My grandmother, Hattie Mae Moyers, the wife of Samuel Nathaniel Walker, was a member of the third generation of her family to live in Southeast Iowa, and the fourth Moyers generation to live in the United States. The Moyers family of which she was a member had their roots several generations before her in "German" soil, although the specific region or kingdom of that country is not known and in the 1700s Germany was not a unified nation. Upon leaving Germany, the Moyers moved to Pennsylvania sometime in the 18th century. Presently, the oldest known Moyers ancestor in the family line is a man named Joseph Moyers. He was born before 1775 somewhere in that nebulous region of Europe now known as "Germany." His last name had various spellings in its history in America, being Moyers, Moyer, Meyer, Myers, and perhaps even Meier. And it is not even certain if the name Moyers ever existed in Europe. My aunt, Marge Kimble, and my cousin, Thelma (Umphrey/Allen) Bearde, have told me they remember many of our previous generation Walker relatives pronouncing the name Moyers without the "o," as if it were spelled Myers, which it so often was.
In the 1856 Des Moines County, census in a time when much of this Moyers family had moved to Iowa, three spellings of the names were found related Moyers family members. They were Samuel Myres (for Samuel N. Moyers and family), Jacob Myer for Jacob Moyers, Andrew Myres for Andrew Moyers. Adding to this confusion, other branches of the family, and one descendant in the generation of my grandmother Moyers' family dropped the final "s" and called themselves "Moyer."
Joseph Moyers had at least three sons, and apparently a daughter, whose name is not known. Son William was born about 1794, Joseph Jr., was born about 1800, and son Jacob was born March 27, 1797. It seems likely the family had moved to the United States before 1797, as the sketchy records indicate that son Jacob was born to Joseph in that year in Pennsylvania rather than in Europe. There also seems to have been a lot of other Moyers families in Pennsylvania at about the same time with similar naming conventions to our own, meaning there were families with similar groups of people having the same first names. This might indicate a relationship among these groups, though of course sometimes names are simply given due to their popularity at any particular moment.
Joseph Moyers Sr.'s son, Joseph Jr., married a woman named Sarah or "Sallie" West, and they had at least five children. These were: 1Harrison Moyers, who married Sarah Ashenfelter. Harrison moved to Des Moines County, after 1856. By 1860 he lived in Huron Township and worked as a wood chopper; 2Eber Moyers, who was born in 1839; 3Sadie Moyers, who was born in 1852 in Ohio and married a man who worked as a merchant who was named Van Nyse (Van Nice), in Kossuth, which is in Yellow Spring Township of Des Moines County near Mediapolis; 4Mary Moyers, and 5Kate Moyers.
(Harrison Moyers' grandson, William Wesley Moyers, was one member of the family who chose to remove the final "s" from his name. Many of his descendants still live in eastern Iowa and western Illinois as members of the Moyer family.)
Next: Generation 2 - The Children of Joseph Moyers Sr.
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