His parents	Married 2/18/1819	Her parents
4GGF Micah "Michael" Rice Bartlett	IL	4GGM Zerviah Edwards Wells-Bartlett
Ancestor 92 (1011100) 3/29/1789- 3/??/1865	Their ancestral child	Ancestor 93 (1011111) 8/25/1798 - 6/??/1832

A Vermont native named Micah Bartlett married his first wife, Olive Brown, in 1811. ¹ Micah and Olive apparently divorced, because they both remarried subsequently. That was rare and stigmatized but not unheard of at the time. They had no known children together.

By 1819, a “Michael R.” Bartlett shows up in the record books of Shawnee, Gallatin County, IL. Strong circumstantial evidence indicates that this was Micah starting a new life. ² Michael has been described as six feet tall with blue eyes, auburn hair, and a fair complexion. That February, Michael married Zerviah Edwards Wells. Zerviah and her parents had moved into Illinois in 1818. Michael and Zerviah had four children together: William (b. in Shawnee in 1820), Joel, Michael * , and Lucinda (b. in Rock Island County in 1830).

The young family moved to Rock Island / Moline, IL (on the Mississippi River at the Iowa state line) in the late 1820s. This was a dangerous frontier area where a treaty between the US and native American tribes was on shaky ground. Michael was among a group of men who petitioned Illinois for protection from nearby Indians, and then briefly joined a militia unit, the “Rock River Rangers”, in 1831. The tension boiled over in the Black Hawk War of April – August, 1832. Michael enlisted again for this conflict, in which Abraham Lincoln, Zachary Taylor, and Jefferson Davis served. It ended with a decided US victory and the end of native hostilities in Illinois Territory.

Zerviah died young in June, 1832, right in the middle of the Black Hawk War. In fact, she died at Fort Armstrong on Rock Island, ³ which was a major administrative / diplomatic headquarters and POW camp during the war. Perhaps local women and children were sheltered there. I do not know the cause of her death, but I would suspect cholera. A cholera outbreak just two months later was so bad that the prisoners of war had to be released. ⁴ I had heard it said that Zerviah was killed in an Indian attack. This is surely loose collective memory of the war in general. I have found no historic reference to an attack on the fort at that time; in fact it was used as a diplomatic post for negotiating a treaty to end the war. A cemetery was located at Fort Armstrong, with a fenced in section for wives of military men. Unfortunately, no record of burials exists and the cemetery was pretty much destroyed in the reconstruction of the fort. There is now a museum on the island. The map below shows the location of the fort, as well as Michael’s grave eight miles upstream.

Michael married his third wife, Bethena Babbitt, May 21, 1833. They raised six children: Mary (1834), Hiram, Zerviah, Christina, Cynthia, and Nancy (1846). Note that they named their second daughter Zerviah, after Michael’s 2nd wife. This can raise some confusion, especially since Michael is buried next to his daughter Zerviah. Michael served as sheriff of Rock Island County 1835 – ’37. He was also a major land owner in the area, with 13 registered land patents between 1819 and 1839. He died in 1865, at a time when seven of his sons or sons-in-law were serving in the Civil War.

A strange rumor about Michael has been passed down through the generations. The way it is related in Kim Davenport’s book, “Michael Rice Bartlett was captured by the British in the War of 1812, captured in Cattaraugus County, NY, and held prisoner for four years, then released two years after war was ended. When released, he returned home to find his wife, believing him dead, had remarried. Disappointed, Michael joined a group of Indians and married an Indian squaw named Abbot.” This legend is not supported by documentary evidence, and in fact it seems to contradict the known dates and facts ⁵. I love keeping family legends alive, as long as we remember to separate fact from fancy. When I first heard this at a 1994 family reunion, we didn’t know about Zerviah and we took it to mean that we were descended from the native American woman.

Kim Davenport has one hypothesis about this rumor, and I have another. Her hypothesis is that this story was an elaborate cover-up for Michael’s divorce from Olive. That is a reasonable possibility. In family history, we often find tall tales surrounding “shameful” episodes such as divorces and children born out of wedlock. I can’t help but notice, though, the striking parallels between this story and the end of Michael’s marriage to Zerviah. Maybe the legend is a dramatic amplification of these real events.

The legend	The truth
Michael Rice Bartlett fought in the War of 1812	He served in the Black Hawk War
He was held prisoner of war	His hometown fort of Fort Armstrong held native American prisoners of war
He returned to find that his wife had left him for dead and had remarried	Zerviah died during the war; Michael might have returned home to find her dead.
Michael ran off to live with native Americans	He fought in a war against native Americans
He remarried a woman named "Abbot" (which is an awfully strange name for a native American)	He remarried a woman named Babbitt

Michael’s FindAGrave profile

Zerviah’s FindAGrave profile