In the Denney family tree, Azariah is a relatively prominent name, and had any of our girls been a boy, Azariah he would have been named.
Today, we remember our 3rd (and 4th) great-grandfather Azariah Franklin Denney. He was born in 1828 in Gallia County, Ohio, the 6th of ten children, among them only two girls. His grandfather James Denney had left the area around Pilot Mountain in North Carolina between 1820 and 1825 with his children and grandchildren, and some of his brothers and their families as well, to settle west of the Ohio river. So Azariah, probably named for his great-grandfather, the “Old Azariah” who stayed behind on the farm by Pilot Creek, was a first-generation Ohio-born Denney, .
He married Mary Sprouse on 16 June 1851, also in Gallia County, and as far as we know they had four children, one girl and three boys. When he was drafted into the Civil War in 1863, Azariah Franklin was living in Morgan, Gallia County, where he appears to have farmed some land, presumably his own.
In 1880, when he was 52, his wife as well as his mother died. He then lived in Springfield, OH, and later must have moved to Indiana, probably to stay with one of his children.
Azariah Franklin Denney died yesterday 111 years ago, on 8 August 1908, in Dunkirk, IN, having lived a long life of 80 years. The story goes that his great-grandson Lorain was given his middle name “Franklin” by his wife Irene rather than by his parents, but one way or another, we think his middle name points back to Azariah Franklin, who died when Little Lorain was just 18 months old.
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