My Genealogy Hound

M. J. Ross, county treasurer, is a native of Brown County, Ohio, where he was born October 22, 1834. He was reared on a farm until eighteen years of age, when the parents came to Knox County, Mo. He soon enlisted in the State Militia and afterward in the Thirty-ninth Missouri Federal Infantry, serving throughout the entire war. After that he resumed farming in Knox County, and followed mercantile life at Novelty for five years previous to locating in Adair County, in 1874. His first business in this county was that of the lumber trade for eight years, and in 1884 he was elected to his present office, to which he was re-elected two years later. Mr. Ross is an able officer of the county, and a leading citizen. By his first wife, Anna Hickman, a native of Vermillion County, Ill., he had one son and two daughters. The son, C. A., is a professor in the State Normal. After this wife’s death, he married Mary L. Coleman, a native of Massachusetts, by whom he has had three daughters, one of whom is now deceased. He and his family are members of the Presbyterian Church. John Ross, the father, was born in 1805, in Beaver County, Penn., but was married in Ohio. His wife, Martha Blair, was a native of Maysville, Ky., and died in 1875. They moved from Brown County, Ohio, to Knox County, Mo., where the father still resides. He reared a family of five sons and three daughters, six of whom now survive. Two of these — Andrew G. and B. W., the present mayor of Kirksville — were in the Federal service in the Third Missouri Cavalry, the former dying at Little Rock after the fight at that place. The general paternal ancestry of our subject is Scotch, and that on the mother’s side is of Irish stock.