Before the Records Settle: John Morehead and Susan Porter

Migration, Memory, and Family Formation on the Ohio Frontier

Purpose Statement
The purpose of this post is to examine the early Morehead family in Fairfield County, Ohio, in order to better understand the parentage of Alexander Morehead and his wife Delilah Pickens, as well as the relationships among Alexander, Thomas, and Calvin Morehead. By integrating family tradition, tax records, guardianship proceedings, and published biographies, this study seeks to clarify family structure and address repeated misidentifications in existing trees.

John Morehead belonged to a generation shaped by movement until they found their permanent home in Ohio. He and his wife, Susan Porter, stand at the beginning of a family whose early history unfolded along the interior edge of American settlement. The family origins are said to begin in Maryland, but known documentation suggests Pennsylvania as John Morehead’s state of origin. By the time John Morehead began his own household, the pull was westward.

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Family tradition preserved a story of the journey that carried the Moreheads into Ohio. John traveled across the Appalachian Mountains leading a single pony, the family’s possessions balanced carefully on its back. Susan rode the animal with an infant, while two other small children were carried in a long tow-linen sack she had made herself and slung across the pony. When the load shifted during the journey, the balance had to be adjusted to keep the children from slipping. The trip was remembered as one made through wilderness, over long distances, with little margin for error. One of the children on that journey was Calvin Morehead. The other two are understood from later records to have been Thomas and Alexander, who entered Ohio with him as part of the same young family.

By the early years of the nineteenth century, John Morehead had settled in Fairfield County, Ohio. There he appears not only in biographical recollections but in the ordinary records of local government. Tax lists place him in the county alongside Thomas, Calvin, and Alexander, all appearing within the same civic framework. These records show the three sons coming of age in the same place and time as John, participating in the economic life of the county under his roof or within his orbit. All three sons married in Fairfield County: Thomas married Elizabeth Good; Calvin married Susanna Good; and Alexander married first Rachel Cook and later Delilah Pickens. Fairfield County became the place where the family took root, no longer moving as a single unit but beginning to branch.

The bonds among the three sons remained visible as they entered adulthood. After the death of Alexander Morehead’s first wife, legal responsibility for his minor children fell not to distant relations but to Thomas and Calvin. In guardianship proceedings, they appeared repeatedly as sureties and guardians, stepping into formal roles that reflected trust, proximity, and close kinship. These records place Thomas and Calvin not only beside Alexander but actively supporting him, a pattern more consistent with a sibling relationship than with more distant kin such as cousins, though the latter cannot be entirely ruled out.

As time passed, John Morehead no longer remained fixed in Fairfield County. Later accounts state that he moved on to Putnam County, Ohio, continuing a pattern of gradual westward relocation that marked the family’s story from the beginning. By that point, his sons were established in Fairfield County as men in their own right.

John Morehead and Susan Porter do not survive in the record as fully drawn individuals. Instead, they are known through movement, through association, and through the actions of their children. Their story is carried forward in tax lists, court records, and a single remembered journey, all pointing to a family shaped by travel, responsibility, and settlement on the early Ohio frontier.

 Sources

1. “Deaths: Troy Centenarian Passes,” Wathena Times (also published as the Friday Troy Republican), Wathena, Doniphan County, Kansas, 28 March 1924, obituary of John Morehead.
2. Fairfield County, Ohio, tax records (multiple years), listing John Morehead with Thomas, Calvin, and Alexander Morehead.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio, guardianship records relating to the minor children of Alexander Morehead, naming Thomas and Calvin Morehead as guardians or sureties.
4. Portrait and Biographical Record of Mercer and Van Wert Counties, Ohio (Chicago: A.W. Bowen & Co., 1896), pp. 781–782.
5. “John Morehead,” Genealogical and Biographical Record of North-Eastern Kansas (Chicago: The Lewis Publishing Company, 1900), pp. 467–468.
6. 1860 U.S. census, entry for Calvin Morehead, reporting birthplace as Pennsylvania (as shown in user-supplied census image).