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I don't normally like to play favorites with certain ancestors or sides of my family, but I am fascinated by ancestors who lived long, righteous, healthy, and interesting lives, have well-traced family roots, traveled a lot in their lifetimes, left portraits or photographs of themselves, have extant grave markers, and/or left numerous descendants, especially if they left many descendants of prominence. Nathaniel Newlin, one of my earliest-born great-great-great-great-grandparents, was one of my favorite ancestors for all of these reasons and also because I have an original picture of him, because he was among the Midwestern pioneers of the early 1800s (of which I have few among my direct ancestors because my immediate family is from the East), because he was a North Carolina Quaker who pioneered in the development of Parke County, Indiana, and the founding of its Bloomingdale Friends Meeting, and since he left a journal of his 1819 journey to the Midwest as a Friends elder, seven years before settling in Indiana with his wife, Catherine Hadley Newlin (1772-1842), and nine of their ten children. I descend from their second child, Joseph Newlin (1797-1865), the only one who remained in North Carolina. The descendants of Nathaniel and Catherine are very numerous. He lived 99 years, and such pictures of people born at that time are rare. He was a farmer and harness marker, and worked at the latter occupation until within six hours of his death. The youngest of the six children of John and Mary Pyle Newlin, Nathaniel was the only child not born in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, from where the family moved with other Quakers to Alamance County, North Carolina, around 1768, where Nathaniel lived until settling in Parke County, Indiana, 58 years later. The basketball star, Larry Bird, a native of French Lick, IN, is a great-great-great-great-grandson of Nathaniel's eldest brother, James Newlin (1747-1813).
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