Amaziah Fuller: A Farmer, a Father of Nine, and the Heart of a Family
Amaziah Fuller spent his entire life within a few miles of where he was born, working the land, raising children, and watching the world change around him.
He lived through the Civil War, registered for the Union draft, and outlived his wife by more than twenty years, dying in 1927 at the age of eighty-three in Mason County, Kentucky.
He never left the region. He never needed to. The hills and hollows of northern Kentucky were the only world he knew, and they were enough.
His life left a quiet paper trail — census records, a marriage bond, a draft registration, a death certificate — but within those documents, a portrait emerges of a man whose children scattered across Kentucky and beyond, each carrying a piece of him into the next century.
Lineage
Amaziah Fuller is my second great-grandfather.
The line of descent is as follows:
Cynthia Fuller Kolf, daughter of Henry Lloyd Fuller, Jr., son of Henry Lloyd Fuller, son of Roman Leslie Fuller, son of Amaziah Fuller.
Vital Statistics — Amaziah Fuller
Full Name: Amaziah Fuller
Parents: Solomon T. “Saul” Fuller and Lucinda Frances Duzan Fuller
Date of Birth: September 15, 1834 (Confirmed from Kentucky Death Records, Federal Census records, and US Civil War Draft Registration)
Place of Birth: Bracken County, Kentucky
Marriage: Letha Powell, November 30, 1854, Bracken County, Kentucky (Kentucky County Marriages, 1786–1965)
Wife: Letha Powell Fuller – Born July 1838, Virginia – Died July 18, 1906, Maysville, Mason County, Kentucky – Daughter of Robert E. Powell and Sabra Walker Powell
Known Residences:
- 1840, 1850 — Living with parents, Bracken County, Kentucky
- 1860 — Bracken County, Kentucky (with wife and three children; adjacent to brother Abraham)
- 1870 — Bracken County, Kentucky (with wife and five children)
- 1880 — Mason County, Kentucky (eight in household)
- 1900 — Mason County, Kentucky (with wife, a daughter and her husband, their child, and a lodger)
- 1910 — Mason County, Kentucky (widowed, boarding, doing odd jobs)
Occupation: Farmer; later listed as laborer
Military: Registered for the Union draft, Mason County, September 1863; listed as age 30, farmer, married. No pension record located.
Children: Nine (see below)
Date of Death: January 26, 1917
Place of Death: Mason County, Kentucky
Cause of Death: Bright’s disease
Burial: Maysville Cemetery, Maysville, Mason County, Kentucky
A Note on Names
Before going further, it is worth pausing on the name itself. Across the various records that document his life, Amaziah Fuller appears under a remarkable variety of spellings: Amassah, Amazia, Amaziah, Amazar, and simply A. — just the letter. His wife Letha fared no better. Her name appears as Levie, Letha, Leafy, Aretha, Olethia, Leathy, and Alethaacross the census and death records. Researchers following this family should be prepared to cast a wide net.
Early Life in Bracken County
Amaziah Fuller was born on September 15, 1834, in Bracken County, Kentucky, the fifth child of Solomon T. “Saul” Fuller and Lucinda Frances Duzan Fuller. He grew up on a farm, and the 1840 and 1850 census records place him in his parents’ household, learning the rhythms of agricultural life that would define his entire working years.
Bracken County in the 1830s and 1840s was a place of small farms and tight-knit communities perched along the Ohio River, not far from the edges of Mason County where Amaziah would eventually settle.
Marriage to Letha
On November 30, 1854, Amaziah Fuller married Letha Powell in Bracken County, Kentucky. He was twenty years old; she was sixteen, having been born in Virginia in July 1838 to Robert E. Powell and Sabra Walker Powell. The marriage is documented in Kentucky County Marriages, 1786–1965.
Letha would spend the rest of her life as the census records consistently describe her: keeping house. That phrase, so plain on the page, represented an enormous labor — cooking, preserving, sewing, washing, tending children, and managing a household through the last decades of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, without running water, without electricity, and without any of the tools we now take for granted. She bore nine children across more than twenty-five years of marriage. She is the quiet backbone of this family.
Letha died on July 18, 1906, in Maysville. A cause of death has not been located. She was sixty-seven years old.
The 1860 Census and a Neighbor Named Abraham
By the time of the 1860 federal census, Amaziah and Letha had three children and were established in their own household in Bracken County. Of particular interest is the census entry’s placement: Amaziah was living adjacent to his brother Abraham. The Fuller brothers farming side by side is a small but telling detail about how closely families remained in this era.
Civil War Draft Registration
In September 1863, Amaziah Fuller registered for the Civil War draft in Mason County, Kentucky. His registration listed him as thirty years old, a farmer, and married — though his birth records consistently place him at twenty-eight or twenty-nine at the time, a small discrepancy not uncommon in an era when exact birth dates were often uncertain.
His registration was not a voluntary act of Union loyalty. The Enrollment Act of 1863, signed by President Lincoln on March 3 of that year, was the first national conscription law, and it required every male citizen between the ages of twenty and forty-five to register. Kentucky, as a Union-held border state, was fully subject to the law. Amaziah, at twenty-eight, had no choice in the matter.
Whether he was ultimately called up to serve, paid a substitute, or was passed over entirely is not known. No service record and no pension application have been located. The draft registration itself is the only military document in the record — a single page that tells us he was there, he was counted, and he went home to his farm and his family.
A Life Measured in Census Records
The census records from 1870 through 1910 trace the arc of Amaziah’s later life with quiet precision.
The 1870 census shows him and Letha in Bracken County with five children still at home. He is listed as a farmer — the occupation he had claimed since at least 1863.
The 1880 census brings a small but notable change. For the first time, Amaziah lists his occupation as laborer rather than farmer. Whether this reflects a change in his economic circumstances — perhaps no longer farming his own land — or simply a difference in how the census enumerator recorded his work, is not clear. The household now included eight members.
By 1900, the family’s shape had shifted considerably. Amaziah, now sixty-six, and Letha were living with a daughter, her husband, their young child, and a six-year-old lodger named Charley Fuller.
Family history offers an explanation for his presence: his father, it was said, left the boy to play with the Fuller children one day and simply never came back for him. Amaziah and Letha took him in.
Whether that story can be confirmed through records has not yet been established, but the fact that he carried the Fuller name in the census rather than any other surname suggests he had, in every way that mattered, become one of theirs. After that single census entry, Charley Fuller disappears from the record entirely. He was six years old, and that is all we know of him.
The 1910 census is the most poignant. Letha had died four years earlier. Amaziah, now seventy-six and widowed, was living as a boarder at the home of John Higgins. He was doing odd jobs for his keep. The man who had farmed his own land for decades was now, in the language of the census, simply a laborer doing whatever work came his way.
Death and Burial
Amaziah Fuller died on January 26, 1917, at the home of his daughter on Lawrence Creek in Mason County, Kentucky. The newspaper announced the passing of Amazon Fuller — a final indignity entirely consistent with a lifetime of misspelled records — and listed his age as eighty-three, which aligns well with his 1834 birth year. His death certificate, however, listed his age as eighty-nine, adding one last small disagreement to a lifetime of inconsistent records.
His cause of death was Bright’s disease — a nineteenth-century term for what we now understand as kidney disease, likely chronic nephritis. It was a slow and difficult illness.
He was buried at Maysville Cemetery alongside his wife Letha.
The Children of Amaziah Fuller and Letha Powell
Amaziah and Letha raised nine children in Bracken and Mason Counties, Kentucky. Their lives stretched from the Civil War era into the mid-twentieth century, and their stories carry all the joy, heartbreak, resilience, and mystery that define any family across time.
Lucinda Ann “Lucy” Fuller (1854–1932)
Lucy Fuller was born on October 10, 1855, in Bracken County, Kentucky — though her death certificate gives the year as 1854, a discrepancy worth noting for researchers. Given that her parents married on November 30, 1854, the 1855 birth year is almost certainly correct. She died on September 19, 1932, in Bath County, Kentucky.
When she was fifteen, Lucy married William Brown Reed on September 8, 1870, in Bracken County. They had five children together: Charles “Charley” Riley, John William, Octavia, George Riley, and Mary Elizabeth. William died in 1889 from injuries suffered while felling a tree, leaving Lucy a widow at thirty-four with a family to support. It was the kind of accident that claimed countless men in an era when timber work was done by hand, without safety equipment, and a single miscalculation could be fatal.
Three years later, on June 3, 1892, Lucy married Abraham George Shrout in Bath County, Kentucky. They had no children together. Abraham had served in the Civil War on the Confederate side — Company D, 9th Kentucky Cavalry, under Captain Coleman in Breckinridge’s regiment. He enlisted September 15, 1862, was taken prisoner, and took the oath of allegiance to the United States government in order to secure his release from a Louisville prison.
In May 1912, Abraham applied for a Confederate pension from the Commonwealth of Kentucky, which was allowed at ten dollars per month beginning June 12, 1912. His application described him as wholly indigent, living by the charity of his neighbors, mentally and physically unable to care for himself. His former comrades testified on his behalf. Abraham died on September 15, 1918, and J.W. Reed — likely Lucy’s son John William — was appointed administrator of his estate. Lucy outlived him by fourteen years, dying in 1932.
Sabra Jane Fuller (c. 1857–c. 1881)
Sabra Jane Fuller was born around 1857, likely in Bracken County. When she was approximately fifteen years old, she married Cassius Marcellus Clay “Cash” Bravard. They had at least two sons — Elijah and John William — and the 1880 census records a one-month-old Bravard infant in the household as well.
In that same 1880 census, Sabra is listed as twenty-three years old and keeping house, with a notation beside her name that reads confined — the census term for a woman near the end of or recovering from a pregnancy. Cash Bravard remarried on March 14, 1881, just months after that census was taken. No death record for Sabra has been located, but the timing strongly suggests she did not survive long after the 1880 census, possibly lost in or following childbirth. She was very young.
Mary Elizabeth “Lizzie” Fuller (1859–1946)
Mary Elizabeth Fuller was born on December 22, 1859, in Bracken County, Kentucky. She lived to the age of eighty-six, outlasting husbands, hardship, and the world she was born into.
When she was sixteen, Lizzie married Franklin Pierce Hull on February 14, 1878, in Brooksville. It was the groom’s second marriage. The union produced no children and did not last.
In 1887, she married Richard A. Ellis, a farmer who was about eleven years her senior. They lived in Mason County, and their son James Barbour Ellis was born there. The 1900 census records them as having been married thirteen years. Richard died on July 12, 1916.
In 1920, at sixty-five, Lizzie was living with her son in Mason County.
She later married William J. Winter — no marriage record has been located — and the 1930 and 1940 censuses show them together in Newport, Kentucky. William died January 17, 1944. Lizzie followed him on December 1, 1946. Her death certificate lists the cause as valvular heart disease due to age. She was eighty-six.
Her son James Barbour Ellis is worth a particular mention in this family story. When he was twenty-four, he married Louise Elizabeth “Betty” Tolliver — my grandmother. James died in 1926, leaving Betty with one small child and another on the way. Betty later married Henry Lloyd Fuller — whose father, Roman Leslie Fuller, was Amaziah’s son. That made James Barbour Ellis and Henry Lloyd Fuller first cousins. My grandmother, widowed young, married her first husband’s first cousin.
John W. Fuller (c. 1864–unknown)
John W. Fuller was born around 1864, most likely in Bracken County, Kentucky. He appears in the 1870 and 1880 federal censuses living at home with his parents. After 1880, he disappears entirely from the records. No marriage, no death record, no census entry beyond that point has been found. What became of him remains unknown.
Sarah Frances Fuller (1870–1954)
Sarah Frances Fuller was born on March 1, 1870, in Bracken County. Known to family simply as Francis, she would live eighty-four years — long enough to become the aunt her nieces and nephews remembered long after she was gone. Her life was marked by resilience in the face of repeated loss.
sister of Aunt Liz, Lida, and Les.
When Sarah was thirteen years old, she was named in a local newspaper report as the victim of an alleged assault. A man was arrested and jailed in Brooksville in connection with the charge, but was subsequently released when it was established that he had been incarcerated at the time the alleged crime was said to have occurred. The record preserves her name without flinching, and so does this account. She was a child, and what was alleged to have happened to her was documented in the community newspaper of her day.
At seventeen, Sarah married Archibald Alexander Winter, Jr., on April 4, 1887, in Mason County. They had three surviving children together, though Sarah told the 1910 census that she had given birth to five. No records have been found for the other two. Arch died on February 4, 1918.
By 1920, Sarah was widowed and working as a cook in a restaurant, still living on West Second Street in Newport where she and Arch had made their home for decades.
She married Thomas H. Corwin, Jr. on November 25, 1920. Thomas died August 14, 1926 due to tuberculosis.
Her third marriage, to Abraham McGee Tallon on June 7, 1928, ended in divorce on December 14, 1938. The court records show that Sarah charged Abraham with cruelty and was awarded $400 in alimony, to be paid at twenty dollars per month.
The final census records show Sarah living with family — first a granddaughter, then a daughter — into her eighties. She died on March 19, 1954, of chronic myocarditis. She was eighty-four years old.
Lillie Myrtle Fuller (1872–1911)
Lillie Myrtle Fuller was born on June 22, 1872, in Bracken County. She was twenty-eight years old when she married Riley Wells Kennedy on October 24, 1900. The 1910 census shows them living in Maysville. They had no children.
Lillie died on April 9, 1911, in Mason County, Kentucky. She was thirty-eight years old. Her death certificate lists the cause as chronic pulmonary tuberculosis, which she had suffered for seven months. It was a slow, painful death — and a short life.
Roman Leslie Fuller (1875–1954)
Roman Leslie Fuller — known as Leslie — is my great-grandfather. His birth records conflict in the way that was entirely common for the era: his birth certificate gives June 10, 1875, while death records suggest September 6, 1876, and his 1895 marriage record lists his age as twenty, which would place his birth closer to 1875. The exact date remains uncertain.
What is certain is that Leslie married Matilda “Tillie” Wiggins on May 13, 1895, when he was about eighteen or twenty years old, depending on which record one trusts. They had four children together: Floyd, Henry (my grandfather), Omar D., and Margaret Helen.
The census records trace his working life from farm laborer in 1900 and 1910, to farming on his own account in 1920, to cement contractor in 1930, to fruit and vegetable peddler in 1940 — a man who adapted to whatever work the times required. My father remembers riding alongside Leslie on his wagon, pulled by a horse, as a boy.
Not a great photo, but the only known image of Leslie at work.
Leslie and Tillie lived out their final years in Newport. Tillie died in 1953. Leslie followed on July 6, 1954. His death certificate lists hypertensive heart disease as the cause of death.
Minnie M. Fuller (1880–1909)
Minnie M. Fuller was born in March 1880 in Bracken County, the second-to-last of Amaziah and Letha’s children. On September 3, 1895, she married John Henry Pendergrast in Bracken County. They settled in Maysville, where John worked as a laborer. They had one child together, a daughter named Nora.
In 1908, Minnie had what the local newspaper described as a mysterious and alarming twenty-four hours. She disappeared from her home on West Fourth Street, taking with her a pocketbook containing money and a revolver. Her husband searched everywhere; her sisters feared she had harmed herself. She returned the following morning in a dazed state, collapsed upon entering the house, and remained semi-conscious for the rest of the day, requiring a physician. When she was able to speak, she said she had spent the night at the cemetery, at her mother’s grave. Letha had died just two years before.
Minnie died on April 3, 1909, of consumption — tuberculosis — at the age of twenty-nine. She left behind her husband John and their daughter Nora, who was thirteen years old. She was buried at Maysville Cemetery, near her mother and father.
Lida Margaret Fuller (1882–1969)
Lida Margaret Fuller was born on September 20, 1882, in Bracken County. Her mother Letha would have been forty-four years old — not impossible, but certainly notable as a late-in-life child. Lida would outlive all of her siblings, dying in 1969 at the age of eighty-seven.
Her story is not without its complications. A daughter, recorded as one year old in the 1900 census, was born in April 1897 — two years before the newspaper announcement of Lida’s marriage to James Dudley Foster on March 30, 1899. The 1900 census shows Lida, James, their daughter, and the mysterious six-year-old lodger named Charley living together in Mason County alongside Amaziah and Letha. James and Amaziah were both listed as farm laborers.
By 1910, the marriage to James had ended. Lida was living with her sister Lillie in Maysville, listing herself as single and using the surname Foster.
On December 30, 1914, she married Frederick William Cooper. The 1920 through 1950 censuses show Lida and Frederick living in Newport, Kentucky — on Fifth Street, then Monmouth Street — as their family grew and their grandchildren arrived. Frederick worked as a YMCA porter, then as a house painter. Lida is never listed with an occupation; she kept house.
Frederick died on April 13, 1949. Lida outlived him by twenty years, dying on September 27, 1969. No cause of death has been located.
Legacy
Amaziah Fuller never strayed far from the land where he was born. He registered for a war, watched his country divide and reunite, buried a wife, and lived long enough to see automobiles replace horses and electric lights replace candles. He died at eighty-three in Mason County, Kentucky.
His nine children carried his blood into the twentieth century and beyond. They ran restaurants and rode wagons and worked in cement and cooked in diners and farmed and labored and loved and grieved in equal measure. One son became my great-grandfather. One daughter’s son married my grandmother, and her second husband was that son’s first cousin, tying the Fuller line to itself in the way that close-knit communities have always done.
Through the record gaps — a son who vanishes after 1880, a daughter whose death left no certificate, a marriage date that doesn’t quite match a child’s birthday — Amaziah Fuller’s family is not a tidy story. It is a real one. And that is far better.
Sources: Federal Census Records (1840–1950); Kentucky County Marriages, 1786–1965; US Civil War Draft Registration, Mason County, 1863; Kentucky Death Records; Abraham G. Shrout Confederate Pension Application, Commonwealth of Kentucky Department of Confederate Pensions, 1912; Daily Public Ledger (Maysville, Kentucky); The Public Ledger (Maysville, Kentucky); Find A Grave memorial records; Bracken County and Mason County court records.
