My Genealogy Hound

ALLER, WILLIAM, farmer, Sec 5; P. O. Commerce; born in Canada in 1828, and first came to the United States in 1845, and lived in Vermont, and returned to Canada in 1846 and remained but one year, when he came to the State of New York and made it his home till he came to this county in 1856, and has lived here since, except three years, when he made his home in Des Moines, where he followed the carpenter’s trade, and a short time in 1862 that he spent in the mountains; was married in New York State to Miss Ann Dougherty, a native of Ireland, in the year 1850; they have a family of five children living: James, Mary A., Sarah, George, Jane, and two deceased: William and John F.; owns a farm of 120 acres. Mr. Aller, when he came to this county, came to Iowa City by rail, and to his present home by stage, and landed his family with three “bits,” or 37 ½ cents in his pocket—the only money he possessed—and started life in this county with that amount of cash capital and made what he now owns by honest labor and economy; there were times in his pioneer life in this county that he worked two days for one bushel of corn to eat; the first year that he came he planted six bushels of wheat, and reaped but five, and the following season he gathered but one barrel of corn from seven acres of ground, and five acres of oats he harvested and stacked, and shortly after a prairie fire destroyed it, with all the hay that he had prepared for his stock during the winter. The next season yielded crops that were more encouraging, and from that time he has been very successful.