Surnames Caine and Cannel from the Isle of Mann
Information from a US Civil War Widows Pension Application: John Eakin Smith had 13 children with his first wife Nancy Fleming Sipe and then left her in 1881 and in 1882 went to Oregon. After several more marriages, all of them bogus since he did not divorce Nancy, he married a widow named Nellie Cannell.
Nellie and her first husband Thomas Cannell were married in the parish of German on the Isle of Man. They had 8 children. At some point they moved to
Barrow-in-Furness in Lancashire, England where Thomas died 10-27-1879. Nellie then went to America about 1883 and lived with her daughter Margaret “Bessie” McLaren in Portland, Oregon. She had another daughter living there named Louise A. Meredith, whose husband Charles M.
Meredith was an umbrella manufacturer. Since it rains an awful lot there, he must have done very well. Nellie met John Eakin Smith while she was living with her daughter Bessie McLaren and married him after knowing him only two weeks. He was younger, b. 1827, she was born abt 1819 since she said she was 86 in the deposition taken in March of 1905.
The case is about the first Mrs. Nancy F. Smith and the last Mrs. Nellie Smith trying to get the widows pension. Thus depositions were taken from the daughters and their husbands as well as a host of military and pension examiners.
Nellie Caine Cannell Smith (abt 1819-1/9/1909) and John Eakin Smith (1927-4/25/1902) are buried in the Lone Pine Cemetery in Portland, Oregon.
Nellie said her birth name was Ellen in the deposition but her parents called her Nellie.
I don’t have the names of her other six children who may have remained in England. Since I don’t know when
The family went to England, the children may have never left or gone back to the Iles of Man.