JOHN SEARS
John Sears, Jr. was born September 17, 1849
in Coles Co., Illinois, the son of John and Hetty A. (Radley) Sears, natives
of Kentucky. John was the eighth of 11 children. He [John, Jr.]
was educated in his native county and engaged in cultivating the paternal
acres. [Note: He was an infant when family went to WI, and quite
young yet when they moved to NE, where he was educated.]
At the age of 20 he was living in Holt County,
Missouri, with his brother Abraham. He married Maria Hawkins.
She was born in Missouri. In 1871 he moved his young family to Osborne
County, Kansas, taking a homestead of 160 acres (SW 1/4, Section 11, township
7, Range 12) in Penn Township, which he farmed for 16 years.
In the spring of 1886, he moved to Montana. He bought
280 acres due west of Corvallis at Woodside, Ravalli County, in the Bitter
Root Valley. Here he was successful, raising cattle in goodly numbers and
fruit in great quantities.
After the passing of Maria, he married Addie May
Wing, the second daughter of John A. Wing, a former Osborne County neighbor
friend, then living at Luray, Kansas. They married on September 17, 1895.
They were living in retirement at Missoula,
Montana when he died in 1906. His children were Franklin, George,
William, Isaac, Edgar, Hetty Johnson (the wife of a neighboring farmer),
and Ida Atchison (the wife of a minister in Colorado.)
Addie lived at Missoula, Montana, until 1930,
when she returned to Osborne County for a brief time. She then made
her home in Oklahoma City with her sister, Belle Richolson. In 1948
they moved to Los Angeles, California. Addie died in 1956.
Osborne Co., Kansas 1870-1930, by the Osborne Co. Genealogical and Historical
Society, Osborne, Kansas, p. 521
(Submitted by Mrs. W. S. Deller)