Walter Whitman, Sr.

Husband of Louisa V. Whitman and father to George, Walter and Edward Whitman.Son Walter became a distinguished poet/essayist, son George is a Civil war Colonel who was wounded in action at the battle of Fredericksburg.
After death of son his remains were removed from Brooklyn cemetery and his wife from Evergreen cemetery.
Courier News, Bridgewater, N.J. #/28/1892
[https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/10325927/walter-whitman]

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Son of Jesse and Hannah (Brush) Whitman.
Born: July 14, 1789 in West Hills, Huntington Township, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York.
Died: July 11, 1855 in West Hills, Huntington Township, Suffolk County, Long Island, New York.
Buried: Harleigh Cemetery, Camden, Camden County, New Jersey.
Occupation: Carpenter, home builder, and farmer.
Married: Louisa Van Velsor June 9, 1816 in Oyster Bay Baptist Church, Oyster Bay Township, Nassau County, Long Island, New York.

NOTES:
As Justin Kaplin astutely puts it, "Walter Whitman, Sr. was born on July 14, 1789, the day the Parisians stormed the Bastille, and he believed in resisting much, obeying little. He named three of his six sons for heroes of the Republic and he trained them as radical Democrats, on the side of the farmer, the laborer, the small tradesman, and the 'people'." Walter Whitman was a carpenter, home builder, and farmer who was 34 years old when his second son, Walt Whitman, was born. He was born just after the end of the American Revolution and was always a liberal thinker. He knew and admired Thomas Paine of Virginia. Walt no doubt inherited his impracticality from his father. Walt Whitman wrote, "Father finished his apprenticeship in New York City, and then worked for some three years there. I have heard him speak of boarding steady for three years in New York in one place. He then went up around the Hills, and sough, Long Island, and took contacts at building. He was a first rate carpenter, did solid, substantial, conscientious work. I have hear mother say that he would sometimes lay awake all night planning out some unusually difficult plan in his building arrangement. (The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, page 24.)

Trained as a carpenter, but struggling to find work, he had taken up farming by the time Walt was born. However, when Walt was just about to turn 4 August 27, 1823, Walter, Sr., moved the family to the growing city of Brooklyn, across from New York City, or "Mannahatta" as Walt would come to call it in his celebratory writings about the city, that was just emerging as the nation's major urban center. Walter Whitman, Sr. was of English stock, and his marriage to Louisa Van Velsor, of Dutch Welsh stock, led to what Walt Whitman always considered a fertile tension in the Whitman children between am ore more smoldering, brooding Puritanical temperament and a sunnier, more outgoing Dutch disposition. Walter Whitman, Sr. was a stern and sometimes hot-tempered man, whom Walt Whitman respected but for whom he never felt a great deal of affection. Walter Whitman may have had a problem with alcoholism, which had doubtless run through the Whitman family line from the time of America's alcoholic eighteenth century. Buckle describes Walter Whitman Sr., as a "large, quiet, serious man, very kind to children and animals, and a good citizen, neighbor and parent" He died at age 65. Walt Whitman described a visit to his father's grave site in 1881, writing "these lines seated on an old grave (doubtless of a century since at least) on the burial hill of the Whitmans of many generations." He surveyed more than fifty Whitman graves, which constituted his entire family history in America, "with its succession of links, from the first settlement down to date, told here - three centuries concentrate on this sterile acre."
[https://www.myfamilybusiness.org/familytrees/velsor/waltwhitmansr.htm]

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"Appropriate to his politics, Walter Whitman, Sr., the poet's father, was born the day the Bastille was stormed, 14 July 1789, to Jesse W. and Hannah (Brush) Whitman. A free-thinking rationalist who rejected organized religion and regularly read left-leaning books and journals, he was proud to have known Thomas Paine personally, and he took his son Walt to hear Elias Hicks, the Quaker iconoclast, and Frances Wright, the feminist/socialist reformer, when they spoke in New York. All three became family heroes about whom the poet spoke admiringly all his life. But if Whitman readily embraced his father's radical politics, he was reluctant to recognize the more general influence of his father's troubled personality.
On 8 June 1816 Walter Whitman married Louisa Van Velsor, with whom he had nine children, the second being the poet, his namesake. The Whitmans had lived in Huntington and West Hills, Long Island, since their Puritan forebears settled there in the seventeenth century, but in 1823 Walter Whitman moved his family to Brooklyn, where they changed addresses frequently. He was a skilled, hardworking carpenter who, once in Brooklyn, tried to better the family's fortunes through real estate speculation: buying a lot, building on it, moving his family there for a few months, and then selling and moving again once he had built the next house. His business ventures failed perennially.
Even before his worldly failures made him bitter, however, Whitman's father was, by all accounts, moody, dour, and inflexible, and the one surviving photographic portrait seems to reflect such a temperament. In "There Was a Child Went Forth" (1855), the father is described as "strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, anger'd, unjust," a man associated with "[t]he blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the crafty lure," a fair description of the poet's own father. That slight, indirect, and unflattering reference is typical of Whitman, who rarely spoke of his father—far less often, certainly, than he spoke of his mother, whose gentle, affectionate disposition he openly admired and emulated. Clearly, the poet wanted to see himself as being more like his mother and struggled against the latent tendency towards brooding rigidity he inherited from his father. That interior struggle was not only outwardly manifest in conflicts between the poet and his father in the 1840s but was also reflected in Whitman's fiction from that period; stories like "Bervance: or, Father and Son" (1841) and "Wild Frank's Return" (1841) express Whitman's sense of suffocation and resentment in melodrama: a protagonist son is rejected by a cruel father who is later filled with remorse when that rejection results in the son's utter destruction (e.g., insanity or hideous death).
Their antagonism (and Whitman's apparent desire for self-destructive revenge) seems to have eased when, in the late 1840s, Whitman began to take control of the family as his father's health failed. That reversal, made complete by his father's death on 11 July 1855, seems to have been liberating, perhaps even freeing him to launch his poetic career. When, in the opening lines of the Preface to Leaves of Grass (published just a week earlier), Whitman spoke of the son who calmly observes the father's corpse being borne from the house, essentially dismissing it as irrelevant, he was announcing the triumph of the sunny, healthy poetic persona over the brooding and unstable shadow he had repressed. Images of the father became as scarce in the subsequent poetry as they had been pervasive in the earlier fiction, and it was at this time, too, that he first cast off his father's name and signed his work "Walt" rather than "Walter." Only late in life could Whitman acknowledge, "As I get older, and latent traits come out, I see my father's [influence] also" (Daybooks 3:658)." [https://whitmanarchive.org/.../encyclopedia/entry_71.html]