Lorenzo Snow, son of Oliver and Rosetta L. Pettibone Snow, was born April 3, 1814, in Mantua, Portage County, Ohio. Our father was a native of Massachusetts, our mother of Connecticut, and were descendants of the genuine Puritan stock—those who fled from religious persecution in the "old world," and landed on Plymouth Rock, of historic celebrity.

Early in the settlement of that portion of country now known as the Middle States, our parents, with their family, consisting of two daughters, Leonora Abigail, and Eliza Roxcy, (the writer of this history,) left the home of their youth, and moved to what was at that period considered the extreme West, or, as it was sometimes styled, "the jumping off place," and settled in Mantua, Portage County, Ohio, making the eleventh family in the township. There two daughters and three sons were added to the family, to wit: Amanda Percy, Melissa, Lorenzo, Lucius Augustus, and Samuel Pearce.