Julia Ann Criswell was born in February 1845 in Maryland to Nicholas and Mary Criswell. Her father was a farmer and railroad engineer who owned $200 of personal property by 1860. The family lived in Howard, Maryland, until the 1850s, when they moved to Barnesville, Ohio. Her mother died in the early 1850s.
She married Abram Bidleman on January 17, 1872, and they had at least three children: Eleanor, born around 1876; Walter, born around 1879; and Mabel, born around 1881. They lived in Columbus, Ohio, and her husband worked as a blacksmith. Her husband died in the early 1900s.
By 1910, she was living in her daughter Eleanor’s household in Grand Junction, Colorado. She returned to Columbus in the 1920s, and she died there of paralysis on August 16, 1932.