including Cornelia (b. 1835), Lucia, Henry Birdseye, and Charles A. Wheaton (b. 1853). Ellen was well educated, having attended a girls seminary in Cortland and music school in the state capital of Albany. She is reported to have owned the first piano in Pompey. She is best known for a notable diary she kept from 1850 to 1858, detailing her life as a wife and mother of a large family. The Wheaton family privately published The Diary of Ellen Birdseye Wheaton in 1923. Selections from the diary were reprinted in the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper in March 2002. Birdseye Wheaton died in 1858 at age 42 from tuberculosis. Progressive views and activism, particularly relating to abolition and women's rights, were an important part of the Wheatons' family life. They sent some of their children to the private school in New Jersey run by Theodore Weld and Angelina Weld Grimké, advocates for these progressive causes. After the death of Ellen in 1858 and moving to join friends in Northfield, Minnesota in 1860, Wheaton married the widow Martha Elizabeth (Archibald) Wagener in 1861. She had also moved from central New York, migrating with her parents after losing her husband and their three sons to illness. The senior Archibalds owned flour mills in Dundas. Charles and Mary Wheaton had five children: Frederick (1862–1881), Robert (1863–1898), Allan (1866–1934), Edith (1868–1950) and Annabel (1870–1946). They also reared together some of the younger of Wheaton's 12 children from his first marriage. Career As a young man, Charles clerked in the general store owned by his brother-in-law Moses Seymour Marsh. Retail businesses were a growing part of the economy. In 1835, soon after the birth of their first child, the Wheaton family moved to Syracuse, where Charles went into the hardware business. Wheaton and a variety of partners, including his brother Horace, built a prosperous company. Over the course of 20 years, the Wheatons lived in seven houses, moving to larger homes as family and fortune grew. None of the Wheaton homes in Syracuse are believed to exist. In 1849, the Wheatons' close friends and fellow abolitionists, John and Anna Loomis North, left Syracuse to move to Minnesota. Ellen noted their departure in her diary, "[John] thinks very highly of the climate and resources in Minnesota, and says it is rapidly filling up with an Eastern population." The Norths were to play an important role in Wheaton's life