| Ford Family in Macon County
Of English-Irish ancestry, E. M. Ford and his wife Elizabeth May Ford came from Indiana in an ox-drawn covered wagon to make a new home in, first, Liberty Township and then LaPlata Township, Macon County, where they established a general store. While their children Minerva Etheline (1866-1935) and Eliza Jane (b.1868) were still quite young, E. M. and Elizabeth were killed in a wagon accident. As a result, the orphaned girls made their home with their uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Ephraim May in Atlanta, along with the May granddaughter Tilitha and their son Noah. On June 6, 1883, Charles Arthur Fleming married Minerva Ford in Atlanta. Although the Fleming family later moved to Waterloo, Black Hawk County, Iowa, to be closer to Charles’s relatives, their ties to Macon County remained strong. Their middle daughter Frances E. was born there on August 10, 1891. Eliza Jane Ford married Timothy H. Barron (b. 1861), son of Archibald William and Mary Terrell Barron, on July 30, 1884, in Macon County, Missouri. The oldest child of Charles Arthur Fleming, Everett Arthur Fleming (b. 1884), his wife Vessie Mitchell Fleming, and their children from Cedar Falls, Iowa, made frequent summer trips over many years to visit the farm home of Aunt Liza and Uncle Tim and their children: Ethel (b. 1885), Mamie (b. 1890), Archie (b. 1892), and Elisha (b. 1896).
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