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SOURCE: History of Genesee County, Michigan
        pub. Everts and Abbott - 1879

        Page 181 - 182


                          HON. JOSIAH W. BEGOLE

  This gentleman was born in Livingston Co., N. Y., Jan. 20, 1815.  His
parental ancestors were French, and settled at an early period in
Hagerstown, Md.  His maternal grandfather, Capt. Bolles, of the same place,
was an officer in the war of the Revolution.  At the beginning of the
present century, both of the grandparents of Mr. Begole, becoming
dissatisfied with the institution of slavery, although themselves
slaveholders, emigrated to Livingston Co., N. Y , then a new country
accompanied by a number of their former slaves.  Mr. Begole's father was
born in Maryland in 1786; was a non-commissioned officer in the war of
1812, and married a daughter of Capt. Bolles in 1814.  One year after the
birth of Josiah Begole, his father moved to Mount Morris, where the son
received his early education in a log school-house, and subsequently at the
academy at Temple Hill, in Genesee County.

  In August, 1836, Mr. Begole emigrated to Genesee Co., Mich.

  During the winter of 1837 and 1838 he was engaged in school-teaching.  In
the spring of 1839 he married Miss Harriet A. Miles, daughter of Manly
Miles, formerly from Connecticut, and commenced work on a new and
unimproved farm.  From that time onward his progress was steady, until he
became the owner of a well-cultivated farm of five hundred acres.

  Mr. Begole has served his townsmen in the capacity of school inspector
and justice of the peace.  In 1856 he was elected county treasurer, holding
the office four successive terms, and during the civil war.

  At the breaking out of the Rebellion he took an active part in
recruiting, furnishing supplies to the army, and looking after the
interests of soldiers' families.  The death of his eldest son, near
Atlanta, by a Confederate bullet, in 1864, was the greatest bereavement of
his life.  In 1871 he was nominated by acclamation for State senator, and
was

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Page 182

elected by a large majority.  In that body he served on the committees of
finance and railroads, and was chairman of the committee on the Institution
for the Deaf and Dumb and the Blind.  He took a liberal and public-spirited
view of the question of a new capital of the State, and was an active
member of the committee which drafted the bill for the establishment of the
same.  He was a delegate to the National Republican convention held at
Philadelphia in 1872.  In the same year he was elected a representative
from Michigan to the Forty-third Congress, in which body he was a member of
the committees on agriculture and public expenditures, and took an
efficient, though unobtrusive, part in all its proceedings.  Since the
close of his Congressional term he has devoted his entire time to his large
and prosperous business.

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