My Genealogy Hound

DAVID COLLINS, farmer, P. O. Wilkinsburg, was born in Lower Chanceford, York county, Pa., in 1808, the fourth son of David and Dorcas (Neel) Collins, of Lancaster county, of Scotch-Irish descent. The father was a blacksmith, and a member of the light-horse company in the war of 1812; in early life was a member of the U. P. Church and later an elder in the Presbyterian; he died in York county, aged sixty-two, and his widow in Lancaster county at the age of ninety-eight. David when nineteen years old began work as a stonemason, which trade he followed four years. He came to Allegheny county in 1835, and ran coal to New Orleans sixteen years. In 1850 he bought the farm on which he resides, built a house and barn, and moved thereon the same fall, and has always been successful as a farmer. Since the age of eighteen he has been connected with the Presbyterian Church, as are all his family except the youngest son. Politically Mr. Collins was an abolitionist, and is now a republican; was county commissioner three years during the civil war. In 1836 he married Mary Manifold, a native of Hopewell, York county, and a daughter of Henry and Elizabeth (Turner) Manifold. Joseph, father of Henry Manifold, was a Presbyterian elder, and his wife, Eleanor Cogle was a Quaker preacher, who walked forty miles to Baltimore to yearly meeting when she was eighty years old. Mr. Collins’ four eldest sons were in Co. A, 101st P. V., during the war, the youngest running away to join when sixteen. David Henry died of disease contracted in the service, at the age of twenty-one; George Washington died in Florence prison in his twenty-first year. The other children are Dorcas Roselma (Mrs. J. L. McDowell), Elizabeth Grizella, Cassius Clay, Joseph, Mary Emma, Ralph, Helen Manifold (Mrs. S. M. Brinton) and Robert Arthurs.