John Evans, 1820-1893

Headstone GPS Coordinates: Grave location unknown in the cemetery.

Birth: 1820, Meifod, Montgomeryshire, Wales, United Kingdom

Death: 17 November 1893, possibly Crosby, Kitsap County, Washington

Relatives in Seabeck Cemetery: Anna (née Evans) Bassett

American Revolutionary War Patriots*: None.

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

John Evans was born in the late months of 1820 in the rural parish of Meifod, Montgomeryshire, Wales. The son of Thomas Evans, a general laborer, and Mary Reese, he was baptized on New Year’s Day, 1821. Little is known about his early years, though it is likely he spent his childhood in Montgomeryshire. By the age of twenty, he was working as an agricultural laborer on the Llyod farm.

On May 19, 1848, John married Mary Vaughn in Llanfyllin, Montgomeryshire. Both were twenty-seven years old when they began their life together. Two years later, on December 16, 1850, their daughter, Anna Jane Evans, was born. Whether John and Mary had other children remains uncertain, but John continued to support his household as a laborer.

The 1871 census still placed John and Mary in Llanfyllin, though their daughter Anna, then twenty-one, was no longer living at home—likely working in service. In 1874, Anna wed Samuel Bassett. Anna and Samuel would leave the United Kingdom in 1877 and sail to New York City on the “City of Richmond” ship. From there, they would journey to Palmyra, Ohio to join up with the already established Welsh community where the men worked in the coal mines.

By 1880, John himself had crossed the ocean. He appeared in records in Palmyra, Portage County, Ohio, living with his brother-in-law, Wakin Vaughn, and Wakin’s wife, Elizabeth. Conveniently, he was just next door to Anna and Samuel. The Welsh presence in Portage County was strong, rooted in the coal mines that had drawn workers from Wales since the 1830s. Welsh immigrants built tight-knit communities there, where their language and traditions endured. John, then fifty-nine, likely followed Anna and Samuel, who had emigrated in 1877, and sought work in the mines as many of his countrymen had done.

Yet John did not remain in Ohio for long. By 1881, he had returned to Wales and was back with Mary. His time in the mines had evidently allowed him to purchase seven acres of farmland—a modest but significant accomplishment for a man who had labored most of his life for others.

The record grows thin after that. Sometime between 1881 and 1893, Mary seems to have died in Wales. John, now alone, made his way once again to America, this time traveling farther west to Crosby, Washington, where Anna and Samuel had settled. His time there was brief. On November 17, 1893, John Evans died at the age of seventy-three, with Samuel Bassett serving as informant on his death record. The cause was listed simply as “old age.”

Although no marker survives for his grave, John was likely buried in Seabeck Cemetery, near where Anna and Samuel would later be laid to rest at the cemetery’s center.