When All the Details Line Up

 

It's encouraging, when looking for a brick wall ancestor, to finally find the document in which all the details line up and we can say with assurity that we have discovered the name belonging to the previous generation. In some cases, the one court document I found which mentions James Turner assures me of his connections to my mother-in-law's family. In other cases, though, it brings up more questions.

James Turner, if you recall, was son-in-law of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother. And that distant great-grandmother was a matriarch on my mother-in-law's matriline, a potential common ancestor for the three exact matches my husband has on his—and thus his mother's—mtDNA test results. All I need to do is determine just how those female descendants for that matriline might figure into the puzzle.

After discarding the possibility of several of the women descending from Elizabeth Howard, that fourth great-grandmother, due to lack of daughters to pass down that mtDNA signature, we are currently circling the family of Elizabeth's daughter Rachel. Because Rachel was married in 1802, before Ohio had even attained statehood status, it would be a very slim chance indeed for me to find mention of her own name in legal documents—with one exception.

That exception was my hope to find a will for her husband, James Turner—and that her husband predeceased her. That hope, however, was quashed when my search for such a legal document in Fairfield County came up empty-handed.

It was as far as a last will and testament go that I was foiled in my research attempt. In its place, however, I found something else which turned out to be quite helpful—except for one detail.

The document was an indenture dated January 11, 1843. By the time of the 1840 census, James had already declared his age to be in his seventies. His wife was not far behind him. And the document being drawn up in court on that date in 1843 served as an exchange of property between the elderly couple and another man named James M. Turner.

The record was helpful in that it identified Rachel specifically as James' wife. In addition, we could possibly infer that James M. Turner may have had some relationship to the originating parties in that he exchanged a mere two hundred dollars in exchange for the property (worth about $8,000 in today's economy, not a bad price).

There was, however, one glitch in that document which didn't seem to line up. Toward the end of the first page of the court record, in specifically describing this property of James Turner, the wording stated, 

...which lot or section of land was granted by the United States unto the said William Turner by Letters made Patent...

Wait. Which said William Turner? I went back to reread the document—not relying on the AI transcription provided by FamilySearch Labs' Full Text search function, but reading that handwriting for myself. If there was a "said" William Turner previously mentioned, I have yet to find it.

However, the indenture provided some other very specific details, like the date in which that original transaction occurred (August 13, 1805), and the description of the property location (Section 28, Township 17, Range 17). I blasted over to the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records to see whether there might be any record of a William Turner receiving land in Ohio.

There was. In Fairfield County. At that precise location: Section 28, Township 17, Range 17. On that same date: August 13, 1805. 

Don't you love it when all the details line up?

Better yet, if James Turner had somehow received that land from someone named William Turner, perhaps William was James' father, just as James M. Turner, next recipient of that property, might have been son of the elder James.

Of course, that's just a guess on my part. But at least it points me in a possible direction to continue my search. After all, it will take some cluster genealogy to help point out what became of Rachel and James Turner's currently invisible daughters.