My husband's Bentley ancestors moved from upstate New York to settle in Elkhart county, Indiana in the mid-1830s. William Tyler Bentley (1795-1873) and his wife Olivia Morgan Bentley (1799?-1838) had seven children before she died during a particularly severe winter in Indiana.
William never remarried. About 1850, he went west to begin farming in Tulare County, California as it became a state. Many of his family members also went to California at that time to farm or raise livestock.
William's daughter Elizabeth E. Bentley (1821?-1898?) married widower Emanuel Light (1815-1897) in Elkhart, Indiana in 1847, becoming a stepmother to his sons David and Eugene. The family moved to California and settled in Santa Rosa, north of San Francisco. As adults, David Light and Eugene Light also became farmers in Santa Rosa (see top left of map).
Then why did David die in Silver City, California in 1863? He was reportedly 22 years old, and multiple news reports of his death only provide a date and a place. Silver City is in the area now known as Sequoia National Park, a mountainous region that today has no year-round residents. Interestingly, Silver City (bottom right of map) is much closer to Tulare (where William Bentley died in 1873) than to Santa Rosa, where the rest of David's family lived.
Silver City was apparently part of the California Silver Rush. Was David seeking his fortune there? Or was he in Silver City for some other reason? As the map shows, it was more than 300 miles from his farm (and his father and brother), quite a long distance to travel in 1863.
Remembering David Light (1839-1863), outlived by his brother Eugene Light (1840-1908) and his father Emanuel Light.
