History of Clarks Nebraska, 1865-1976

Heritage of Clarks Nebraska

We begin our story in the year 1854 when the United States Congress organized the Nebraska Territory. Four years later, a law was passed defining the boundaries of its counties and locating their county seats. Merrick County now had a name and a county seat — Elvira. To the present day no one knows the exact location of Elvira, but many pioneers believed it was located two miles southeast of Clarks. The county received its name from the wife of the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Her maiden name was Elvira Merrick. The volume “History of Nebraska” tells us … Read more

Ancestors of Charles Jarvis Holmes of Marshfield and Rochester MA

Charles Jarvis Holmes

The purpose of this article to treat with one branch only of the Marshfield-Rochester family, the head of which was the late Hon. Charles Jarvis Holmes, lawyer and public servant of distinguished official relation, as was his father before him, Hon. Abraham Holmes, and as was also the former’s son excepting that he was a banker and financier instead of a member of the legal profession, and a man of high standing and long service in his calling at Fall River, where he was succeeded by his only son, Charles L. Holmes, now treasurer of the Fall River Five Cents Savings Bank, an institution his father had served in the same official relation for approximately fifty years, and who is worthily wearing the family name and sustaining its reputation.