These six men are sons of John Shepard Sr (1777-1856) and Asenath Marvin (17??-1827) who settled in western New York in the early 1800’s on seven plots of land he purchased from the Holland Land Company. John Sr first lived on one of the plots on Putnam Settlement Road in Batavia, Genesee County, then in 1820 he moved his family of seventeen to a piece of land he purchased in neighboring Middlebury, Wyoming County. There, Asenath and youngest daughter Delilah died and were buried in Dale Pioneer Cemetery. By 1831, John Sr had remarried, had three more daughters, and moved back to Putnam Settlement where he remained until his death in 1856.
Missing from the picture is John Sr’s oldest child, Andrew Shepard (1803-1848), who by the early 1830’s had lost not only his mother and sister, but also his wife, Lucy Whaley and a son Almon. They were also buried in Dale Pioneer Cemetery. This loss may have been the reason why Andrew moved west with his young daughters Belinda and Thankful to Illinois, where he remarried and had seven more children. Unfortunately, Andrew died a year after his last child was born in Illinois in 1848; however, all his siblings except Delilah, lived well into adulthood.
John Shepard Sr also had seven daughters between his two marriages: Phebe, Polly, Sally, Delilah, Fanny, Harriet, and Laura. These women married men with last names of Hawley, Covell, Chaddock, Shaw, Andrews, and Warner. In all, John’s fourteen children yielded approximately 363 descendants four generations later.
Lorette Shepard was one of them, the daughter of John Jr and Polly Powers. She was an only child until her brother Charles was born in 1855, the year Lorette turned 19 and her mother Polly turned 40. That was also the year Lorette started to keep a diary. About half the people she mentions in her diaries are related and the other half are neighbors, friends, and acquaintances throughout western New York state.
These people became known as the Pioneers of Genesee County.