“Date: Wed, 14 Feb 1996 18:14:44 -0500
From:
Subject: another Knowlton

Has anyone out there run into the name William Dexter Knowlton? I have been unable to get very far in researching my Knowlton line for lack of finding this, my great-great grandfather's name among the documentation to which I have access.
Unfortunately, I have no dates or other pertinent information. I do know that he married Lavisa Emma CARR (one source tells me Maude Carr) and they bore my great grandmother, Alma Tina Knowlton. She died last year in Akron, Ohio where she lived most of her life..

My grandfather, Richard Knowlton Gast, does not remember much except that there was supposedly a "famous" Revolutionary War Colonel as an ancestor. Whether he means he was reputed to be in our lineage or just related, I don't know. If in our lineage, I would then suspect the William/John/John/Thomas line as a possibility, but all of my sources cut off just prior to the generation that would have included William Dexter Knowlton.

Grandfather also mentioned a circuit rider in the Knowlton line who rode off one day and never returned. Indians were suspected, but he knows nothing more. I think this Knowlton was William Dexter's father.

I would be thrilled to find that someone may have come across William Dexter in their research, but it would also help if you could just point me to some appropriate sources containing some of this later data (1800's). (I have looked at Stocking and at a Memoir of Colonel Thomas Knowlton which includes the story of Captain William dying aboard his ship and his wife coming to Ipswich...but that is all I have really found.)

Thanks very much! Kathryn Westcott”262

I have very scant information on William Dexter ("Deck") from an old census report that a gentleman

in a southern Indiana historical society found for me. Apparently he and his widowed mother came to

Indiana from Kentucky. She took in washings and he worked in (as I recall) a barrel factory. All the rest

of my information comes from my mother and is of course anecdotal (he died when I was an infant.)263