Friday, May 23, 2025

Exploring the Map

 

Now that we have several possible Miller names swirling about in this month's posts, it's time to take a different look at the possibilities: by exploring the map of Perry County, where those Miller relatives of my mother-in-law's brick-wall ancestor Lidia once lived. Geographic proximity can lend a sense of genealogical connection, and that's exactly what a plat map can provide.

Though finding such a map for Perry County in the 1840s—the point at which Lidia's family met with so much misfortune—would have helped, there was a plat map available online at the U.S. Library of Congress for 1859. Fine. I'll settle for that.

We've already seen that one property belonging to Jonathan Miller was described as the northwest quarter of section twelve in township seventeen and range seventeen. Based on the Public Land Survey System, which was historically a way to divide and describe public lands in the United States for eventual distribution, such a numbering system should make it easy for us to locate the property.    

Since Ohio was designated as a Federal Land State, a series of congressional laws established the process for doing so, eventually involving a rectangular survey system which divided and numbered land into a system of "townships," each township containing thirty six square miles. From that point, each township was divided into thirty six "sections," each containing 640 acres.

From that point, each section was numbered in a specific order, beginning with the northeast corner section, then proceeding across the six sections of the top row of the map's grid to the northwest corner section, then dropping down one row and snaking back in the opposite direction to continue the numbering system. 

Visualizing that sequence may seem complicated, until you view a diagram like this one at FamilySearch,  which makes everything much clearer—and should help me find Jonathan Miller's property in section twelve. 

Well, let me interject one caveat to that crystal-clear diagram: it helps to know that, when Perry County was established in 1818, the land system required the neighboring county of Fairfield to give up two rows of sections to complete the township of Reading, the precise place where Jonathan Miller's property ended up being designated after the reorganization.

Looking at the 1859 plat map I found at the Library of Congress, you can follow the PLSS numbering system across the northernmost row of sections, from right to left, section one through six. After section number six, though, there are two more unexpected sections continuing in that same row, oddly numbered out of sequence from section seven to what appears to be another section two. Drop down one more row from that additional section two, and we snake around to the other direction, beginning with what was obviously another added-on section, numbered section eleven.

Following that, in logical sequence—but only for that one section—is the section twelve we've been seeking for Jonathan Miller's property. Indeed, in 1859, the 139 acre parcel of land was labeled "J. Miller." Along with the label of his land, we see familiar names among his neighboring land owners: Anspach and Spohn, a surname which eventually married in to the Miller line.

From that point, the numbering system reverts to the usual PLSS system: sections 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and—strangely—another section 12.

If I hadn't found that explanation of the aberration when setting up Perry County's original land holdings upon the county's founding, it would have been puzzling to try and locate the Miller property. Likewise, finding Jonathan's other property, listed as the southwest quarter of section one, should have been directly above section twelve, if we followed the established numbering system.

Sometimes, despite such orderly systems for naming and describing land, it helps to know a bit more of what the locals already knew. 

Thursday, May 22, 2025

Notes From Long Ago

 

Sometimes, the old trumps the new. In the case of reading nineteenth century headstones, I'd take a seventy-two year old transcription any day, so when I found just that, I sat down for a good read.

My question lately has been, "Where was Lidia Miller Gordon buried?" It was not with her Catholic husband and in-laws, apparently. When I discovered a number of Miller family members buried in a humble, farmland-based burial ground in Perry County's Reading Township, I thought I'd take a look around.

While Find A Grave has photos of many of the still-legible headstones in the Binkley Cemetery—like Lidia's possible brother, Jonathan Miller—the earliest burials have suffered the ravages of time, weather, and unkind trespassers. Fortunately, while I was looking online at FamilySearch.org/labs for any documents to resolve my research dilemma about Lidia, one search result produced a transcription of Binkley Cemetery headstones.

The beauty of this discovery was that, though they are mere typewritten transcriptions of the engraved headstones, they represent work done in 1953—a full seventy two years ago. Granted, 1953 is a long time after the first burials occurred in that cemetery in 1810, but it is still a vantage point much earlier than our present day.

I thought I'd take a look, line by line, page by page. Job number one was to keep an eye out for any mention of Lidia Miller Gordon, my mother-in-law's brick wall second great-grandmother. There were indeed a number of Millers recorded in that transcription, so now that I've created a Miller Network through my Ancestry ProTools, I'll be careful to add those entries into the appropriate places as I build out the Miller Network. Every bit of detail helps.

The FamilySearch entry continued for several pages. While organized alphabetically by surname, it appeared to cluster information pertaining to family plots. Thus, I could find the cluster for Jonathan Miller's family, and, just below that on the same page, a grouping for Michael Miller's family, another family which might be considered relatives to Lidia. In addition, there was a set of burials listed for the Dupler family, likely a connection to Jonathan Miller's wife Catherine, who was herself born a Dupler.

No matter how helpful it was to find this seventy two year old cemetery transcription, there was one detail missing: any sign of a burial for Lidia Miller, wife of William Gordon.

Wednesday, May 21, 2025

Taking a Cue From the Cemetery

 

Sometimes, assumptions can sneak up on us. That was what was fixin' to fool me in this process of seeking Lidia Miller, the young mother who died in 1840. Unable to find any further information on her, I reached outward to the rest of her possible family relations in search of clues to solve Lidia's riddle.

Lidia's husband, William Gordon, died at the end of the same year in which he had lost Lidia: on Christmas Eve in 1840. As would be expected for a member of the Gordon family, William was buried in the Catholic Cemetery in nearby Somerset, a village within the Reading Township where we had found him listed in the 1840 census. Likewise for William and Lidia's baby, also named William—and, unsurprisingly, so were William's own parents, the senior William and his second wife, Mary Cain Gordon. From that, a natural assumption would be to take a cue from these burials and assume that younger William's wife Lidia would be buried in the same cemetery.

Wrong.

Well, at least it seems to be a wrong assumption. I can't find Lidia's final resting place, as of this point. But what I did find was surprising—surprising enough, that is, to make me doubt the connection between Lidia and her supposed Miller relatives, Jonathan and his wife, the former Catherine Dupler. You see, with all the family burials at Holy Trinity Cemetery, it was easy to assume that Lidia would also be Catholic. Perhaps she wasn't.

Now that we've found Jonathan Miller, a possible brother or cousin to Lidia, according to DNA matches, I followed him to his final resting place, a cemetery in New Reading called simply Binkley Cemetery. With a name like that, it would be easy to assume this was just a family's private burial grounds within their farm property. Perhaps that might have been true at one point. However, Find A Grave now notes over one hundred seventy memorials posted for this cemetery, with burial dates ranging from the namesake ancestor Johann Jacob Binckley's burial in 1810 through the most recent burial noted in 1947.

Not surprisingly, included with several of those burials in the Binkley Cemetery were headstones for the Miller surname. Perhaps seeing a couple by the name of Binkley—Samuel and Elizabeth—residing in Jonathan's household in the 1860 census may have been my first hint, though at the time I discovered that, I hadn't yet made any connection between the two families.

In addition to Jonathan and his family, however, the Binkley Cemetery's burials included another Miller family, that of Michael Miller and his wife Mary. Mary, if we can rely on the notes posted on her Find A Grave memorial, was born a Binkley.

Michael, according to the age given on his headstone, was likely born in 1812. That year of birth would put Michael too young to have been Lidia's father. Considering Jonathan Miller's burial in the same small cemetery and the fact that Binkley family members once lived in Jonathan's home, I'd consider that a suggestion that Michael and Jonathan might have been brothers.

That makes one useful cue gleaned from this burial discovery. But the final clue I gained from discovering this burial spot was the reminder that at least Jonathan and Michael Miller were not practicing Catholics. If Lidia turns out to have been their sister, despite her marriage to a Catholic resident of the same township, that means I would have to look elsewhere to find those useful documents we rely on for genealogical information prior to itemized census records and civil birth records.

Whether such records are still in existence—or even whether I can discover what faith these families adhered to—remains a big question. The consistency of Catholic baptismal records has certainly been a benefit to me in researching this Gordon family's past. Stepping outside the faith may leave me with no recorded options at all. 


Tuesday, May 20, 2025

Hacking Into the Network

 

It may have been the shortcut of DNA testing which revealed just who the relatives of brick wall ancestor Lidia Miller might have been, but we are still missing the specific details I am after. Sure, Lidia might have been related to Jonathan Miller—as well as being his neighbor in Perry County, Ohio—but we can't be sure just how they were related. Siblings? Cousins? We need to get down to a more granular level with these Miller family DNA matches, yet the documentation doesn't seem to be there.

There is one other way that keeps calling us back, though: cluster research. This is our call to return to that network of those who knew each other best: the Miller family's traveling partners who made the journey with them to the frontier of Ohio in the early 1800s. While we as researchers may not have the convenience of birth or death certificates from that time period—let alone census records naming each member of the household—we still need to find a way to hack into that network of relatives and traveling partners who accompanied each other into the (very risky) wilds of the frontier. 

Face it: this was not the time period in which one's future grandfather hopped onto his Harley to check out the chicks hanging out in the town square, one county away. Getting around was slow and ponderous, took planning, and required security measures. Those whom you knew—and trusted—became an essential element in your immigration plan. And wherever our ancestors went, those Friends, Associates, and Neighbors—or F.A.N. Club for short—were sure to go, as well.

Though we're into our third full week of chasing information on young Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother who lived only long enough to marry and give birth to two sons, we have little to show for our efforts. We have discovered that Lidia's one surviving son, Adam Gordon, was named in his paternal grandfather's will—but we have not been as successful in finding a similar mention in the will of a maternal grandfather. We traced the records for a Miller neighbor of Lidia and her husband, William Gordon, in hopes of discovering any relationship, and then, hopefully, finding his parents' names. DNA matches tip us off that Lidia and Jonathan Miller were indeed related, based on the DNA of their descendants. But that doesn't confirm the exact relationship.

Following land records, we can see that Jonathan's property once was owned by someone named Adam Onsbaugh—or Anspach—who eventually deeded the land to a daughter, who married a Dupler. And discovering that Jonathan's own wife was born a Dupler dangles yet another tantalizing hint before our eyes.

Thus, we have Duplers related to Anspaches, and Duplers related to Millers, but how the Millers relate to each other, I can't yet uncover. Still, knowing how important those networks were to early immigrant settlers, I'm convinced there has to be a connection. After all, the population of the entire county in 1820—well over a decade after Adam "Onsbaugh" acquired his property—was only eight thousand people. Back then, people stuck with those they knew. And those they knew were often family members.

To hack into that network—those friends, associates, and neighbors—will take following those other surnames which seem to keep re-appearing, every time I research Jonathan or Lidia Miller. The ultimate goal will be to zero in on parents' names for either Jonathan or Lidia, of course, but it may take us around in more circles before we close in on the answer—if, indeed, we can do so before the end of this month.  

Monday, May 19, 2025

Finding the Fastest Route

 

While I've been taking the long way around my genealogical problem—finding the parents of Lidia Miller in Perry County, Ohio—there is a speedier way to find my answer...maybe. The fastest route, it seems, would be to follow the suggestions at ThruLines, Ancestry's tool for connecting DNA matches.

Granted, ThruLines has an Achilles Heel of its own: suggestions are based, in part, on the family trees posted by subscribers. As we all can see, some trees are more accurate than others, hence the need for caution for anyone using this approach. But if the trees used are all correct—and adequately documented, I might add—it's worth following the family line from a shared ancestor down to the present-day DNA match.

In Lidia Miller's case—that unfortunate young woman who lost her life after giving birth to her second child in 1840—there is a suggestion for her father. While I've already looked at the documents available for this possible father—Ancestry suggests a man named Jacob Miller—the difficulty with that suggestion is that there may be more than one resident of Perry County with that name.

However, ThruLines also suggests a possible sibling for Lidia, for whom there are five possible DNA matches.

Granted, looking for DNA matches sharing an ancestor that many generations back in time—this would be my husband's fourth great-grandfather who was possible parent of both Lidia and the assumed brother—stretches into the murky area of the tiniest of shared genetic segments. In other words, the connections could border on coincidence—either from Perry County's notoriously high incidence of intermarriage of family lines over generations, or from the possibility of all the matches coming from the same geographic origin.

In what seems like a coincidence of its own, the suggested brother for Lidia turns out to be one and the same as the Jonathan Miller I've already been tracing this month. He was my first candidate to include in my "Millers of Perry County" Network on Ancestry's ProTools. While I am still following the ownership of that property which was mentioned in Jonathan Miller's will, a far quicker process would be to explore what can be documented on these five DNA matches descending from Jonathan Miller.

Looking at those five matches, right away I could eliminate two of them. One match was a person whom I had previously examined as part of my mother-in-law's Gordon line—the same line as Lidia's husband, William Gordon, descends from—who also had Snyders intermarried into that line of descent. Even if this match was descended from Jonathan Miller, that information wouldn't tell me much.

The other match had a line of descent outlined by ThruLines which I couldn't replicate by documentation, so I discarded that possibility.

However, there were three other DNA matches. I followed each one's line of descent, as outlined by ThruLines, being careful to find several documents confirming the connections. Again, despite the paper trail seemingly nodding yes to this connection, each DNA match is quite distant, containing one small segment for each match shared. Better yet, using ProTools to view shared matches of these Miller candidates, I then identified several other matches descending from this same Jonathan Miller line.

Does this point to a confirmation for Lidia and Jonathan? Possibly. But that still means identifying the right Jonathan and confirming who his father was. While DNA might have been the fastest way to speed up the process, it still requires verification by those monotonous plodding trips through the paper trail.

Sunday, May 18, 2025

Reminiscing — And Reusing

 

The other day, I ran across an article on Family Tree Magazine about RootsWeb, the "granddaddy of genealogy websites." For those of us who wandered the site frequently in those early days of online genealogy, the forums and information posted could be useful—sometimes essential. Thinking about those old websites launched me into a reverie of reminiscing—but not so long that I didn't heed the article's advice to remember to check it out now.

Even though RootsWeb is frozen in time, due to the evolution of computing leaving this technological dinosaur vulnerable to hacks, there is still much that can be accessed. Remembering those many useful posts I had found there on Perry County, Ohio, resources, I thought it might be worth my while to give it a look, via a site-specific Google search. 

What I remembered finding back then were burial records transcribed from decades ago when headstones weren't quite so faded, and researchers who had hand-entered data from handwritten records. I had saved some of these resources to my own computer, in the prescient fear of maybe someday seeing the site go down, but others which I hadn't saved could have come in handy now, in my current search for Adam Gordon's mother, Lidia Miller, before her untimely death.

I did find some notes readable, including a post reminding me to check out the history of the early Catholic Church in Perry County. One entry pointed to Internet Archive, which now hosts the digitized version of the A. A. Graham tome, History of Fairfield and Perry Counties, with its listing of early church members. Someone named Adam Gordon was listed among those early members of the church, though I doubt it was our Adam Gordon. Still, it was informative to page through the 1883 publication to see what was happening in this ancestral location so long ago. I'm keeping an eye out for any biographical sketches on Miller families, despite there being so many people by that name in Perry County.

Another link I found in my exploration brought me to a site from long ago called Ohio Genealogy Express. There, a page transcribed from another early Perry County history book laid out the brief history of the formation of each of the county's townships. Since Lidia's family and the Gordon family had settled in Reading Township, I took a look at the explanation there. Apparently, Reading Township was originally established prior to the formation of Perry County. When that reorganization took place in 1818, two rows of sections which originally were in Fairfield County's Richland Township were now added to complete Reading Township as part of the new Perry County. Knowing this may help explain the location of the original land purchased by Adam "Onsbaugh" in 1806, long before Perry County was even in existence.

I'll probably continue to search through the potpourri of material still accessible through the old RootsWeb and other old genealogy websites. After all, someone once knew the details that now have me puzzled. You can be sure that someone once knew the names of Lidia Miller's parents and siblings. Sometimes, that F.A.N. Club concept is useful for that very reason: someone out there once knew the answer. The key is finding just where that someone stashed that missing kernel of truth.

Saturday, May 17, 2025

Meanwhile, on the Miller Side

 

While the routine grunt work of plowing through Anspach records continues in the background—not the scintillating reading material one would prefer—I thought I'd wander over to the other side of the family representing my mother-in-law's Miller roots in Perry County, Ohio. While I seldom like to pay attention to hints copied from other people's trees, I thought just this once, I'd explore a suggestion about mystery ancestor Lidia Miller's possible father.

The suggestion, from ThruLines, was to look for someone named Jacob Miller. Since there was a Jacob Miller listed in the 1820 census in Reading Township, the same place in Perry County where Lidia and her husband William Gordon lived, that was as good a place to start with this suggestion as any.

Though the age brackets used for the 1820 census aren't very helpful for our purposes—the adult age bracket stretches from age twenty six through forty four—I first wanted to check for signs of a young daughter. Indeed, there was one, though the bracket included all girls under ten. Since Lidia died early in 1840, not even two years after her marriage, I have no way to know how old she was. However, we can safely guess she was about twenty when married, putting her birth before 1820, and thus within that "under ten" age bracket for Jacob Miller's 1820 census readout.

At the same time I noticed the one girl in the Jacob Miller household, I spotted three sons, also under ten years of age. Could one of them have been Jonathan Miller, the one whose property we've been following this past week? Hard to say at this point, though the broad age bracket could include both Lidia and Jonathan, as he appears from other records to have been almost ten years Lidia's senior. 

Using Ancestry.com's ProTools, I'm building a Miller network which includes all three of these Millers from Reading Township, just to have a place to park all my discoveries on this possible F.A.N. Club. But as I stockpile records on Jacob Miller from Perry County's Reading Township, I begin to notice a few detracting details. One is that there may have been more than one Jacob Miller in the neighborhood. And for this particular Jacob Miller in the 1850 census, his arrival in America was not only after having married, but just before the birth of his sixteen year old daughter Margaret.

In other words, the Jacob Miller in the 1850 census couldn't have been the Jacob Miller of the 1820 census.