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SW
1780 to 1857
Susannah Wilson Beedle
Dorchester, Massachusetts · Richmond, Maine
Sent into James Bowdoin’s household at about nine, she worked there nine years for no wage and no schooling, and still learned to read and sign her name. Bowdoin’s wedding gift of fifty wild acres on the Kennebec became the family’s land in Maine. She raised thirteen children.
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JB
1770 to 1839
John Beedle Sr.
Devonshire, England · Richmond, Maine
A mariner born in Devonshire who married Susannah on 11 April 1799 and cleared the Bowdoinham land with her. Years after his death the family vault failed, and the two were reburied together in a former garden plot whose exact spot is still unconfirmed.
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JB
1811 to 1894
John Beedle Jr.
Richmond · Dresden, Maine
Susannah’s son, and the reason her story survives. In 1865 he wrote A Short History of the Beedle Family by hand. Almost everything the archive knows about the Maine line comes from that manuscript.
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WB
1840 to 1862
William Henry Harrison Blair
Pittston, Maine
Susannah’s grandson through her daughter Sarah Blair. He is recorded with the 9th Maine Regiment and died in 1862, the Civil War’s second year, in his early twenties.
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WS
1793 to 1858 · 1797 to 1858
William Simpson and Mary “Polly” Kimsey
Warren County, Tennessee · Sublimity, Oregon
Married in Tennessee in 1813, they moved through Missouri and crossed the Oregon Trail in 1846. Both died at Sublimity, Oregon, in 1858, nine months apart.
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WC
About 1788 to 1848
William B. Cooper
Madison County, Kentucky · the Oregon Trail
Nancy Cooper’s father. Family tradition, not yet matched to any record, says he died on the Oregon Trail in 1848, on the road to the country his daughter would settle.
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BS
1818 to 1910 · 1820 to 1883
Benjamin Simpson and Nancy Cooper
Tennessee and Missouri · Portland, Oregon
Married in 1843, they came over the Oregon Trail and raised their family in Oregon. Sylvester’s parents; both lie at Lone Fir Cemetery in Portland.
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SS
1844 to 1913
Sylvester Confucius Simpson
Platte County, Missouri · Salem · San Francisco
Born at Elm Grove, Missouri, he married Mary Frances McFarland in Salem on 11 October 1866 and moved the family to San Francisco in 1879. The archive holds three different birth dates for him, and keeps all three.
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MS
1848 to 1905
Mary Frances McFarland Simpson
Pennsylvania · Salem, Oregon · San Francisco
Carried around Cape Horn to Oregon as a small child in 1851. Myrtle’s mother, and the first keeper of Burnbrae, the Mill Valley cottage finished in 1899 that passed down through the family after her death.
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MW
Born 1873
Myrtle Una Simpson Wilson
Salem, Oregon · Mill Valley, California
Fourth child and first daughter of Sylvester and Mary Frances, she married Clarence Cicero Wilson and carried the Simpson line into the Wilson name. At Burnbrae she is remembered for shooting a hole through a zinc bathtub during pistol practice.
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KW
The family historian
Kirke Wilson
San Francisco
Son of Earl Simpson Wilson. He wintered at Burnbrae in 1968 and spent decades tracing the Simpson and Cooper lines back to the 1600s, filling seven volumes. The family site says one is held by the Library of Congress.
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CW
Dates unknown
Clarence Cicero Wilson
Places unrecorded
Myrtle’s husband, and the archive’s largest open question. The sources record his name and his marriage, but not his parents, his birth, or his death. Family members who know more can add it inside.
