Most of what survives of Aaron Vanderslice is bound inside a single government file — ninety-five brittle pages of a Civil War pension claim, opened for his orphaned children in 1864 and fought over for more than a decade. Read straight through, those pages tell a story no family would have chosen to invent: a good soldier, a double tragedy, a drunken mistake, a battlefield death, and a scandal that reached all the way to a federal investigator's undercover report. Nearly every scene below is corroborated by sworn testimony inside that file.
A shoemaker's family
Aaron was born in Chester County, Pennsylvania, about 1834, a son of John Henri and Ann (Tweedy) Vanderslice. His start in life was hard. By 1841 the family had fallen into poverty and entered the Chester County almshouse — the county poorhouse.
In that era, long before any public safety net, each Pennsylvania county ran a tax-supported poorhouse (also called an almshouse or "poor farm"): a working farm and residence that took in people who had nowhere else to turn — the destitute, the orphaned, the elderly, the sick, and the disabled. The place recorded everyone it admitted, and its books list Aaron there at seven years old, alongside his mother and his brothers and sister. The following year the county "bound him out" — placed him under a formal indenture as an apprentice to a local master, William Forsythe of East Caln — to work in exchange for food, shelter, and training in a trade, an arrangement that also relieved the county of his support. (How that record finally solved the family's oldest puzzle is told below.)
By 1850, sixteen-year-old Aaron was living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, learning the shoemaker's trade — a craft he'd keep the rest of his short life. Within a few years he moved to Philadelphia, and on July 3, 1854 he married Martha (her maiden name is recorded variously as Wylie, Whylie, or Bryte), in a ceremony performed at a friend's home by the Rev. Robert Armstrong.
Over the next six years they had four children: William and Ann Eliza — twins — born June 14, 1855; Henry, born August 19, 1857; and Thomas, born in 1860. (Henry is the child most often dropped from later retellings; he appears to have died young, and by 1870 only three of the four were still living.)
City life had its rough edges. In June 1859 a Philadelphia jury convicted Aaron of what the newspaper called a "trivial larceny" — and, making plain what it thought of the case, the court fined him a single cent, plus the costs of prosecution.
When the war came, Aaron answered it, enrolling on May 5, 1861 as a Corporal in Company E of the 27th Pennsylvania Infantry. And while he was away at the front, tragedy found the household: in October 1862, his wife Martha died, leaving four small children without a mother.
Three days in 1863
Grieving and far from home, with four motherless children in another family's care, Aaron — by the sworn account of neighbors and his children's guardian — had taken hard to drink. On a brief furlough in the early spring of 1863, badly intoxicated, he was introduced to a young woman named Mary Ann Frazier, known around the neighborhood as "Moll." On March 25, 1863, an alderman married them.
It lasted about three days. Sobered up, Aaron is said to have regretted the marriage at once, left Mary Ann, and returned to his regiment — never mentioning the union to his fellow soldiers, his family, or his closest friends. It was a secret he carried to his grave, and one that would nearly cost his children everything.
The first day at Gettysburg
That summer the 27th Pennsylvania marched north. On July 1, 1863 — the desperate first day of the Battle of Gettysburg — Aaron's regiment fought a holding action near the town, and Aaron was severely wounded in action.
He was carried back to the Camden Street General Hospital in Baltimore. His close friend Cornelius Stevens — the man who had employed Aaron since boyhood — traveled to Baltimore to sit with him. On his deathbed, Aaron made no mention of any second wife; he asked only that Stevens take legal custody of his children. He died of his wounds on August 21, 1863.
He was sent for by the dying soldier, and went to Baltimore, was there when he died — and he made no mention of his marriage nor alluded to his having a wife. — from the guardian's sworn affidavit
A pension, and a ghost from the furlough
Cornelius Stevens kept his promise. He returned to Philadelphia, was confirmed by the Orphans' Court as guardian on October 16, 1863, and secured a federal minor's pension of $8.00 a month to house and feed the children. William was placed at the state-funded Chester Springs Soldiers' Orphan School, where the 1870 census records him, safe, as a "scholar."
Then, in 1873, the long-forgotten furlough marriage came back. Mary Ann surfaced to file a competing Widow's Pension — and because federal law placed a widow ahead of minor children, the government promptly suspended the orphans' payments.
The Pension Office sent a Special Agent, M. E. Jenks, to investigate. His undercover report laid bare a startling picture: Mary Ann was a well-known Philadelphia madam operating under the names "Moll Frazier" and "Moll Donnelly," running a house of prostitution at No. 340 St. John Street. Her own cousin told federal agents she had been in the trade since she was a teenager.
The waiver, and the orphans restored
The marriage certificate, however, was legally binding — which made Mary Ann, whatever her profession, Aaron's lawful widow. But she seems to have understood what her claim was doing to his children. In 1874 she signed a statement waiving any right to the money already paid to the minors, making, in her words, "a present of it to the children."
Her health was already gone. Dying of consumption, she closed the house on St. John Street, moved to Lorraine Street, and died there on November 2, 1874 — just twenty-seven years old. After Cornelius Stevens himself died, his widow Catherine Stevens took over the guardianship, submitted Mary Ann's death record, and petitioned to lift the suspension. On June 14, 1877, with the competing widow gone, the government formally restored the pension to Aaron's children — keeping William fed and schooled until he aged out of the system.
He grew up to become the Rev. William A. Vanderslice, and the line ran on through him — down four more generations to the present.
Aaron's parents — found
For years this was the family's favorite puzzle. The pension file never names Aaron's father, and the 1850 census only showed him boarding in Lancaster with a shoemaker named Eugene Harkins — an apprentice, not a son at home. Earlier guesses reached toward a Kensington shoemaker named Jacob, and even toward Captain Jacob Vanderslice, a son of Henry the Declaration-reader. The real answer turned out to be plainer, and sadder.
It was waiting in the Chester County Poor House admission books. In 1841 the almshouse took in a Vanderslice family: a mother, Ann, age 40, with her children Lott, Aaron (age 7), Wilson (age 5), and Jane (age 2). The next year the directors bound the three boys out to local masters — Aaron to William Forsythe of East Caln, Wilson to William Corbit of Upper Oxford, Lott to Emmor Seeds of East Bradford — and that scattering is the last time the family appears together.
That household matches, name for name and age for age, the family of John Henri Vanderslice — baptized in Philadelphia in 1802 — and his wife Ann (Tweedy), whom he married in Chester County in 1833: sons Lott, Aaron, and Wilson, and daughter Sarah Jane, born about 1831, 1834, 1836, and 1839. Finding Aaron beside his mother and all three siblings — the right names, the right ages, in the right county — is what genealogists call a family-group match, and it does what no single document had: it names Aaron's parents, and through his father John Henri it links Aaron, and our whole line, back into the family recorded in the 1929 book — and on to Reynier, the Dutch immigrant of 1701.
One honest note: the poorhouse clerk recorded the children, not the absent father by name — so the link to John Henri specifically rests on that family-group match (mother Ann plus the three siblings) and on his distinctive March-4-1802 birthdate matching the man in the 1929 book. It is about as firm as this kind of evidence gets, and it fits every other fact we have — Aaron's Chester County birth, and the brother the pension file says later moved to New Jersey.
What we know — and what's left to confirm
- Aaron's line downward is proven by his Civil War pension file: William → Charles → Raymond → Larry.
- Aaron was a shoemaker, born ~1834 in Chester County — bound out of the county almshouse as a boy in 1842, apprenticing in Lancaster by 1850.
- His parents were John Henri Vanderslice (b. Philadelphia, March 4, 1802) and Ann (Tweedy), married in Chester County in 1833 — established by the poorhouse family-group record.
- Through John Henri the line joins the documented descent in the 1929 book, back through Daniel and Henry the Declaration-reader to Reynier, the 1701 immigrant.
- A record naming John Henri directly as Aaron's father — a baptism, or Aaron's own binding-out indenture, which often names a parent.
- John Henri's later life: his wife Ann's family, and his December 1889 Philadelphia death.
- What became of Aaron's bound-out siblings — Lott, Wilson, and Jane.
Are you a Vanderslice cousin? If you have family records from John Henri and Ann (Tweedy)'s line — or from Aaron's brothers Lott and Wilson — I'd love to hear from you.
Not to be confused with a different Philadelphia Aaron Vanderslice, born in 1842 (son of Moses and Eve) — an infant in the same year our Aaron, then about eight, was bound out of the Chester County almshouse.