Page 56 - Armstrong Bloodline - ebook_Neat

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Rolla S Armstrong, family obituaries and other information received from Kaye Powell
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Kaye Powell email of 12-11-95, explains her family descent from Rolla S. Armstrong
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Rolla S. Armstrong Family Photo Album

Family Narratives and Biographies

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A Conversation With Dad by Kaye Powell, 03-17-2000
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Grandfather Arthur & Family Information, prepared by Kaye Powell, 03-02-2010

6. Olive Melissa (Armstrong) (Heath) Goold

Olive Melissa was born in West Haven, VT on May 12, 1847, and was only
about a year old when her parents and siblings moved to Parma, MI. Her
mother died when she was only 9 years old. The Armstrong family was a
very close knit group who came to each other’s aid in times of hardship and
helped each other in the care and raising of family members. This appears
to be the case with Olive, as in the 1860 U.S. she does not appear in the
1860 Census with her father and second wife Marietta, but with her sister
Sarah and husband George Lewis.

Per an entry in her father’s medical account book, she left Parma on Dec.
21, 1864 after George Lewis was severely injured during the Civil War. It is
believed that the seventeen-year-old’s destination was Galesburg, IL, and
Olive Melissa
that she went to live with her sister Ellen and husband Trumbull.

It is further believed that it was here that she met Sidney M. Heath. Sidney returned to the area upon the
conclusion of the Civil War in 1865, and he and Ellen were married the following year at the home of Ellen and
Trumbull Goold on May 25, 1866. Over the ensuing years they became the parents of two sons and two
daughters. It was Sidney and Olive who first lived in Iowa, and who her older brother Jerome was visiting when
he first viewed and fell in love with the area. The 1870 census showed that Sidney, Olive and their one-year-old
daughter, Nora, resided at that time in Washington Township, Page County, IA.

In April 1878 her husband, Sidney, died leaving her to care for their four small children. The extended family of
brothers and sisters mobilized yet again, with her brother Alva and his two oldest children Lillie and Rolla
moving to Iowa to stay with her. (Alva’s wife, Mary, had died two months before Sidney). At the same time,
Alva’s two younger children lived moved in with Ellen and Trumbull in Illinois.

In November 1880, tragedy struck yet again, and her older sister, Ellen, died of cancer. About one year later she
married her sister's widower, Trumbull Carey Goold. After their marriage, their combined family of 10 children
resided in New Windsor, IL, where her husband operated a flour mill. In 1884 they moved to Howard, SD where,
except for a couple of years in Iowa in the middle 1890s, they resided until his death in 1903. In addition to their
children from previous marriages, they had two sons of their own (the oldest of whom - Howard - was an avid
genealogist who published an extensive history of the Goold family.

Using today’s roads, Howard, SD, is about 83 miles south of Watertown, SD, where I am first able to place my
grandfather, Frank, in 1904/1905, and about 128 miles north of Vermillion where great grandparents Alva and
Mary lived from 1870 - 1878. As Alva and his children lived with Olive and Ellen and Trumbull’s families from the

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