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.