Family records show birth year as 1863.
John Abram Satterlee was about 2 1/2 years old when his parents, Abram Isaac & Susan Demarest Satterlee, took him and his older brother, Emmett Jay, and sister Emogene S. to Vandalia, Missouri.
John Abram's first schooling was in Vandalia; later he went to work as an apprentice carpenter in his brother Emmett Jay Satterlee‘s "Tin & Carpentry Shop" in Joplin & Carthage, Mo. John became interested in photography while working in the "shop" and it was here he devised a successful method of developing & processing his own "Tin-Type" pictures and built a "Traveling Studio Darkroom" covered wagon.
While John was growing up in Missouri his father had moved, to western Kansas where he took a homestead near Ulysses, Grant County, Kansas, adjoining the Joyce family homestead on the old Cimmaron Trail.
After John Abram was married in 1882 to Nancy Jane Hager, he traveled with her in his "Studio" taking some of the first pictures of the "Cherokee-Strip-Run", in northern 0klahoma. Nancy being part Indian was granted some land near Choctaw, Oklahoma, and for a time John lived there with his fami1y. Later they were living in Ulysses, Kansas when John's dad, Abram Isaac died in 1891.
In 1899, Nancy had returned to her home in Kansas to have their last child, while there she contracted measles and died, leaving John with five small children.
John left the children in Ulysses, Kansas and went on the road again with his "studio."
In 1903, John met Eva Mae Davis in Nelson, Nebraska, where they were married; he brought her to Ulysses to care for his first family.
After the birth & death of their lst 2 children in Kan. John decided to bring Eva & their daughter Hazel to the west coast in 1907. In Washington State John resumed his carpentry trade and when the season was slack he worked in his own photo studio in his home taking wedding & local group pictures etc.
Father of 15 children,
7 were born by his first wife,
8 by his second wife.
1927, Sept. 19, in Addy, Stevens County, death at age 68 is recorded.