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.

Taking a Different Perspective

Staring down a longstanding research roadblock, somehow hoping this time it will reveal the answers it kept secret last time, surely doesn't work. Sometimes, the problem requires looking at it from a different perspective. Granted, I'm still stuck on Lydia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother, despite looking at her from both the perspective of her second marriage and the early years of her first marriage.

There is, however, a different approach yet to take. That attempt at problem solving I had begun last May, when mulling over the neighborly connection between another Miller family and the young family of Lydia and her first husband William Gordon.

Knowing that the Gordons had a neighbor named Jonathan Miller, last year I had used the Ancestry.com ProTools to form a "network" to examine what could be found about Jonathan Miller and his family. That was when I ran into the additional surnames I mentioned yesterday, of the Dupler marriages and the Anspach line.

Today was the time to review those notes—not only that, but to pull up what I had entered in the floating branch in my tree to add those mystery Millers as a potential connection to Lydia's own roots. From that point, I examined DNA matches among my husband's results who had any connection to the lines including those additional surnames, Dupler and Anspach.

While I am a long way from confirming any possible Miller matches, I am mapping out those several DNA matches' lines of descent from their founding Miller ancestors. Granted, each of those matches shares a tiny percentage of DNA with my husband—wobbling on unreliable, in the estimation of some experts—but I'm tracing them, just in case something does reveal itself in the examination. We'll take a closer look at the proposed connections tomorrow. 

Finding Family History's Pivot Points

 

Following a family's history seems to radiate the aura of tracking a straight line. Pedigree charts do seem to confirm that idea of a straight line: from self to parent to grandparent to greats and beyond, we're taken step by step back through history. The simplicity of that concept can be deceiving.

In Lydia Miller's case—that second great-grandmother of my mother-in-law—the relationship seemed almost close enough to reach out and touch. She seemed to have been born about 1820 in Perry County, Ohio, where she married William Gordon and gave him two sons. But an unexpected swerve in the family history road set her on a path that I—and several others descended from this woman—totally missed finding. Unbeknownst to us, we had stumbled upon a pivot point in her family history.

That was where I had lost her—until I reviewed her case this very month a year ago.

Though I had started work on "Lidia Miller" at the beginning of May last year, laying out all the details I had found on her life in Perry County, it wasn't until the twenty seventh day of that month that I asked the question, "What if that was all wrong?"

Sure enough, Lydia's marriage to Benedict Palmer had surfaced, and pointed me in a new direction. That, however, may not be the only pivot point we'll need to navigate as we complete the story of Lydia's life. Turning to the other side of her story, we may be in for surprises there, too.

I had already mapped out a few possibilities. Using the friends and neighbors concept, I had examined the likelihood of relationships with nearby Miller families, such as the Gordons' neighbor Johnathan Miller. From there, I discovered that Miller family's connection with another Perry County family, the Duplers. Then, following Johnathan Miller's will, and then the land records associated with his property, I ran across another linked surname, which originally appeared as Onsbaugh, but later morphed to Anspach.

Though I had—literally—mapped out the Miller property and examined names of neighbors back in Perry County, nothing definitive had popped up. It was at that end of the month when I hit the research pivot point: I discovered the information that Lydia had been married a second time. Adding that information to the family tree, complete with documentation, took up the last few remaining days of that month. I did my best to add all the descendants of this new Palmer family, then to trace all their descendants down to the current time. I'm now in the process of reaching out to these descendants to compare notes and collaborate on discovering Lydia's roots.

Now, a year later, I've finally completed that documentation process for the Palmer line of descent, but I can't say I've made any further discoveries. Still, it is important to keep track of the work already done, and to build on those discoveries. This calls for a revisit to the FamilySearch Full Text Search tool to see if anything further can be uncovered from documents on hand at that website.