Circling Back Again

 

The saying that everyone in Perry County is related to each other may be a concept that has roots which reach generationally deep. Or maybe that is a description which keeps circling back again. In seeking family connections for Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother, I'm starting to see the same surnames pop up, generation after generation.

When we considered the original owner of the land which Jonathan Miller willed to his two sons in 1866—a man by the name of Adam Onsbaugh—that chase led us to another similar name: Adam Anspach. In the same census record where we first found Jonathan Miller's entry on the same page as Lidia's husband William Gordon—the 1840 census—we not only found mention of someone named Adam Anspach, but David, Christian, and Benjamin, as well.

That wasn't the only place where the surname Anspach popped up. I had seen it in Jonathan Miller's own will. Only problem was, this time the mentions had to do with Jonathan's daughters.

The 1866 Miller will had granted Jonathan's two sons fairly equal portions of his land, but to his five daughters, he had stipulated that his sons pay them (or their heirs) $650 each. Fortunately for us, Jonathan mentioned each daughter by name: Mary Elizabeth Crist, Belvida Anspach (for whom her portion was to pass to her children), Barbara Anspach, and Catherine and Isabella Miller.

Adding these two daughters to the Miller family tree who had married men surnamed Anspach had me looking forward to the next generation, but it didn't take long for me to circle back again to the generation preceding Jonathan's own time. Jonathan's daughter Barbara had married someone named Leander Anspach in Perry County on November 28, 1852. And Jonathan's deceased daughter—whose name apparently turned out to be Belinda, according to her 1864 headstone—once again had her name mauled in her 1847 marriage record, which stated that Malinda Miller had married Adam Anspach.

What's interesting about that Adam Anspach—in addition to ringing the bell for us with that same name we had seen one generation earlier—is that he was son of a man named John Adam Anspach, whose namesake father, Johann Adam Anspach, was of an age to have been the 1806 purchaser of the property we have been chasing.

These details have indeed kept me running in circles. Granted, this is merely a simple sketch of possible relationships, and details need to be inspected more closely. But no different than the many intermarriages I've witnessed from my mother-in-law's parents' generation in Perry County, the tradition seems to have been far more deeply rooted than just during that time period.

That brings up another question. If Jonathan Miller was related to the original Adam "Onsbaugh" Anspach, what was the exact connection? And more pertinent to my search for Lidia Miller's roots, does she even connect with Jonathan Miller's family at all? After all, we can't lose sight of the original research goal that led me down this circling trail.

Think Phonetically

 

The search for Adam Onsbaugh was on. I had found him in the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records as the 1806 owner of a parcel of land which bore the same township, range, and section number as the property which, years later, Jonathan Miller was bequeathing to his two sons. Could I find any other records on this man?

I probably wouldn't have launched such a search, if it hadn't been for the unknown roots of my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother. Also bearing the surname Miller, Lidia had become the wife of William H. Gordon; after the couple's untimely deaths in Perry County, Ohio, their orphaned son Adam was raised by his paternal grandmother, herself a widow by that point. To connect Lidia to her past meant exploring any possible connections through the friends, associates, or neighbors surrounding the unfortunate young family. Searching Miller neighbors was one approach to this cluster research method.

Land owner Adam Onsbaugh, I reasoned, must be somehow connected to that Miller F.A.N. Club, and I needed to at least examine who he might have been. Could the Millers and Gordons have migrated en masse from Pennsylvania with Adam Onsbaugh? Did they know him in the past, and thus get inspired to follow his migration trail west to Ohio? I had to at least find him in the census records in Perry County to learn a bit more about this pioneer settler.

Searching for Adam in the 1810 census—the first enumeration after he acquired his land in Ohio—presented a problem. Perry County itself was not a county until 1818. The county was formed from portions of Fairfield, Washington, and Muskingum counties. Thus when the Land Office Records identified the location of the Onsbaugh property as Perry County, they were apparently identifying that land by current jurisdiction, not the county in existence in 1806. So I wouldn't have been surprised if no  Adam Onsbaugh showed up in the 1810 census in Perry County—but there was no one by that name listed in the entire state of Ohio.

No matter; let's fast forward to the 1820 census. There, I did find an Adam Onsbaugh in nearby Hocking County, but no one with that spelling in Perry County. However, there were two other listings: one for Adam Onspough, and another one for someone named John Onspough, both in Reading Township where our Jonathan Miller eventually lived.

I moved further on to the 1830 census, where I found several others with similar spelling variations. All in the same Reading Township, I found someone named John Anspaugh heading up one page of the census, and several others listed two pages earlier. All with that same surname spelling, they were David, Christian, Adam, and Benjamin.

Could Onsbaugh be the same as Anspaugh? I barely had time to consider that, when the 1840 census brought me more discoveries. There was a Benjamin and an Adam Anspach listed, again in Reading Township—in fact, on the same page which launched us on this journey when I discovered William Gordon's listing on the same page as "Johnathan" Miller. 

If you think about this morphing surname situation phonetically, it seems quite possible. We started with Onsbaugh. Realizing that several languages pronounce the letter "a" more like an "ahh," it could be possible that an "Onsbaugh" could also have been spelled "Ansbaugh." Then, too, the guttural ending, "gh" could seem similar to some ears as the German rendition of the ending "ch" and thus be substituted in spelling. Thus, we could move from Onsbaugh to Ansbaugh to Anspauch—and possible even to Anspach, as we saw in the 1840 census, all by thinking phonetically.

I couldn't help but notice the Find A Grave memorial for one Johann Adam Anspach, buried in Somerset—the town in Perry County surrounded by Reading Township—in 1838. The sponsored memorial includes a listing of his many possible children, including married names for the daughters. Though this list would represent descendants from a generation removed from our Jonathan Miller, I couldn't help but notice some similarities from names listed in a previous page of another document I had already been reviewing: Jonathan Miller's own will.  

Searching for Seventeens

 

I admit: searching for Millers in Ohio can be a challenge. Even searching for Millers during the earliest years of Ohio statehood can overload a researcher with too many search options—more specifically, with false leads. Yet, here I am, armed with the description of the land in Perry County which Jonathan Miller willed to his two sons at the end of 1866, trying to find a record of how, years before, he himself had received the land.

My thinking was rather straightforward. If Jonathan Miller did happen to be a sibling of the brick wall ancestor I've been seeking—Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother—then discovering how he obtained his property might reveal his relatives. And possibly hers.

Jonathan Miller's will identified what appears to have been two parcels, one on the northwest quarter of section twelve, the other on the southwest quarter of section one. Both were identified as being in township seventeen and range seventeen.

My first thought was to check the records at the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records. Just in case it wasn't a laughable idea, my first search there was for any land in Perry County obtained by someone named Miller. There were plenty of options—two pages of listings, in fact, none of which belonged to someone named Jonathan Miller. 

Remembering Jonathan Miller's mention of one parcel of land having once been where "Shelly Dupler had resided," I wondered whether that was the former owner of the Miller land, and searched for the Dupler surname. After all, Jonathan's wife was born a Dupler. Though Dupler was a surname far less common than the overwhelming Miller surname, that search for land records brought up absolutely zero results.

I noticed that the Land Office search results had some columns which, by clicking on the heading, could be sorted in number order. Township and Range were both sortable. I clicked, looking for seventeens. Nothing came up, except for one parcel registered to a man named John Miller in 1809. Though it might have been possible that our Jonathan Miller could have identified himself as "Jon" Miller for short—and thus be mistakenly transcribed as John—I already knew from his entry in the 1840 census that he would have still been a child in 1809.

Rather than manipulate the spread sheet aspect of the file, I tried something else. The Land Office records could also be searched specifically by location. Keeping the main "location" state entry as "Ohio," I scrolled down on the "search documents" landing page to the section labeled "Land Description," and entered my information there. For township, I entered seventeen; likewise for range. For section, I entered twelve. And clicked on "Search Patents." That was it.

Only one result came up for my search: not a property owned by anyone named Miller, but a parcel obtained in November of 1806 by a man named Adam Onsbaugh.

My next question was: could it be worth my while to search for this new surname? Would it lead me to any helpful information about Jonathan Miller—or, more importantly, to my brick wall ancestor Lidia Miller? While it seemed strangely similar to one of those wild rabbit trail diversions, it was worth a try to check it out.

One Hundred Years Ago

 

Much as some people might celebrate a friend's birthday—say, their fortieth, or some other mere decade's amount of life—by buying a reprint of the front page of that exact day's newspaper, I thought I'd do the same today for my mother. Today would have been her birthday, one hundred years ago, and I was curious to see what the world might have held for her family that day.

Since my mother was born in a tiny farm town called Oelwein, Iowa, I couldn't pull up any copies of the local paper from archival collections. Perhaps there wasn't any local newspaper. After all, at the time, Oelwein boasted not quite eight thousand residents, although ever since the arrival of the railroads there at the turn of the century, it had seen a growth spurt. To read the news of the day, I had to rely on the publication at Cedar Rapids, an hour's commute to the south.

There, The Evening Gazette focused mainly on leftover news from a recuperating Europe after the Great War had subsided. Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, inaugurated that day as President of the German Republic, made three separate appearances on the Gazette's front page, as did French General Charles Mangin, who died that very day. Lawsuits and murder trials rounded out the day's news, as well as an announcement of big plans to bring a replica of Cheyenne, Wyoming's Frontier Days to town. To round out the day's news, an ominous mention of a bank failure in nearby Mason City, juxtaposed with reports of the state's banking situation being "in fine condition," pointed to history yet to be made.

My grandparents' brief stay in Oelwein—a railroad center grown out of a corn field bought from the town's namesake farmer—was an odd juxtaposition of my grandfather's current employment and my grandmother's oddly out-of-place roots as a southern lady whose impetuous marriage to a tall, dark, and handsome eligible bachelor brought her where she never expected to be. The stories of those farm-based days when my mother was born I know well. After all, it was my mother who passed on the family stories from her own relatives; why not share stories of her own parents' lives? But the stories providing the context of her young life and what blend of news mixed to create her own social environment I hadn't before explored.

Sometimes, in addition to gaining the right details about birth dates and places and the names to which they belong, it is helpful to spend a moment surrounded in the news of the day. To see what has yet to come down the road for an ancestor—those newsworthy items which to us are "old news"—can open up new vistas to us and help gain an appreciation for what shaped those family members from past eras.

Above: Headlines from the front page of the May 12, 1925, Cedar Rapids newspaper, The Evening Gazette; image courtesy of newspapers.com. 

Mother's Day Takes the Lead

 

If genealogy were a race, in my case I'd say the moms take the lead. I can't yet be sure, however, whether it's my mother's tree that's out ahead or my mother-in-law's tree.

Right now, I've been working on one brick wall ancestor in my mother-in-law's tree: her second great-grandmother Lidia Miller, wife of William B. Gordon of Perry County, Ohio. However, don't let that "brick wall" status give you any notions of stalled forward motion. I've been working every angle I can on this roadblock, trying to do an end run around Lidia. I'm hoping DNA will play a part in unraveling this mystery.

Of course, with an advanced Mother's Day gift to myself—Ancestry.com's ProTools addition to my subscription—I've had some additional tools to play with, and I've been running comparisons on every DNA match I can find. Using the ProTools Shared Matches option, I've been flagging each close relative of those ThruLines matches and then adding them to my mother-in-law's tree, as well.

End result? I'm still on a tear with that Gordon and Miller line. In the past two weeks, I've added 500 more individuals to my in-laws' tree, which now has 38,871 researched people. Many of them are ancestors leading to newly-discovered DNA matches. Others are collateral lines filled with people just waiting to fulfill their role as connectors for more DNA matches to come.

That's not the only progress made in these past two weeks. While I was showing a fellow genealogy society member what I've been finding with ProTools, I tested out the Shared Matches option on my own tree. And voila! A recent DNA connection resulted in adding thirty four new individuals to my own mother's line, so I now have 40,257 people in my own tree.

It's a race. But I concede; my mother-in-law's tree grows far faster, thanks to those large Catholic families who settled in rural Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota. Though the count of DNA tests potentially linked to that tree are much less than mine—my DNA match count is a bit over twice the size of my in-laws' results—the sheer number of family members over the generations makes my in-laws' tree a robust one, indeed.

We have three more weeks before we move on to the last of my mother-in-law's Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, and then we'll shift to my father-in-law's side of their family tree. It will be interesting to see how much that tree grows between now and then. For the past two biweekly reports, the tree has been growing at a clip of about five hundred individuals for each report sequence. Three more reports at that rate would add another 1,500 names to that tree—at which point, the in-laws' tree will indeed take the lead.

Speed, however, is not the point of this exercise. While it may take learning the personal history of every Miller who lived in Perry County before 1850, the result will hopefully be that the end of the month brings us an answer to the question, Who were the parents of Lidia Miller Gordon? That's one young mother about whom I'd like to learn so much more.

A Point of Digression

 

Would you even realize it if you had crossed paths with a fourth cousin? How about a third cousin? Some people aren't even aware of who their second cousins are—but now that some of us are using DNA testing to round out our family tree, we are growing an awareness of these distant relatives.

This weekend, I'm taking a break from the search for Lidia Miller's parents, that seemingly orphaned second great-grandmother to my mother-in-law. Instead, I've jumped to her husband's line, whose parents I do know about, in hopes of discovering even the tiniest hints about their extended family. After all, this being a community of early settlers in Perry County, Ohio—a place known for its many intermarried lines over the generations—there could be another connection to that mysterious Miller family coming at me from a different angle.

My approach right now has been to work off the suggestions at Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, and trace each descendant listed from the selected ancestor. Working with the line of William B. Gordon, Lidia's father-in-law, I zeroed in on his children from his second wife only, since that is the line from which Lidia's husband was born.

While that may sound particularly restrictive to you, keep in mind that William B. Gordon had eight children, including Lidia's husband William H. Gordon—and that was just the family from his second marriage (he had eleven more with his first wife).

And so the work begins. From each child, beginning with the oldest, I add that child's marriage and descendants to my mother-in-law's family tree. Then I move on to the second-born of William B. Gordon's children, adding each descendant in that line. Eventually, I've laid out a basic working descendancy chart for William B's progeny, from which I can then plug in DNA matches in their proper place in the extended family tree.

Yesterday, I was working on William's daughter Susan, who married David Hewitt in 1846. While the Hewitts had seven children (at least that I can find), when it comes to current-day DNA matches, there were none showing on the ThruLines chart. Curious, I worked my way through the descendants for this couple—and that is where I spotted one of those rabbit-trail-worthy points of digression.

Susan Gordon Hewitt had a granddaughter, Grace Doyle, who was a second cousin to my mother-in-law's own grandmother. This Grace married a man considerably older than she was at the time. For that fifty three year old man, it was his second marriage.

Like so many people from rural Perry County, Grace's parents had chosen to move to a big city. First to Cleveland, where Grace was born, the young family eventually moved to the state capital, Columbus, a city not more than an hour's travel from Perry County. Likewise, Grace's future husband eventually moved from his native West Virginia to Columbus, and there they married.

Looking closely over the details in that 1931 marriage license, an unusual entry jumped out at me: Grace's intended—a man by the name of Harry Westerman—listed his occupation as cartoonist. I thought finding that occupation listed was rather unusual—and that's where the rabbit trail beguiled me.

With a quick check at Google, I found very little on the man, but the search did lead me to some illustrations at Wikimedia Commons. For one, there was a line drawing labeled as Harry J. Westerman, attributed to an entry in a 1904 book, The Art of Caricature.

Quick! To Internet Archive to see whether anyone had uploaded the now-public domain book. Yes! There it was, with the same image visible on page 173. Whether that was a drawing by Mr. Westerman or one portraying his likeness, I couldn't tell from the information, but the trail was getting warmer.

Looking for the man's biography—after all, there must have been some reason why he was mentioned in a book, right?—I found very little at first. But each step opened up a glimpse of a possible second step. Moving along the research path can help, even one step at a time.

Since the 1904 Grant Wright book had attributed Mr. Westerman's work to a publication called the Ohio State Journal, I tried searching through the usual newspaper collections we use for genealogy work. With no luck at two different subscription sites, I turned to the Internet search engines again, and found the Journal uploaded to the website "Ohio Memory," a collaboration of the Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio.

There, searching the newspaper collection for the name "Harry Westerman" plus the publication title, I found one example of the man's work as a cartoonist from January 30, 1909. Digital collections at the Columbus Metropolitan Library informed me that H. J. Westerman began his career with the Ohio State Journal in 1897.

Working in a state in which there was "so much political activity and strife," as Wright's 1904 Art of Caricature book observed, perhaps it is no surprise to discover that Westerman the cartoonist targeted political topics. Of course, from my vantage point of having just stumbled across this rabbit trail, I had no idea of the political interests of Ohioans at the launch of the twentieth century, but when I read the report of Harry Westerman's sudden demise—he died of a heart attack en route with his family to New York City—and saw his death covered in newspapers from the nation's capital to rural Iowa, that research excursion led me to find at least one of his books.

Called simply, A Book of Cartoons, the 124-page collection of Westerman's work, now in the public domain, is easily viewed at Hathi Trust.

After exploring this man's life story—not to mention his tangential connection to my mother-in-law's family—I had to take a look. Not that I have any knowledge of the back story for the political commentary flowing from his pen via newspapers of the time, I still was curious to get more of a sense of who this person was, and to imagine what his family must have gone through on that train trip to New York which, unbeknownst to them, was Harry Westerman's final journey.

I think so many times about that "sound advice" to develop research questions and stick with research plans—but then I realize how much I'd miss if I heeded that advice. There will always be tomorrow to look further into Lidia Miller's kin, but when a story unexpectedly presents itself with more questions than answers, I simply can't resist turning aside to chase that target.

Last Wishes — With Precise Details

 

When Jonathan Miller drew up his will in Perry County, Ohio, on December 7 of 1866, he provided a small gift to future generations of curious genealogists by the insertion of one particular stipulation. He wanted not only to leave a specific piece of property to two of his sons, but to personally ensure that the boundaries of each split portion be designated precisely as he wished.

To that end, Jonathan not only provided the verbal description of each surveyed lot, but sketched in the lines of the perimeter for each parcel: the north section to his son Andrew, and most of the southern portion to his son John, with the exception of a small section alongside John's portion also designated for Andrew.

The gift to us—particularly for our purposes in finding the roots of this Jonathan Miller, and hopefully his connection to my mother-in-law's ancestor, Lidia Miller Gordon—is the description of the property. Not so much the landmarks—the surveyor's notes running from a maple tree to a hickory tree, then to a beech tree, then ash, and finally elm—but the legal description is what I'm seeking. 

Just from the fine print in this document, I can see mention of possible family connections. Before I had even found the marriage record for Jonathan and Catherine—she was formerly a Dupler—I had spotted one mention in Jonathan's will. Noting Jonathan Miller's mention of a particular acre of land "on the north side of the Columbus road" which once had been "the same lot on which Shelly Dupler had resided," I had wondered even then if this was a sign pointing to a relative.

With the land described as being part of the northwest quarter of section twelve, and also part of the southwest quarter of section one in township seventeen and range seventeen, I now have some details that might help trace the ownership of this parcel back through the years. If I'm fortunate, this could reveal the name of the owner from whom Jonathan originally obtained the land. Better yet, it might reveal another relative from a previous generation—maybe even help us discover the identity of Jonathan's father.

Diagram above from 1868 will of Jonathan Miller of Perry County, Ohio, illustrating property subdivision; image courtesy FamilySearch.org; in the public domain.