Examining the Hypothetical

 

If the two sisters in the household of Gregory Metzger didn't die in the county they called home, where did they die? More importantly, where did Gregory Metzger himself meet his end? And where was his will filed?

Still trying to piece together the complete family of my husband's third great-grandfather, Michael Metzger, I'm not quite sure yet whether Gregory even fits in the picture. True, his home was right next to that of Michael's namesake son in the Perry County, Ohio, Jackson Township. And two of the women living in Gregory's home—Joanna and Mary Ann—were listed as sisters in the 1880 census, presumably after Gregory's own passing. But why were there no records of their deaths in Perry County?

My first guess was that perhaps each of them had died while visiting an as-yet-unnamed family member living in a different county. Since I am still missing two names to round out the elder Michael's possible nine children—and that's even counting those hypothetical three, Michael, Joanna, and Mary Ann—I wondered whether discovering the identity of the other missing two might point us in the direction of the place of death for these hypothetical three.

Conveniently, there's DNA testing to help guide us in matching up some of these hypothetical siblings. While my husband's ThruLines results for the Metzger family don't include any matches descending from Gregory, Mary Ann, or Joanna, there are two other names for which he does have matches. One, listed on ThruLines as Joseph John Metzger, seems to line up neatly with the Find A Grave entry for a man by the same name, buried in nearby Knox County, Ohio. The other one linked by Find A Grave, for Johann Metzger's burial in Indiana, seems less likely but also happens to be included among my husband's ThruLines results.

While Ancestry's ThruLines is a matter of both DNA and subscribers' family trees, I can't simply toss the information because some trees on that site include errors. You know what that means: I'll need to double check by doing some grunt work of my own with research on each of these men to figure out what made them decide to leave the rest of the family behind in Perry County, Ohio.