Wade & Webb Family History

On 26 December 1872, in Coosa County, Alabama, Charles H. Webb made his will, leaving everything to his wife Malinda for her lifetime or widowhood and then equally to his children, named as C. D. Webb, M. J. Spiers (the surname is hard to read), Wm. M. Webb and Caroline Webb Morgan, with two grandchildren, John C. Webb and Martha Ann Smith, to share as one child. The will was proved in the Coosa County probate court on 12 February 1877, when he was “deceased, late an inhabitant of this County”. A photograph of the will book page is on his Find a Grave memorial, whose date of death, December 1872, turns out to be the date of the will.

Emma May Goodrich, Mrs. William H. Wade, died at Morristown, New Jersey, on 6 March 1888, after only three weeks in the state, and her death return said no more of her burial than “Morristown”. Her Find a Grave memorial, under the name Mary A. Wade and linked to her husband and her sons William and Harry, places her grave in Evergreen Cemetery, Morristown, section P, grave 70.

On 13 August 1918, the Navy’s official chronology of naval aviation records, “Ens. Frank E. Wade received the designation of Naval Aviator No. 1,000 at NAS Pensacola, Fla.” The book adds that because some men before him had been given fractional numbers, he was not literally the thousandth. Frank Edward Wade of Richmond Hill, then 22, had joined the Naval Reserve Flying Corps in April 1917 and was commissioned an ensign that August, very probably on the day he won his wings; in the Second World War he served again, as a lieutenant commander.

In the autumn of 1936 Hilda Webb’s portrait as a bride ran in a national advertisement for Camay soap, headed “‘My skin was never lovelier thanks to Camay’ says this charming Alabama bride.” Her testimonial card, from Birmingham and dated 5 August 1936, is signed “Hilda Wade (Mrs. Frank E. Wade)”; she had married Frank E. Wade at Forest Hills three years before. A copy kept in the family’s papers led to the page, page 17 of the film magazine Modern Screen for November 1936, and the same advertisement ran that season in Radio Stars, Radio Mirror and the Boston American.

In May 1966 Clifton F. Thomas, president of the Richmond Hill Savings Bank in Queens, wrote to Webb Wade, then living in Atlanta, Georgia: Webb’s father, Frank E. Wade, had just opened an account at the bank in trust for Webb’s daughter Christine, and the bank was pleased “that another great-granddaughter of Mr. William H. Wade is now a depositor in the Bank.” Her great-grandfather, the president wrote, “was a founder and charter trustee” of the bank and served it until his death, and “the name of Wade is still well known to many of the old-timers here in Richmond Hill.”

The New York State census of June 1855 found John Wade, 78, born in England, living as “Father” in the household of James M. Wade in the 15th Ward of Brooklyn. On 4 January 1856 the Brooklyn Daily Times announced the death of John Wade, aged 79, a founding member of the Baptist church in MacDougal Street, New York, his funeral to be held “from the house of J. M. Wade, No. 66 Ninth street.” James M. Wade had been orphaned as a boy, so the old man was very probably the father of his wife, Eliza Ann.

The Brooklyn Daily Times of 5 April 1876 gave James M. Wade, “Deacon Wade”, a long obituary: born in New York in February 1816, orphaned at twelve or fourteen and left the chief support of a half sister, he became at twenty a partner in a coffee-roasting and spice business in New York, then a builder in Williamsburgh, lost his property in the panic at the start of the Civil War, and ended as a real estate agent on Broadway. A Baptist “of the old school”, he was a founding member of two Brooklyn churches and a deacon in Williamsburgh for many years; his grandfather had been a founding member and licensed preacher of New York’s Oliver Street Baptist Church. His death certificate, signed by his son Dr. James D. Wade, gives the cause as pneumonia and his burial at Cypress Hills on 3 April 1876.

Photographs of the lot books and cards in the office of Maple Grove Cemetery, Kew Gardens, taken in April 2024, show that lot 279 in the Prospect section was owned by William H. Wade Jr. of Richmond Hill: his first wife Ellen was its first burial, on 19 July 1906, and he, his second wife Josephine and his son Frank E. Wade followed, under a family monument carved with a Masonic emblem. Nearby, the north half of lot 182 belonged to Ann Lynas, mother of Josephine and of Martha, the wife of Harry Elisha Wade, and Harry and Martha lie there under a LYNAS and WADE monument. A card for lot 27A in the Summit section, owned by Frank E. Wade, places Ellen’s sister Elizabeth J. Marritt there in 1942, with an Elizabeth Thompson, very probably their mother Eliza, and a William Thompson.

The Wade lot at Cypress Hills Cemetery, Brooklyn, photographed in April 2025, is Section 18, Lot 49, as its corner post is cut, under a fluted pillar inscribed WADE. Its flat stones are those of Eliza Ann Wade (born 1 March 1816, died 15 December 1915), her son Dr. James D. Wade (1838–1902) and his wife Harriet R. Wade (1834–1905), and their son Dr. Henry A. Wade (died 1954) and his wife Helen B. Wade (died 1959). Eliza Ann’s husband, James M. Wade, is not in the lot: buried at Cypress Hills in 1876, he lies, by his Find a Grave memorial, in the Locust Grove section.

Wilbur Wade’s government headstone at Cypress Hills National Cemetery, Brooklyn, photographed in April 2025, records his service in the First World War: “CPL CO G / 313 INF / 79 DIVISION / WORLD WAR I”, from New York. He died on 12 February 1936; his wife Elizabeth A. is commemorated on the reverse of the stone.