Yet Another Miller

 

Among the DNA matches isolated to point solely to a Miller ancestor connected to our Lydia in Perry County, Ohio, some linked to an ancestor named Joseph Miller. A cursory glance at this Joseph Miller showed a man born in 1801. Hmmm, I thought: a year of birth close enough to perhaps link him as a brother to the Jonathan Miller we've been watching.

So much for numbers. Even if this Joseph were born in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, as we had suspected for Jonathan, he certainly didn't die in Ohio. A link in the DNA match's tree led to a Find A Grave Memorial for a man who died in Fulton County, Indiana. Not the same story as what we've seen for Lydia or Jonathan.

One tiny detail in a life story doesn't provide the full picture, of course. As it turns out, this Joseph may well have made a stop in Ohio on his way to Indiana, after all. Joseph Miller apparently married his wife, Barbara Overmyer, in none other than Perry County. Surprisingly, the entry for their wedding is displayed on the same page as that for Jonathan Miller and Catharine Dupler, occurring just one month before the other Miller ceremony, on March 18, 1824.

That was enough to beguile me into following more of Joseph Miller's story. After all, there was a promising Joseph Miller listed among those thirty five Miller heads of household listed in Perry County in the 1830 census. Perhaps this was the one.

Many Millers

 

Continuing the quest for a possible Miller father for our Lydia, we have many Millers from which to choose. And I don't mean a choice from among the many Millers resident in the state of Ohio—although the Miller surname does happen to be one of the top three surnames in that state. Back in 1830, the first census taken after Lydia was born, there were at least thirty five heads of household in Perry County, Ohio, claiming that surname.

Although it was possible that Lydia's immediate family might not have stayed in Perry County—after all, as we've already seen, some Millers came from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and could just have kept on traveling—I'm hoping that gleaning information from this one snapshot of 1830 might give a chance at discovering members of Lydia's immediate Miller family.

In tandem with a search through the Perry County Millers of 1830, I am reviewing the rest of the DNA matches tying my husband to candidates with Miller roots. To continue this search in a way that would yield meaningful results for our search for Lydia's parents, we need to remember some details:

• The Miller DNA match must represent a line which is not intertwined with the many other surnames in Perry County which have, over the centuries, intermarried with my mother-in-law's family.
• The potential match would need to be someone who could be identified, placed within the context of a family tree, and verified by documentation—thus, no enigmatic labels replacing match names.
• The tree needs to convey a reasonable story: no wild migrations over hundreds of miles of rough terrain in a matter of days; no births to teenaged couples barely old enough to parent children; no unexplained surname changes or other fingerprints of confused identities.

I have already found six DNA matches at Ancestry who all descend from Jonathan Miller and his wife, Catharine Dupler. Since then, I've located almost as many more Miller matches satisfying my prerequisites, but who descend from a different Miller ancestor. The challenge now is to build out trees for those matches, confirm the assertions, and watch to see where the Miller nexus might occur between our Lydia and the DNA match's ancestor.

This, as you can imagine, will be a time-consuming process.... 

Supposed Siblings and Their Possible Patriarch

 

I confess: I cheated. This wearying search for possible siblings and parents of my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor Lydia Miller has nigh worn me out. So when I spotted an Ancestry hint that perhaps Lydia's possible sibling Jonathan Miller was son of a man named Henry Miller, I decided to check it out. 

Since Jonathan was said to have been born in Pennsylvania—at least, according to his Find-A-Grave entry—it made sense to look for such a father both in Jonathan's home in Perry County, Ohio, and for his supposed home town back in Pennsylvania.

Checking the 1830 census in Perry County, Ohio, however, led me nowhere. That was the first census in which Jonathan had appeared in Ohio after his 1824 marriage to Catharine Dupler, but the significant number of Miller residents in 1830 in Perry County told me the search might be challenging. Besides, the lone Henry Miller in Perry County that year, himself a man under forty, turned out to be far too young to have been father of Jonathan, himself born in 1802.

The suggestion at Ancestry, however, was to check out a Henry Miller still residing in Pennsylvania. While on its surface, a card transcribed from Mennonite Church records, offered up as documentation of Henry Miller by Ancestry hints, seemed plausible as father of Jonathan—and thus, possibly, of our brick wall ancestry Lydia Miller.

Plausible, that is, until a closer look revealed that that Henry Miller couldn't possibly have been father of Lydia. If Lydia's own burial record contained the correct age, her date of birth would have been in 1820. Pennsylvania Henry, according to the card gleaned from Mennonite records, had died by 1812. Indeed, one Henry Miller, dying intestate in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, became subject of a court appointment of administrators late in that same year.

While this Henry might well have been father of Jonathan Miller, he certainly couldn't have filled those same shoes for Lydia. It's back to the drawing board for another hypothesis on just who Lydia's father might have been.

Six Miller Descendants

 

Six DNA tests reveal a distant cousin with a connection to a Miller ancestor from Perry County, Ohio. Each of those Miller connections shares a slight match with my husband's DNA test at Ancestry.com. But rather than leading back to Lydia Miller, my husband's direct line ancestor, each one of these matches points in a different direction: to someone named Jonathan Miller.

This Jonathan Miller, said to have been born in 1802 in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, spent most of his adult life in a different Somerset: in Perry County, Ohio. There, in 1824, he married Catharine Dupler, and began raising his family.

It was not lost on me last year as I explored possible family members related to Lydia Miller that Jonathan Miller was a close neighbor to Lydia and her first husband, William Gordon. Now, discovering that six direct line descendants of Jonathan Miller are DNA matches to my husband, a descendant of Lydia Miller, seems to confirm my hunch that those two ancestors must have been closely related. I just can't tell yet how close that relationship was.

Five of those six DNA matches claim Jonathan Miller as their fourth great-grandfather. The additional match is one generation closer, showing Jonathan as a third great-grandfather. None of the matches shares more than twelve centiMorgans of genetic material with my husband—a tiny one-segment match, indeed. 

The six matches descend from three of Jonathan's daughters. Two descend from eldest daughter Belinda Miller, two from Barbara Miller, and two from Catherine Miller.

There are three more DNA matches connected to Jonathan Miller for which I am still building out their line of descent. I suspect there will be more yet to find, as I build out Jonathan Miller's tree over multiple generations.

The obvious next question is: how is our Lydia related to Jonathan Miller? There is obviously some sort of family connection. Since Jonathan was said to have been born in 1802, and Lydia in 1820, my guess would be that the two were siblings. Despite the wide spread between those years of birth, it is not uncommon to see siblings in a large family with such a disparity in ages.

The next task, then, is to discover what can be found to confirm the identity of Jonathan's father.

Avoiding "Endogamy Lite"

 

If there is any difficulty in comparing DNA matches from my mother-in-law's family, it is that the folks claiming a heritage in Perry County, Ohio, can often be related to each other in several ways. Far more closely connected than one would expect from pedigree collapse, they are not exactly poster children for endogamy, either. That's why I like to call this scenario a case of "endogamy lite"—only about half the calories, er, connections you'd expect in any endogamous population. And in this month's research case, I need to avoid those "endogamy lite" relationships like the plague.

The beauty of these tiny DNA matches I've recently discovered is that they are isolated to only one surname matching my mother-in-law's inter-related family lines. That name is Miller. With many of our other Perry County DNA matches, a closer look almost always reveals connections to several shared surnames, making it difficult for me to answer my research question for this month concerning Lydia Miller's roots. Those multiple surnames have been intertwined into this family for generations—but not, thankfully, in the case of these newly-discovered Miller DNA matches.

This opportunity gives me a chance to view Miller connections, isolated from the other intermarried lines. So far, I've found six such matches, and I'm working on confirming three more. Unfortunately, since these are all matches found on Ancestry.com, I have no way to extract the raw data and paint the chromosomes, unless I encounter six very willing strangers who are game to allow me to deeply explore their test results—something I'm not even going to attempt.

According to one Miller collaborator I've been working with—someone, by the way, who is related to my husband through multiple family lines, thanks to "endogamy lite"—there are several more Miller DNA connections to be found on the other testing services. Another task for me to do will be to explore what this collaborator has found at those other sites.

I suspect, however, that my husband's test yields more Miller connections than does my collaborator's test. Using Ancestry.com's ProTools, I checked for shared matches between the six Miller tests I've identified and my collaborator's test. There are no matches in common. Granted, this collaborator could have inherited totally different strands of Lydia's DNA than my husband has, yet another reason to continue comparing notes.

Looking at the trees of these six Miller matches found so far is informative. We'll explore a bit more of those connections next week.

Discerning the Distance

 

There's already been a lot of exploration done on the question of Lydia Miller's parents. Just in this month, I've outlined the eight children of her second marriage to Benedict Palmer and sketched out each child's line of descent down to the current generation. Of those many descendants from that second marriage, I've yet to find any DNA matches linked to my husband's own test.

While I realize the connection would have been distant—Lydia would be my husband's third great-grandmother—it is not beyond reach. Actually, any two resultant fourth cousins could share up to 139 centiMorgans, but they could also share absolutely nothing. With the children of Lydia's second marriage being half-siblings to my mother-in-law's great-grandfather Adam Gordon, Lydia's firstborn son from her first marriage, any potential DNA matches would share even less than that amount.

There are, however, some other surprising DNA matches showing up in our results. Very small connections, hovering around ten centiMorgans, belong to people whose pedigree chart points straight back to a Miller ancestor.

While they do reach back to a Miller connection, it is unclear just how their ancestor—Jonathan Miller of Perry County, Ohio—was related to Lydia herself. One collaborator I'm working with has hypothesized that Jonathan was actually Lydia's father. Right now, I'm tending to lean towards a scenario where Lydia may have been Jonathan's much younger sister.

To test out those hypotheses may mean employing some specialized DNA tools. "What Are The Odds" (WATO) comes to mind here. Before I make that jump, though, I'll be working on a few more Miller DNA matches, as there are actually two different Miller lines showing up in my husband's matches. But the bottom line is that, for a DNA match as small as some of these connections, there may be no way to pinpoint a relationship. Just looking at, say, a ten centiMorgan match could mean seeing a third cousin or a fourth or fifth cousin—or beyond. There is no way to differentiate.

Still, to find any DNA match in our list leading back to Jonathan Miller is encouraging. In tandem, maybe they can both point us to the identity of Lydia's parents, and his, too.

Revisiting the Miller To-Do List

 

It's always a good idea to leave yourself notes about where a research task left off. Last year, I closed off my May research project—looking for the same Lydia Miller we're working on this month—with several undone items remaining on my to-do list. It's time to reopen that file and get back on track while there's still time this month to make some progress.

I had two separate files left with unfinished business. One came from a ProTools Network I had opened up on Miller neighbors mentioned in various research collections. The other came from DNA matches harvested from my husband's results which showed a connection to Millers who might possibly be related to Lydia.

The first to-do list, the names in the Miller network I had set up last year, contained three possible ancestors for Lydia. The first name, Jacob Miller, represented a possible ancestor according to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool. With no dates suggested for this Jacob Miller, I admit it was a relief to see that the ThruLines list eventually dropped that name from the list of my husband's possible ancestors.

The second and third names in that Miller network are still ones to follow this month. One was Michael Miller, a man who died in Perry County, Ohio—home of my mother-in-law's roots—in 1896. The other candidate was Jonathan Miller, born in 1802 in Somerset, Pennsylvania, and dying in Somerset, Ohio—in that same Perry County—in 1868.

I had already begun tracing each of those two men's lines of descent last year, and I'll continue the process behind the scenes this month. Don't think that's simply because I like the dull dry routine of building family trees for strangers; it appears there may be a second type of connection which will provide more guidance in this endeavor.

That other connection comes from DNA testing. As it turns out, the connection with one of those three people mentioned earlier—Jonathan Miller, Lydia and William Gordon's neighbor—may also be borne out by DNA matches. At this point, I'm hypothesizing that Jonathan Miller and Lydia Miller may have been siblings; a second possibility might have been cousins. Either way, though, that would make a very distant relationship between any two matches related now to that family—a connection so distant that some such cousins might not show up in DNA matches at all.

The fact that there are a few DNA matches showing this promising sign helps me narrow that search to specific Miller lines as I map out the family connections. Rather than complete a full complement of all lines of descent from Jonathan Miller's family, for instance, I'll be looking at the connections with specific DNA matches who already show up in my husband's results. Hopefully, that will streamline the process enough to allow us to come to a conclusion by the end of this month. It may be possible to figure out mystery ancestor Lydia Miller's roots, after all.