Shelby  County,  Indiana
Biographies

Rev.  George  Bozell

          Rev. George Bozell,  highly esteemed citizen and appreciated Christian minister, residing on section 24, Cicero township, is a native of Champaign county, Ohio, bornjune 17, 1821. His father,  Ezekiel Bozell,  was a native of Virginia, where he was reared and married, and moved to Ohio in early day, settling on a farm.  In 1824 he moved to Bartholomew county, Indiana, locating again on a farm, where he finally died at the age of about sixty years, an exemplary member of the Christian church.  His father,  Henry Bozell,  was also a native of the Old Dominion, was a farmer by occupation and supposed to have participated in the Revolutionary war. He was of French and Irish descent.
          Mr. Bozell's mother, whose name before marriage was  Lucy Robinson, was also a native of Virginia and brought up there, and died at the age of sixty-years.  Her father, also a native of that state, was of French and Irish ancestry.
          Rev. George Bozell, the ninth of the ten children in the above family (all of whom grew up to years of maturity), was three years old when brought by his parents to Bartholomew county, this state, in which locality he was reared, attending the subscription schools in the log school-house of the period.  He remained an inmate of his parental home till he had passed the age of twenty-two years, when he started out in his own care.  Borrowing the money to pay for his marriage license and the minister a marriage fee, he was united in matrimony January 12, 1843, with  Miss Mary A. Bishop,  a native of Johnson county, Indiana, and reared in Shelby county, this state, a daughter of  Lewis Bishop.
          About this time he rented a farm in Bartholomew county and worked by the day, at thirty-seven and a half cents a day, from sunrise to sunset.  In 1850 he came to Tipton county locating in the virgin forest west of Tipton village, erected a log house and began to improve the place.  After a time he exchanged this place for eighty-eight acres at another point, where he built a hewed-log house and improved that tract also.  In 1865 he sold that farm and for twenty-seven years occupied and cultivated a rented farm, but owning sixty acres where he now lives he moved upon this place in 1897.
          In 1843 he was converted into a professing and zealous Christian, and about 1855 was called to preach the gospel.  His first charge as a minister was at Tetersburg, in Tipton county, and ever since then his labors have been mostly confined to Tipton, Howard, Hamilton and Delaware counties.  He has preached more funeral sermons than any other man in the county, aid has married about as many couples as any other man, and he is now one of the oldest in the living ministry in this county.  Also he has baptized hundreds of people and has been remarkably successful every way in advancing the cause of Christianity.
          In his politics he was at first a Whig, then Know-nothing. He is now a stanch Democrat.
          He has had eleven children, as follows:  Thomas J.,  Susie N.,  Lewis J. (trustee of Cicero township),  Stephen A. D.,  Lucy A.,  and the others are all deceased.  Mrs. Bozell, the mother of these children, died December 22, 1865.  May 10, 1866, Mr. Bozell married  Martha Eiler,  and by this union there have been nine children, — John L.,  Melissa J.,  Eunice A.,  Alace,  George,  Walter,  Laura  and  Mattie, and an infant deceased.
Biographical and genealogical history of Cass, Miami, Howard and Tipton counties, Indiana, Lewis Publishing Company, Chicago, Illinois, 1898, page 447-8,  F.A. Battey & Co., Chicago, Illinois, 1883
Contributed by Phyllis Miller Fleming

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