Notes for: Daniel ("Dan") Hulsizer Bodine

From Ronny Bodine:

In 1850, Daniel H. Bodine, age 20, lived in Lebanon, Hunterdon County, New Jersey where he was engaged as a school teacher. In 1860, D. H. Bodine, age 30, lived in Perry, Pike, Illinois employed as a clerk. His household included Maggie 23, a milliner; Wallace 28, John 21, a stage driver, and Mary Bodine, 16, all of whom were likely his siblings. In 1880, D. H. Bodine lived in Pittsfield, Pike County where he served as a Justice of the Peace. Harriett (Ball) Bodine was the daughter of Gideon Olin and Lucile (Holmes) Ball.

From: The Jess M. Thompson Pike County history : as printed in installments in the Pike County republican, Pittsfield, Illinois, 1935.

Harriet Ball, on April 12, 1863, married in Pike county Daniel Hulsizer Bodine, a native of Trenton, New Jersey, where he was born in May, 1827. Daniel Bodine, coming to Illinois in the early 1850s, located at Perry, moved thence to Meredosia, where he taught school in 1854, moved from Meredosia to Bushnell, and later to Pittsfield prior to 1875.

Dan Bodine, descendant of Jean of Staten Island, was out of college at 21, taught school, became an accomplished bookkeeper, was proficient in mathematics, read, apoke and wrote French, German and English with equal facility, taught a class of twenty Pittsfield businessmen more than a half century ago (among them the late John and Adam Hesley), was deputy county treasurer under Thomas Reynolds, was secretary of the old Pike County Fair Association at Pittsfield for ten years, was political writer from Pike county for the old St. Louis Republic, was rated as a friend by Governor Dick Oglesby of Illinois and by Pike county's noted early jurist, Judge Chauncey Higbee, for whom he named one of his sons, Chauncey Higbee Bodine.

Daniel Bodine died in Pittsfield in the house where Allie Heck now lives, November 3, 1883, and a Pittsfield paper of the period says that Governor Richard Oglesby came from the state capital to attend his funeral. He was buried in the West cemetery. Known among his contemporaries as a man of rather unusual genius, he was said to be somewhat lacking in the element of practicality necessary to put his genius to full accomplishment.

Daniel Bodine and Harriet Ball had eight children, namely: John Franklin, born at Bushnell and now of Minong, Wisconsin; Lizzie Sutphin, named for Perry's noted early day physician; Minnie Melvina, who married Edward A. Renoud, native of Wisconsin, July 25, 1885, and is now a resident of Pittsfield; Charles of New Salem; William of St. Louis; Chauncey Higbee of Pittsfield, who married Florence Edith Hanish of Oshkosh, Wisconsin; Anna, who married Otto Fisher and resides at Redondo Beach, California; and Daniel Ball Bodine, who married Mary Clostermery and is at present a resident of Pittsfield. The daughter, Lizzie Sutphin, died at Bushnell, Illinois, at the age of two years.

Following the death of Daniel Bodine, his widow, the former Harriett Ball, again married, her second husband being Edward Chappell of Pittsfield, whom she married December 14, 1898. She resides in Pittsfield, in her 94th year, having been born at Jacksonville, Illinois, February 20, 1844.