizabeth Emily Wood née Clark, 1862-1923

Headstone GPS Coordinates: 

Birth: 10 April 1862, Harrison Township, Drake County, Ohio   

Death: 3 December 1923, Coyle, Jefferson County, Washington

Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: None

American Revolutionary War Patriots*: Unknown.

Disclaimer: These lines have not been officially proven by NSDAR standards

Elizabeth Emily Clark was born April 10, 1862 to her parents Joel Clark and Susanah Leslie in Harrison Township, Ohio. Joel Clark was a Private in Company D, 142nd Indiana Infantry of the Union Army during the Civil War. His regiment was sent to Nashville where he died of sickness in 1865. He was buried in Nashville, Tennessee. Elizabeth would have been about three years old at the time.

When Elizabeth was fifteen years old, she married twenty-two year old James B. Wood from Illinois in 1877.  In 1878, Elizabeth and James were living in Indiana where they had their first child Eleanor Charlotte.  Their second child, John, was born in Illinois in 1879. By 1880, the family was living in Hancock, Illinois where James worked as a farmer.  In 1883, Elizabeth and James lived in Kansas where they had two more children: Flora in 1883 and Clarence in 1885.

The Wood family arrived in Seattle, Washington in 1889 where they eventually homesteaded at Hazel Point in Jefferson county. James and Elizabeth continued to have more children: Carl (1889), Elmer (1891), Lillian (1894), Willis (1896), Daniel (1898), and Hazel (1900), Doris (1905), and Ellis (1907). In the 1910 census, the family was living in Norton, Jefferson county, Washington. James worked as a farmer in the spring and a trapper during the winter to support his large family. In 1920, the family was still living in Norton, and James was working as a dairy farmer.

At the age of sixty-one, Elizabeth passed away on December 5, 1923 in Coyle, Jefferson County, Washington from ventricular heart disease, a condition she had suffered from over the course of six years. According to her headstone, she passed away in 1924, but her death certificate states she died in 1923.

In 1950, her husband James died in Selah, Yakima county at the age of ninety-five. His obituary listed all twelve of his and Elizabeth’s children as living at the time along with “52 grandchildren, 87 great-grandchildren, and 14 great-great grandchildren.”

(Historical note: It wasn’t uncommon for people living across the Hood Canal in Jefferson county to transport and bury their loved ones in Seabeck Cemetery probably because the cemetery didn’t charge to bury people.)