Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Time to Read Between the Lines


Sometimes, we struggle so much with our most difficult research problems that we get too amped up to see the obvious staring back at us. When that happens, it's time to sit down, take a deep breath, and re-evaluate what we can see about our case.

Let's take my problem case of the parents of Sarah Rinehart Gordon. Unfortunately for me, this particular Sarah—one of many with that given name among those in both the Rinehart family and that of the Gordons—was born far from civilization, in a time when birth records, if kept at all, were listed in a family Bible or noted upon baptism at the local church.

In Sarah's case, though, her parents had left their home in Greene County, Washington, and ended up somewhere in Kentucky by the time she was born in 1795. And yes, somehow, they ended up returning back to Greene County after her birth. Where such birth records might have been kept for her is a mystery which may remain shut to me and all other Gordon and Rinehart researchers.

Believe me, I've struggled with ways to find some trace of her family from those earliest years of their history. Sometimes, that struggle seems to do no more than to lock the puzzling researchers' minds to any possibility of seeing the answers laid plainly before their eyes. That's the reason for the pause to take a deep breath and reconsider.

So yesterday, I took the time to chill on the Rinehart mystery, and to cast a cool eye on the genealogical scenario. Thankfully, in that pause, I noticed a few things that may—or may not—turn out to be helpful clues.

The first is that I noticed the unusual spacing between the ages of the children in Simon and Ann Rinehart's family constellation. I can't tell, yet, whether Sarah was their oldest child, but I do have records asserting that she was born in Kentucky in 1795. From that point, the children's names I could find were for a son and three more daughters. Jesse, next born, arrived in 1806, back in Greene County, Pennsylvania. Following him were Hannah, Lucinda, and Charlotte. When I realized that those daughters were born in 1812, 1815, and 1818, respectively, it occurred to me that this was a far different pattern than what I could see for the other two children.

Normally, back in that era, it was easy to spot gaps in birth order, allowing us to draw such conclusions as the death of a child when the usual two-to-three-year pattern was broken. The birth years of the youngest three children in Simon and Ann Rinehart's situation are a good example of such a basic pattern.

The gap between Sarah and her brother Jesse, however, doesn't give us quite the same pattern. The gap between Sarah's 1795 arrival and Jesse's birth in 1806 is significant. Then, too, the gap between Jesse and the next sibling is also far greater than the typical two to three year spacing. What was going on in these gaps? Were these long time spans simply indicating missing children? After all, infant and child mortality in that era was far more common than what we experience in our own century.

However, keeping in mind the conflicting reports of mother's maiden name in Sarah's death record and Jesse's biographical sketch in a county history book, what we may be seeing is not a typographical error in the rush to publish a book of over one thousand pages. Could it be that Simon Rinehart's return to Greene County was for a specific—and likely tragic—reason?

While I'll need to seek documentation for such events to confirm this hypothesis, the least I can do for now is trace the Rineharts' trail from their wedding in Greene County before 1795, to Simon's return to Pennsylvania before his ultimate removal—with much of the Rinehart and Gordon clans—to Perry County, Ohio.

What I can find, for now, is the likely entry for Simon Rinehart in the 1830 census. That would be the last year he lived in Greene County—at least, according to his son's biography in a Perry County history book, years later. Tracing the birth locations of Simon's daughter Sarah's children can also provide a concurring timeline, as all of her children up until son Simon Rinehart Gordon were born in Greene County, but the next child—daughter Sarah Gordon—was born in Perry County in 1832.

The move from Pennsylvania to Ohio is far easier to explain than the earlier one from Pennsylvania to Kentucky and back home again: the extended family all thought it would be a good idea, and the move entailed a community of relatives all heading to the same location at about the same time. But the move in the 1790s to Kentucky and back?

Now I'm wondering whether something happened after the birth of Simon's daughter Sarah. Could it be that those conflicting reports of mother's maiden name were actually due to the fact that there were two different women married to Simon Rinehart? Could it be that Sarah lost her mother, shortly after her birth, and Simon and his infant returned home for help as soon as was possible? Could Ann Wiley have been Sarah's mom, and Ann Wise the mother of son Jesse?

Of course, it would be helpful to locate any marriage record to confirm that guess, but records at that early date were not kept at the courthouse. Pending any confirmation, though, I'll need to keep that hypothesis in my back pocket. This may be an alternate explanation for the conflicting reports showing up for two siblings in the Rinehart family.

Tuesday, February 18, 2020

Caught in the Net—and Still Struggling


Like an insect unwittingly caught in the spider's net and struggling in vain to regain its freedom, that's how I sometimes wrestle with those brick wall ancestors whose secrets remain stubbornly hidden from me. The case of the wife of John Gordon's grandson James is one of those immovable bricks blocking my research progress.

I first stumbled upon the fact that this wasn't going to be an easy find the same way we all do with every ancestor: I came upon her, step by step, from the people I already knew were in my mother-in-law's family tree. I had worked my way backwards in time until I got to my mother-in-law's great-grandmother, Nancy Gordon. Nancy, born in 1820, likely in Greene County, Pennsylvania, was the daughter of James Gordon and a woman called Sarah Rinehart.

James' family line we've already discovered, back at least two more generations, but Sarah's genealogy was a different story. Though her younger siblings were all born in Pennsylvania—Greene County figures as a strong possibility here, too—from the census records of the later decades which provide such information, we see that Sarah, herself, was born in Kentucky.

I was able to determine that Sarah's father's name was likely Simon Rinehart, and that her mother was either named Ann Wise or Ann Wiley. This was the first clue that details on this family were not entirely clear. Though I found records stating the Wiley name, an old history book of Perry County, Ohio—the place where the Rineharts and Gordons ended up after leaving Pennsylvania—mentioned Ann's surname as Wise.

That little bit of confusion is only a warm-up to the problem of determining just who Sarah's father really was. Although Sarah's brother's biography in the Perry County book states their father's given name was Simon, it is not necessarily an easy feat to rush back to early 1800s Greene County records to find any information on a Simon Rinehart. And there's a specific reason for that.

You see, the Rinehart family of the late 1700s in Greene County, Pennsylvania, was indeed comprised of several brothers, one of whom did have the name Simon. The problem was, this Simon was married to a woman named Sarah, not Ann. A trifling detail, though, compared to this other one. Though Simon and his wife had four children—none of whom was named Sarah—apparently, in the process of trading lands with another settler in that frontier region of southwest Pennsylvania, Simon Rinehart was ambushed and killed by natives. The estimated date of that tragic death was about 1781.

Problem: our Sarah Rinehart, daughter of Simon, was not born until 1795. She obviously was daughter of a different Simon. But which one? I've struggled to sort out all the possible Simon Rineharts from Greene County. Sarah's dad and mom did return from Kentucky after her birth to settle in Greene County, presumably because they had family connections which drew them back home. But none of the other Simons born to the extended Rinehart family there fit the parameters for the right Simon.

And so, I continue twisting in the wind, struggling like the unfortunate insect to free myself from a sticky research problem—which means it's time to take this research mess out of its dark corner of the electronic file cabinet and shake it up with some brainstorming tactics. While we may park our messiest research problems in a buried file folder, after its hiatus, we may discover new resources that could lead to some answers—or at least fresh clues that give us more to work with, and bring us closer to answers. 

Monday, February 17, 2020

There's Always Another Puzzle


It is indeed a joyful moment when a family history researcher can break through a brick wall to discover the preceding generation in a direct line. As you can image, I held a private celebration (translation: happy dance time) when I discovered the proof argument concerning that brick wall on my mother-in-law's Gordon line last week.

All is not smooth sailing for the Gordon genealogy, however. There are some sticking points in that extended family tree which keep bumping into another family named Rinehart. The Rineharts, like many others in that pioneer bunch of settlers who moved from Maryland to the western end of Pennsylvania and, finally, on to the state of Ohio, spent a good deal of time together in what was once the wild environment of the frontier of southwest Pennsylvania.

Those Rineharts, incidentally, found themselves at the center of a tragic episode in what was to become Greene County, Pennsylvania—but that is a story I'll save for a later day. Suffice it to say, for today, that I'm still puzzled about just how all these Rineharts were connected, if they were related to each other at all.

This week, let's take a look at one of the Rineharts who directly connected to my mother-in-law's Gordon line. That's the easy part to explain. After we settle those formalities, we can jump off to the wilds of the unknown part of this genealogy.

Last week, I talked about my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, John Gordon. He, it turns out, was the son of the George Gordon who once owned the land that became half of Georgetown in what is now Washington, D.C. From John's first marriage came at least nine children, not the least of whom was my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, William B. Gordon.

This William B. Gordon, like his father, was married more than once. But unlike his father, he left enough of a legacy for his many researching descendants to track the lines of both wives. That, as I mentioned earlier this month, was how my husband eventually became his own cousin: a descendant of one Gordon half-sibling married a descendant of another half-sibling.

In the case of today's discussion, our direct line ancestor was William B. Gordon's eldest son by his first wife, Mary Carroll. This son, born in 1794 just after the family had settled in Greene County, Pennsylvania, the couple named James.

Now, fast forward a respectable twenty-five years, and we find young James marrying a woman in Greene County by the name of Sarah Rinehart. Now, understand there is no problem with a Gordon marrying a Rinehart; in fact, there were others within the extended Gordon family in Greene County marrying members of the Rinehart family. It's just that this particular Rinehart, while born to a father whose name—Simon—might seem familiar to people of the time in Greene County, actually came from a Rinehart line which may not have been related to the rest of the Greene County bunch.

One confusing detail is that this Sarah Rinehart was not born in Pennsylvania like all the other Rineharts, but came from somewhere in Kentucky. When you realize that her birth was in 1795, you realize this must have been a very unsettled part of the continent at that point.

Another confusing detail involves the maiden name of her mother—was it Wise? Or Wiley? If you follow the paper trail for the children born to Sarah's parents, records can be found for each of those possibilities.

Blending that all together leaves us with a very tentative collection of clues. We'll see tomorrow, for instance, why Sarah Rinehart's father, Simon, is not likely to be the Simon Rinehart known by the folks in Greene County, Pennsylvania.

Sunday, February 16, 2020

What if it IS my Circus?


Sometimes, we run into messy stuff when researching our family history. Face it, if life can sometimes be messy, so can the narrative that flows out of our own family's history. And sometimes, the mess gets so confusing that we—or someone else following the same trail—can get thrown off track.

I've run into that problem before, most recently back at the end of last year, when I had two different genealogy companies yelling at me that I had the wrong wife for my Aaron Broyles. (No, as it turned out, I didn't; mine was long gone when the other Aaron—and the specific wife that had been mentioned—still lived in that other state everyone was insisting on.)

My response, once I put together my draft of a proof argument, was to just leave it alone. How could I first find all those other subscribers at two different companies who insisted otherwise, and then convince them of their error? I've often learned that no good deed goes unpunished, and I didn't want to try and prove that maxim wrong—at least, not in this instance. And, as my husband often likes to say, "Not my circus; not my monkeys." I left it alone.

But just this weekend, I ran across another messy research problem. It involved a fourth cousin once removed—removed far enough, that is, to be someone I wasn't personally acquainted with, but close enough to possibly show up as a DNA match to me. This woman's life story apparently included some sad or difficult episodes, and I'm sure there would be plenty to read between the lines of the few documents I was able to glean on her life's trajectory.

She was married at least twice, the first time to a man who eventually ended up in their state's "reformatory" institution, and the second time, when she was well into her thirties, to a man whom she left a widower when she died fifteen years later.

The problem was this: in all the census records where I found her with the first husband—in 1920 and 1930—there was never any mention of children. But by the time of the 1940 census, suddenly she and her new husband had a fifteen year old daughter, listed with the surname of the second husband.

Obviously, my question was: who were the actual parents? This second husband had never been married before, and all previous census records showed him living alone with his own widowed father. All previous census records for the wife showed her living alone with her first husband—with no children. Could this have been an adopted child? A child of a now-deceased sibling of one of the adults?

Obviously, a lot can unfold in the space of the ten years in between two census enumerations. There is probably quite a messy story that evolved in a decade's time, in this family's case. Of course, I tried my hardest to piece together the story, looking in every direction, both time-wise and relative-wise.

This is just one instance of the many types of confusing research clues we may encounter as we piece together the stories of our own families over the generations. And it brings up a question. What do we do when we find others have got the facts badly jumbled? Do we just walk away with a shrug, spouting that old Polish saying, "Not my circus; not my monkeys"?

What if it is our circus?

Thinking this through, I had to go back and revisit the case of mistaken identities for the two Aaron Broyles men in my mother's line. Do I really just leave everyone else thinking they had those details right? Or do I speak up?

That's a question that came up in a family history workshop I was teaching yesterday. In the past, I would have just said, yeah, leave it alone. Forget those sayings about the monkeys; how about this one: you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Some people get really incensed about being approached, out of the blue, to inform them that they got something wrong. Especially if it concerns their own family.

On the other hand, the thoughtful people in my class yesterday wondered if there might be other ways to broach the subject and offer a correct version of the facts. And that is quite possible. After all, while we can't change someone else's tree, we certainly can exhibit correct documentation on our own tree. More than that, we can edit our entries to add brief statements on why we chose one version of the story over another one. After all, we do have control over our own public trees posted at such venues as Ancestry.com. And on the universal tree in places like FamilySearch.org, corrections can be made upon producing the determining documentation, so that all can benefit from that information.

While it still may earn you not much more than the ire of a total stranger if you go correcting other people's trees, the situation is far different when you make the case clearer on your own turf. By adding notes, comments, and listing resources on our own trees, we can publicly introduce others to our thinking process and provide evidence to support our contentions about specific family links different than the status-quo mistakes on other trees. In addition, that can become a way to flag the situation and bring it to the attention of researchers who don't, yet, even know about such a discrepancy.

People do take a look at other subscribers' trees. Though we can't necessarily make everyone look at our mini-proof arguments posted on our trees, by providing that information publicly, we are still making our contribution toward making the right lines of reasoning available to a wider audience. Hopefully, some people will be observant enough to take action and likewise correct their own tree.

While I don't—yet—think it is our responsibility to correct all the research wrongs in the world, I do see the pursuit of family history to be a collective effort. We do share what we've found with each other, even if passively (and perhaps even unwittingly). In that one small way, I've come to see I've needed a slight attitude adjustment to realize that, yes, in some cases, it is my circus—and by example, I can make that incremental contribution towards the collective betterment of the record-keeping for the family lines I'm most concerned about.

Saturday, February 15, 2020

Easing Into Another Batch


Could an indexing project be as relaxing as mindlessly assembling a jigsaw puzzle? Depends. In my case, anything would be relaxing in comparison to the five-hour-long commute last night from a city that was only ninety miles from home. Once safely home after such a harrowing experience—and promising myself to never, ever, ever attempt a trip home from the Bay Area on a Friday preceding a three-day weekend—I thought I'd unwind with a little volunteer work online at FamilySearch.org.

Truth be told, the real reason I headed to the indexing tab last night was because of something I had spotted a few days earlier. I had been trying to find resources to help me do some lookups of California records at FamilySearch.org. To my surprise, last week I discovered a project which had been initiated by a neighboring genealogical society—a project which anyone could help complete with only a few minutes of volunteer work at a computer. Sure, I'd be willing to help my neighbors, so I made a mental note to go back to that link (yes, I saved it) during the time I had scheduled for indexing work later in the week.

By the time I got to check it out again, it was gone. All I got was an error message, as if it were a broken link or something. But how could that be? So I went back to my original notes, and tried to look up the collection in FamilySearch's catalog. Sure enough, there it was, now searchable. Poof! Another indexing project quickly dispatched.

I'm glad to see how quickly some of these indexing projects are completed. There is so much work still to do to make digitized record sets searchable. Since I couldn't work on that California record set anymore, I went back to my old standby: naturalization records in the tri-state area surrounding that major port of entry, New York City. This time, I concentrated on some very old records—well, as early as 1856—from Essex County in New Jersey.

Those early records don't contain as much information as later naturalization applications require—but I'll bet anyone searching for their immigrant ancestor from the late 1850s would be elated to find anything on such mystery ancestors. At least this is a start for those seeking to make the momentous jump "across the pond."

Likewise, because this particular record set was so sparse, as far as fill-in-the-blanks went, it was a blast to complete the indexing batch, so I did more than one batch. It was a breeze. It was a good feeling to know I'm helping someone else. And it hardly ate up any of my spare time. That's the type of volunteer project that's do-able for almost anyone—and I'm glad so many people have been willing to jump in and help. The end result makes it easier for all of us to delve further into our own family history.

Friday, February 14, 2020

A Pause to Consider:
Love in Past Years


Happy Valentine's Day! Whether you have been dreaming of receiving one of those quaint, Victorian-styled tokens of true love fit for a queen, or gearing up to laugh at some Vinegar Valentines, today might be the time to consider what greetings your ancestors might have been sending in their own younger years.

One of the most prolific producers of such greeting cards and postcards, at least in London, was the concern of Raphael Tuck & Sons (and no, despite the man's birth in Prussia, I'm not related; just love to look at these old-fashioned prints). Raphael Tuck, familiar to some genealogists on account of being the originator of the three-postcard "oilette" series known as "The Marriage at Gretna Green," created a commercial art concern in Great Britain which spanned nearly a century as a family business, from 1866 to 1959, at the retirement of grandson Desmond Tuck.

Of course, those of you who are privileged—or inescapably tasked—to work as part of your own family's business realize how much material can be gleaned from your occupational records and crossed over to your family history accounts, just as the line of ownership descended in the family business of Raphael Tuck & Sons has been detailed. Whether your firm became as well-known in your own occupational specialty as that of Raphael House, you can still share the story of your own family's success, both for its business history and for its family history.

As for those valentines wending their way to you—or making their way from your own anonymous hand—they may be as far afield from those quaint Victorian specimens or even those vinegar valentines of the 1840s onward as we are from those generations of our ancestors. But it's still fun to imagine what our great-great-grandparents might have slipped in the mail, or in a spontaneously-picked bouquet of flowers for a hopeful beau or belle. Hopefully, it didn't include vinegar.



Above: Undated and anonymous example of a "vinegar valentine," courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Thursday, February 13, 2020

Meanwhile, Chattering Away
in the Background


After this genealogy guinea pig bared her soul and confessed her more-than-disorganized research shortcomings yesterday, a few thoughts popped up and demanded a postscript. Today, they will have their moment in court.

No matter how organized a researcher hopes to be, the truth of the matter is that the minutiae of organization seldom makes for exciting scripts. First-I-did-this-and-then-I-did-that can be mind-numbing in its exquisite organization. For the most part, I spare you that detail. I am, after all, focused on the story, not the snooze.

However, much like the teletype machine in the old-fashioned newsroom, my research is chattering away in the background. Only rarely does the bell go "ding" to alert everyone of a breaking story. Meanwhile, center stage holds the unfolding of another story's account—while the real work is getting done behind the scenes.

That is the type of drudgery I mentioned yesterday: that relentless fine-tooth-comb cleaning process, with every step calculated to miss not a speck of misplaced conclusions. While that is necessary, it makes for boring copy. But if I don't keep at it—in the background, of course—I never get the chance to stumble across an interesting aberration which will alert me to that next fascinating family history story.

So, this week, while leading up to the story of how two Georges—and not the ones you had been thinking—might have been the namesakes for Georgetown in the Washington, D.C., area, behind the scenes, I've been methodically combing through the entire Gordon family tree.

I'm far from done with this process, of course. There were too many Gordons per generation to make this an easy exercise. But thanks to this periodic review, I do discover branches that were entirely omitted the last time I passed this way, or which now can be joined to the freshly-digitized historical records added to the online collections I frequent. Often, these updates lead me to new details, some of which even include a story or two.

Now that the Gordon story has led me back yet another generation, I'll add documentation to my mother-in-law's tree to connect John Gordon to his father George. Not that the story is now completed—finding George only dredges up further questions in my mind, of course—but it will take its place in the ebb and flow of research. At some point, I'll set it aside and let it rest until more can be found to bring me back even farther—to Scotland, perhaps. But I'm a firm believer in not banging my head against a wall; when the trail goes cold, it's time to switch tracks and pursue a more profitable course along another surname's line.

And for our current plans, that is exactly what we'll be doing. I mentioned one of the reasons I was delighted to find the Tenmile Country book is that it included some other surnames which intertwined with my mother-in-law's Gordon line. One of those lines was that of a family—or maybe more than one family—named Rinehart. Thankfully, the Rinehart line is mentioned in that same Tenmile Country book, and will be the family history we will turn our attention to, next week.

Meanwhile, like that teletype machine, you can be sure my check-the-records routine will continue to chatter away in the background while, on center stage, we roll out another family story.
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