Thomas Dell was one of the younger generation of Quakers from the
Waterloo area who attended the Seneca Falls women's rights convention in such large numbers. Like most of them, he came with other family members. Unlike them, he attended not with his mother or sister but with his father and with his cousin (and next-door neighbor), Rachel Dell Bonnel.

In 1848, Thomas Dell was twenty years old. He had been born in 1828, probably in the same place he was living twenty years later, the oldest child of William S. Dell and Charlotte Dell. His father was a Quaker who
had migrated from New Jersey with other Quaker families in the early part of the nineteenth century. His mother had been born in Connecticut.

By 1850, Thomas and his father ran a nursery in the Town of Waterloo. On April 5, 1850, Thomas signed an anti-slavery petition with other men from Waterloo and Seneca Falls. He died in 1851, when he was only twenty-three years old, and he is buried in the Quaker cemetery on Nine-Foot Road in Waterloo.

Sources:

• Graves, Quaker cemetery.
• 1850 census.
• Antislavery petition, April 5, 1850.

-Judith Wellman, Historian
  Historical New York