Ella Persis Chapin

Wife of Edward Browne. She entered Vassar in 1865, the year it opened: in 1928 the Vassar Club of Miami was proud to have at lunch “one of the first graduates … Mrs. Edward Browne, of Lake Bluff, Ills., who was in the class of 1869, after having entered the institution in 1865,” though the college’s register marks her as not having taken the degree (source). She married Edward Browne at Pentwater, Michigan, on 22 December 1875. In Chicago and Lake Bluff she was a member of the Chicago Woman’s Club from 1898, president of the Lake Bluff Woman’s Club and of the School Children’s Aid Society, and joined the DAR in 1900 on the service of five Revolutionary ancestors. She gave her cousin details for the family history Kith and Kin (1922).

The family genealogies give her no children (“Children: BROWNE. No issue,” 1924); see Henrietta Browne.

She was her family’s historian. Besides the DAR application of 1900 and her help with Kith and Kin, she answered readers’ queries on the Cummings, Converse and Walbridge families in the DAR’s American Monthly Magazine in April 1903, signing herself “E. P. C. B.” (source).

Her ancestry is set out in research/hatten/Browne_Chapin_Cumins.md and now in the archive: through her father, the Chapins of Winfield, N.Y., and Monson, Mass. (Loring Chapin, Jotham Chapin, Lt. Jonathan Chapin), back through Abigail Munn to Deacon Samuel Chapin of Springfield, and through Anna Hitchcock to the Pynchons and Gov. George Wyllys; and the Braces of Winfield (Capt. Abel Brace). Through her mother, the Cummings family of Windsor, Vt. (Lt. Jerahmeel Cummings), the Converses of Woburn and Stafford (Col. Israel Converse, Maj. James Converse) and the Walbridges and Porters of Stafford and Hadley (Maj. Amos Walbridge).