Nothing to Write Home About

 

It's a day before the end of another month, and I'm feverishly working on last-minute tasks on my to-do list for Lydia Miller's side of my mother-in-law's family tree. Sometimes, though there is a lot of work being done, there's not much to say about it—as they say, "nothing to write home about." 

My task today was to wrap up my exploration of Miller families appearing in the early census records of Reading Township in Perry County, Ohio. That was the location of Lydia's first married home, which she shared with her husband, William Gordon, and her one surviving son, Adam.

To aid in the exploration, I've been using an Ancestry.com beta tool, called simply, "Networks." Early this month, I had set up a network which I dubbed "Miller Family in Perry County, Ohio." One by one, I've been adding specific Miller households to this tool, then locating them in as many documents as possible, before extending each hypothetical relative's line of descent several generations.

On the one hand, I've failed miserably in finding any confirmed connection between these other Millers and Lydia's own Miller roots, but on the other hand, I'm hoping the effort may produce some sign of DNA matches. An additional possible outcome might be to discover patterns, such as any Millers who might have followed Lydia and her second husband Benedict Palmer to their new home in Mercer County.

So far, no such promising signs have emerged. Thus, the repetitive grunt work—with nothing much more to say about it. Some work takes time but, regardless of the proportion of work, yields very little in the way of remarkable results.

Tomorrow, whether the work is done or not, we'll close out this exploration to discover Lydia Miller's roots. It will be time for a recap of the month's progress—including some unexpected discoveries—and an outline of what to do the next time I revisit this research puzzle. And if we are really lucky, perhaps Ancestry's algorithms will catch up with us and be ready to yield some new DNA matches from the descendants of Lydia's second family.

Piling on the Palmers — And Just in Time

 

Quick! To the chase—at least, before the end of the month beats us to the finish line.

Right now, to my mother-in-law's family tree I'm feverishly adding the children of Lydia Palmer—formerly the Lidia we had listed as widow of William Gordon of Perry County, Ohio. The reason for this rush to add the children of Lydia's second marriage is my hope that connecting them to my tree today will give us enough time for the algorithms at Ancestry.com DNA to pick up this additional line of descent. After all, no matter how people spelled her name—Lidia Gordon or Lydia Palmer—she was ancestor of not only those descending from her first son, Adam Gordon, but from her many Palmer children, too. There may be a lot more DNA matches out there to discover.

According to an article about ThruLines posted by Ancestry.com's support team on their website, changes in family trees at Ancestry are usually reflected in ThruLines within forty eight hours. That means, if I hurry, all these new discoveries about Lydia's second family may generate ThruLines results by May 31. Talk about a deadline!

Of course, I'll likely continue the chase into June, despite my promise to myself to move on to the next month's feature from my Twelve Most Wanted for this year. I'm curious to see whether any matches show up who share DNA specifically based on the Miller line—Lydia's as-yet unknown parents' line—rather than the Gordon line of her first husband.

In the meantime, here are a few details to wrap up the month.

First was the question about what became of Benedict Palmer's first wife. We found the 1839 marriage record for Benedict and Catherine Hovermill in Fairfield County, but her ominous absence just a few years after that marriage demanded a search for her burial information.

In what seemed to be a fluke from Find A Grave, I did indeed find Catherine's burial—but it came to my attention as a hint at Ancestry pointing to a Find A Grave memorial supposedly for her husband, not for herself. 

Once I clicked on the link provided by that hint, I could see that the headstone itself was for Catherine, not her bereaved husband.

We could already see that there was a monument marking Benedict Palmer's actual burial location in Mercer County, where he and his second wife Lydia had settled, but because the stone was engraved with the man's name spelled as "Benadict," it did not surface as a hint for his final resting place. I had to go in and manually change the search to the other spelling to get the memorial linked to the right person.

As for Catherine's son Jerome, he, too, was buried in the same cemetery in Mercer County, Ohio, where his father had moved the family. I suspect his Find A Grave entry contains some errors, though, as the memorial states that he was born in Mercer County, when we can see from the Palmer family's entry in the 1850 census that they had not yet moved from Fairfield County until after that point.

If Jerome Palmer, born about 1840, had lived a longer life, his death record might have confirmed his mother's name for us. As it turned out, though, Jerome died before his fortieth birthday, leaving a wife and two young daughters, long before the advent of such helpful documents.

Locating information on those two details from Benedict Palmer's first marriage, I can now get back to work, building out this newly-discovered branch of my mother-in-law's family tree. From Lydia Miller's additional eight children in the Palmer line, there surely will be multiple candidates for DNA matches to connect us to her unknown Miller parents. And while I impatiently wait out those forty eight hours, I have some wrap-up work to do on Lydia's possible brothers' families, back in Perry County, Ohio.

About That Other Lydia

 

Whenever we encounter conflicting assertions about a branch of our family tree, there is no route that possibly can be taken—at least, if we want a tree that reflects documented, correct information—other than to inspect all that can be found, according to each version of the "truth." In the case of that "other" Lydia, wife of Benedict Palmer of Mercer County, Ohio, that is exactly the task we need to attend to today.

Here's the assertion that got me started on this chase: a Find A Grave memorial for someone named Lydia Palmer, who was buried in Ellis Cemetery in Montezuma, Ohio, a tiny village in Mercer County that even today claims a population under two hundred people.

Nestled up against the state border with Indiana, Mercer County is on a road leading from Columbus, Ohio, to Fort Wayne, Indiana. From Perry County, where Lidia Miller lived, to Mercer County would be a trip of almost two hundred miles. If Lidia Miller, the widow of William Gordon, were indeed one and the same as Lydia Palmer, it would help to assemble records documenting the transactions that made that assertion a reality.

Let's check first to see what we can find on Lydia Palmer before her death in 1895. As early as 1860, I could find a census record for Lydia and her husband Benedict Palmer in Montezuma. The household included two daughters and five sons, with the oldest being named Jerome and the youngest, at one year of age, designated as his father's namesake, Benedict. The senior Benedict was noted to have been born in Delaware, while Lydia claimed to be an Ohio native.

The difficulty with the ages indicated for these children—Jerome listed as being twenty years of age in that census, meaning a birth year in 1840—was that "our" Lidia had given birth to her one surviving child, Adam Gordon, only a year prior to that. Not to mention, Lidia's husband, William Gordon, died at the end of 1840, certainly not in enough time for her to have remarried and brought another son to full term in the interim.

Looking for marriage information on Benedict Palmer, I did find a marriage record dated in February of 1839—the same time as our Lidia's son Adam was born—not from Mercer County where I had found the Palmers in 1860, but from Fairfield County, not far from Perry County. Benedict's wife's name, however, was listed as Catherine Hovermill.

Thinking this might have been a different Benedict, I went looking for someone by that name in Fairfield County. When I located him in the 1850 census, Benedict Palmer was indeed living in Fairfield County—but his wife's name wasn't Catherine at all. Despite the scrawl of the enumerator's handwriting—and his propensity to use abbreviations for names—the resultant entry for "Benidic" Palmer's wife looked far more like Lydia than Catherine.

It was time to branch out to more recent records—hopefully, those of the type which would include names of parents, such as death certificates. Remember that youngest son from the 1860 census, the one named after his father? I found what might—or might not—have been his death record. However, this Benedict Palmer died in Iowa, not Ohio. The informant, his wife, stated that her husband was born in Iowa, not Ohio. To complicate matters, she also reported that his father was born in Ohio—not Delaware, as we had seen from census records. 

The biggest problem, however, was that while this Benedict's death record noted his mother's name to have been Lydia, her maiden name, according to her daughter-in-law, was Barker.

Wrong Lydia? Don't be too sure. I kept looking—thankfully. Among the marriage records turning up in searches was one for a wedding performed in, of all places, Perry County, back where we had left our own Lidia Miller Gordon. On May 1, 1842, Benedict Palmer and Lydia "Gorden" stood before a Justice of the Peace, who solemnized their marriage.

To complete the tale, I'll need to look for any record of what became of Benedict's first wife, Catherine, who was evidently the mother of the oldest son, Jerome, whose burial was also noted with a Find A Grave memorial in Montezuma.

And that youngest son Benedict? Though he died in Iowa, he was indeed buried back in Montezuma—and, despite her provision of incorrect information on her husband's death certificate, so was his wife Rachel.

Thanks to an unexplained entry at Find A Grave—one which, without that documentation, seemed to make no sense at all—we now have the rest of the story, as far as Lidia Miller's life went. The birth dates for the sons of each husband, while seeming to contradict assertions about this marriage, made much more sense, once we followed through to find documentation to tell the full story.

Now, I'm left with far more to do on this month's research project. Besides documenting these discoveries for the family tree, I'll need to add the line of descent for children of Lidia's second marriage. Then, because those descendants may mean additional discoveries among perplexing DNA matches, I'll need to pursue that angle, as well—all before the close of this month, if all goes well.

What if That was All Wrong?

 

The month-long chase to discover the parents of Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother who seemed to materialize out of nowhere, is almost over. Only four more days remain to work on this month's selection for my Twelve Most Wanted, but while I feel I've made headway on this brick wall puzzle, I haven't come to any solid conclusion.

I feel good about the progress I've made—especially the discovery of DNA matches linking to Jonathan Miller, a Perry County, Ohio, neighbor whose descendants may be telling a story I couldn't find through the traditional paper route. There is, however, one nagging question: what if that discovery—and all the documentation it led me to—turns out to be all wrong? What if Lidia Miller's story was far different than what we've discussed so far?

There's a good reason for asking—perhaps one you have noticed too, if you followed the links I've included with this month's posts. Notice the 1840 burial information for Lidia's husband, William Gordon, as presented by the volunteer posting his memorial on Find A Grave. As is often done by these volunteers, memorials are linked with those of family members, a helpful gesture—as long as the connections are correct. In this case, I'm not so sure the information is right, but I can't just not check it out. 

William Gordon's memorial has the usual listings for his parents, children, and siblings—and in William's case, his half-siblings, as well. As is often the case, volunteers also link a memorial with the burial information on a spouse. However, in William's case, information supposedly about his wife Lidia was cross referenced with the burial information of someone named Lydia Palmer.

This Lydia was born about the same year our Lidia's birth was estimated to be: 1820. That's where the similarity ends. Lydia Palmer was the wife of someone named Benedict Palmer, and she was buried with him in 1895, not in Perry County, the location where we'd expect to find Lidia in Ohio, but in Mercer County, a county halfway across the state on the Indiana border.

True, it could be possible that our Lidia, widowed with a young child in the early years of Ohio's statehood, might have sought out an eligible bachelor to fill her departed husband's shoes—but I can't just take anyone's word for it, not even that of a dedicated Find A Grave volunteer. This brings up a possibility that we need to take our due diligence to inspect for ourselves.

Memorializing Family

 

Today, Memorial Day in the United States, is one day set aside to honor those who died while in the line of duty in military service. A custom which began after the Civil War, when families decorated the graves of their lost loved ones—hence the original designation as Decoration Day—the day now also honors the memory of those who have fallen in subsequent wars and military engagements.

Though my husband's family includes many members through the generations who have served in the armed forces, they have very few relatives who have actually died while in service. But as I explore the family's collateral lines, I find more and more who had harrowing stories of service to share—or, more the case, didn't share those stories much farther than their own immediate family.

I've lately been exploring the Miller lines of possible siblings of my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor, Lidia Miller Gordon. In the extended family of one DNA match, I ran across an old news article concerning one such distant cousin, who had—finally, after five years of confinement—just been released from captivity as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict.

The newspaper report included one detail about those five years: the veteran's younger brother had enlisted, served, finished his tour of duty and returned home, all before his brother regained his freedom. If the news could have been shared with this brother in captivity, the family didn't want to do so, for so many reasons. While both brothers eventually lived to tell about their experiences, what a burden it must have been to suffer through. These types of stories need to be memorialized, too—not just hidden away in a newspaper article now long forgotten that only a genealogist would stumble upon.

Then, too, there are stories of military loss that were so traumatic at the time that those closest to the tragedy could not bring themselves to speak of it. Though even the thought may be painful for those who lived through the loss of their loved one in service, eventually it will become important to share those stories. The rest of us need to hear them, to be informed of them, to learn from them. Despite the pain. Despite the grief. We mourn with those who grieve—and gain a different perspective of what it was like to live through that loss. We never know until we are told. Share the story. Pass it on. That story is worth living through the generations.

Not the Usual Five Hundred This Time

 

It takes a lot of collateral relatives to put a DNA match in the proper place in the family tree. As I search for clues about my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor, Lidia Miller Gordon, there have been a lot of DNA matches connected to one growing branch of that family tree. And that means the numbers keep growing for every biweekly count—just not at the usual five hundred per fortnight rate experienced in the last two counts.

Still, in the past two weeks, my mother-in-law's tree has grown by an additional 416 relatives, mostly from known Gordon lines and those proposed Miller relatives whose descendants have turned out to be DNA matches. Granted, that falls short of that five hundred rate of the last two session, but my mother-in-law's  family tree now has 39,287 documented individuals included in the records.

In addition, this past two weeks brought in another seven DNA matches, including at least one related to my mother-in-law's Gordon line. As I work through the DNA results with my recent addition of Ancestry.com's ProTools assist, I'm connecting more and more of those Gordon and Miller collateral lines. Eventually, there will be enough information to figure out Lidia's connection to her own roots—and thus push back the curtain obscuring her origins at last. Someday.

In the past two weeks, I think the only reason that rate of increase on the tree has slowed has been because I've been traveling. It is, after all, Memorial Day weekend—not to mention graduation season. Hopefully, in the next two weeks, the celebrations and socialization will slow to a normal summertime pace, and I can get back to the typical five hundred additions for the next biweekly count. After all, it will only be a few more days, and we'll be on to a new research target for June's ancestor in my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025.

Off the Shelf: "Time Anxiety"

 

Not that I'm experiencing time anxiety myself, but Time Anxiety is a book I've wanted to read for the past, oh, thirty nine days. That's when the book was released, a perfect choice for a release date for a book like this: April 15, just in time for every American to release a collective sigh of relief over the national tax deadline.

Author Chris Guillebeau defines "time anxiety" as "the feeling of being crushed by the scarcity of time and the inevitability of things ending." He has been mulling over the problems with time management for a long time, and this newest of his books is a collection of his observations on what he calls a myth: Time cannot be "managed." 

Time management, this author asserts, "is a powerful story built on an entirely false premise." However, there is, he assures us, still much we can do about that.

While reading through Guillebeau's explanation of this predicament, I noticed a few thoughts that can be applied to genealogy—a pursuit which itself, much like the perennial "to do" list, is never really "done." Here's a sampling of some ideas which caught my eye.

• In a practical tip he calls "The Reverse Bucket List," the author urges readers to "make a list of the amazing things you've already done." It's not just a matter of a pat-yourself-on-the-back journey down memory lane; the process may inspire you to set new or revised goals, especially if the review lights up some previously obscured information or resources not available to you the last time you tackled the problem.
• In questioning just what constitutes "enough" for a project, begin by deciding on "a logical finish line" for the goal. Observing that a lack of boundaries for a project conditions us to "the idea that work simply never ends," the author sees the lack of "milestones and end points" as robbing us of a sense of purposeful accomplishment. Genealogy research in general can have that effect, as many of us have experienced. That's why I've chosen my Twelve Most Wanted research cycle for the year: to help me attain finish lines with each goal, even if it only turns out to be a wrap-up summary at the month's end with a next-step list of objectives for the next time I tackle that research question.
• When getting started on a research project, think about where you tend to get sidetracked or encounter stuff that throws you off your planned course. Rabbit trail? Yep, that's me, so I need to do an evaluation of the dips and twists in a typical project cycle, make a note of them, and create tactics for reshaping the behaviors. I don't worry so much about the rabbit trails—they generally lead me to some useful insights in the end—but it is helpful to have a rescue plan on hand to get me back on track when I veer off course.

Time, as Guillebeau observed, is "the greatest nonrenewable resource in the world." For example, unlike many other items—out of milk? go to the store; out of money? find a way to get more—he notes: "if you run out of time—you're done." 

"Time is limited, but desire is limitless" is an observation the author shared which likely resonates with so many who are pursuing questions about their family history. There is always something more we want to know, some new question that looms on the horizon of our latest family discovery. These are two facts in conflict which the book examines—and that those of us fascinated with pursuing our ancestors would benefit from considering, as well. While we have made considerable progress in unearthing our family's stories, there is always more work to be done.

Perhaps we can benefit from a tip in the book as Chris Guillebeau, an author known for his writing and speaking on entrepreneurship, considers what has come to be called "granny hobbies"—activities among which has been counted the pursuit of family history. Such activities, he explains, can bring us into a "flow state where time seems to feel more expansive." Noting a New York Times article on that very subject, he explains that such activities can be associated with "cognitive improvements related to both memory and attention." 

The main point that caught my eye in this section of Time Anxiety is this: doing such activities in groups—think knitting groups, quilting circles, book clubs—is not solely to execute the task, but to incorporate it into community. When we think of the quintessential avocational genealogist, we think of someone in pajamas and bunny slippers, hot cocoa in hand, holed up at home, feverishly scrolling through digitized documents long past midnight. What if we took a page from this chapter of Chris Guillebeau's book and considered genealogy to become a team effort, gathering to build family trees together?

Perhaps I can't take a detour away from genealogy without seeing applications which relate back to that endless pursuit of our family's long story throughout time. Every "granny hobby," as Guillebeau noted, has a "large ecosystem of teachers and practitioners." In the genealogy world, we certainly do. I'd like to see us energize that world even further—especially through local genealogical societies—by coming together in community to encourage each other as we discover more about our own families. That may well be our best option as an antidote to "time anxiety" for those of us who realize our family trees will never become "done."