October 25, 2026
Newspaper accounts often introduce Patience Ann Champion through her husband, Dr. Federal Champion. Read together, the articles provide a few details of her own life—and show how much remains to be learned.
The 1896 biography says Patience was born in Tuckahoe, New Jersey, on March 24, 1804, and married Federal Champion in 1827. It describes her as the mother of Mary, Belle, Jane, Maggie, and Frank. A 1847 obituary for Dr. Champion gives her maiden name as Patience Ann Treen and says the couple had one son and four daughters.
An 1892 obituary says Patience died at the home of her daughter, Mrs. W. H. Snyder, in Belleville. It describes her as the mother of six children—four daughters and two sons—and says that Jane was the only surviving child. The 1896 biography gives a different date for her death than the 1892 notice, whose issue date also sits awkwardly beside its printed death date. The discrepancy should remain visible until another record resolves it.
Patience’s story also reaches a 1853 commissioner’s sale involving her and others as plaintiffs in a case over rural Madison County land. The notice does not name the other parties clearly enough to identify their relationship to her, and those parcels are not the Belleville house. The 1855 building report separately names B. F. Champion as the person who built a family residence on Charles Street. The project identifies B. F. as Patience’s eldest child; the newspaper evidence connecting B. F. to Frank, the son named in 1896, remains a strong but not fully explicit match.
The records give us a starting outline: a woman born in New Jersey, part of a family that moved west, mother to a large family, and a Belleville resident whose later years were spent with her daughter Jane. They also remind us not to let a single retrospective stand in for a complete biography.
1896 Champion family biography
1892 obituary for Patience Ann Champion
1847 obituary naming Patience Ann Treen