Number Six for the Record

 

Among the thirteen children of Lyman and Deidama Dunham Jackson, there are two yet to review. One is the couple's eldest daughter, Rosanna, who during this entire month has kept me stumped; we'll acknowledge what still needs to be done in her case with tomorrow's post. The other—number six out of the Jackson thirteen, for the record—was John Jay Jackson, my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather.

It would do us some good to note a few details here from the Horace Mortimer Jackson book we've been using as our trailblazer, The Family History of Michael Jackson. For the record, the Jackson book noted John Jay Jackson to have been born February 7, 1792. This was likely in Otsego County, New York, where many of the Jackson children were born.

From that point, many of the expected details on John Jay's own biographical sketch were lacking. Much like the book's entry for his youngest sister, Lucy, reading the entry became a matter of filling in the blanks for myself. I'll use today's post to fill in a few of those blanks for John Jay from records I've found in recent years.

The first opportunity to fill in the blanks in the Jackson book came with John Jay's own wife's name. The book offered "Miss —— Ames." Some zealous researcher, upon seeing the error, wrote in the correct name in the copy of the subsequently digitized book: Sarah Ijams. And that was exactly the identity of John Jackson's first wife.

As to whether the couple had six children, we need, first, to sort out some details. The book stipulates that there were three daughters, two of whom were named in the sketch: Comfort and Nancy. (The third daughter merited another one of those blank lines.)

While there was a daughter named Nancy—my mother-in-law's direct line ancestor—whether the second daughter was named Comfort, I have yet to verify. The other daughter has been recorded as Elizabeth C. Jackson, who died young and unmarried in 1842. Whether the "C." stands for Comfort, I haven't been able to document. However, since John Jackson's first wife, Sarah Ijams, had migrated to Perry County, Ohio, along with her sister, whose name happened to be Comfort, named after an older relative in the Ijams line, our Elizabeth could have carried her aunt's name as her own middle name. 

And the third daughter? My guess is Rosanna, by 1840 married to Walter Mitchell.

While we might be considered generous in allowing two out of three for the book's effort at naming the daughters of John Jay Jackson, it is not quite the same case with his sons. Robert and Joseph I can find, but William as a son of John Jackson eludes me.

However, as the book noted, John married twice, the second wife, filling in the blanks, being Mary Cecelia Grate. Children of this second wife did indeed include a son named Lyman, as the book affirmed. However, three more daughters joined the family with this second marriage: Mary Cecelia, named after her mother, Caroline, and the child the couple lost at four years of age, Clarissa.

To make sure I haven't missed anything, it would help to make a thorough search for signs of that possible extra son, William. After all, a son with that name would have been his maternal grandfather's namesake. And with the book's details mentioning possible service during the Civil War, it is quite likely that such a son could have been lost in casualties.

To recap, as I've said so many times before, genealogy books can be helpful as way finders, especially now that we have the capability of checking each other's work through documentation. It's been helpful to spend this month verifying facts from the Jackson genealogy as I build out the extended tree of John Jay Jackson's twelve collateral lines. Hopefully, recording all these branches in my online tree will lead to connecting with some DNA matches, as well.

Tomorrow with the close of this month, we'll recap progress made and draw up plans for the next time we revisit this Jackson line, before we jump to next month's feature from the Twelve Most Wanted for 2026.

Drawing Blanks

 

Following the path of a genealogical trailblazer can be helpful—until that guide ends up drawing blanks. In the case of the youngest child in Lyman and Deidama Dunham Jackson's family, that is indeed what happened when we look to their youngest child. 

Using the 1906 book, The Family History of Michael Jackson, we have so far traced most of the thirteen Jackson children. In many cases, the guidance of researcher Horace Mortimer Jackson has pointed us in the right direction. Perhaps in this final case, as so often happens, the baby of the family got shorted. 

Here's what the book tells us about the thirteenth Jackson child. First of all, her name was Lucy Deidama, garnering her mother's given name as her middle name. The author gives her date of birth as February 6, 1808, and indicates that she eventually married someone named Elisha Alderman.

That is the point in the brief narrative where we start drawing blanks. Of her death, the author provides merely a line "——" for the date. No place is given, not for her death, nor for her birth.

There were, however, several children listed. Of the eight named, however, even there we find a blank: the fifth child, a daughter named Calista, was said to have married "——" Clapp. With a given name like Calista, I thought it might not be that hard to determine the first name of Mr. Clapp—until I realized that husband's last name might not even be correct.

If it hadn't been for that old familiar destination for so many of the Jackson children who decided to leave home in Pennsylvania and move westward, I might not have found any further details to round out that scant history in the Jackson genealogy. But it wasn't long before I realized Lucy's family had left Pennsylvania's Erie County for Knox County in Illinois. Elisha Alderman had decided to follow so many of his Jackson in-laws.

While the 1850 census showed only six of the possible eight Alderman children in Knox County, that was enough of a jumping off place for me to trace the family's lines of descent. I started with the name I thought would be easiest to follow: their son who was listed in the Jackson book with the unusual name of Gilderoy. From that point, I've made it down to the current century with some of that son's descendants.

Granted, that makes one line of at least eight in this uncertain readout of the children of Lyman Jackson's youngest daughter. There is much more to still untangle, especially given the blanks left in that trailblazer's guidebook. But no matter how many blanks the author inserted in his narrative, there are still enough clues to enable a twenty-first century researcher with digitized records access to piece together the full story.

A Long Slide Down to the Present

 

This month began by listing what I had already learned about my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, Lyman Jackson, in preparation to delve further into that man's family line and history as this month's selection from my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026. Starting from Lyman's birth in Connecticut in 1756, we followed him to his marriage in Vermont and the new family's migration westward, first to upstate New York, and then to Erie County, Pennsylvania.

It's been a lot of years since that time—not to mention a lot of miles—but this past weekend, I finally diagrammed one line of Lyman's descendants all the way to the current decade. Starting with Susannah Jackson Kennedy's move to Knox County, Illinois, and subsequent family lines moving to Kansas, then Nevada, and ultimately to Santa Rosa, California—site of that devastating 1906 earthquake mentioned in one family history book—I've finally finished that long slide down to the present, sticking close to each of those lines of descent.

Imagine my surprise, then, to arrive in our current century and discover that one Jackson descendant married and moved to an address in California which is an easy amble down the street and around the corner from where I currently live. That makes our neighbor my husband's fifth cousin once removed.

Granted, we have yet to meet these newfound Jackson cousins. I'm just in awe over being able to discover such a connection, not simply from a family with origins as far away as Connecticut, but as far removed as an ancestor who lived in the mid-1700s.

Before this month is over, there is still one more task to complete. Lyman and Deidama Dunham Jackson had yet another child whom we need to track. Tomorrow, we'll consider the baby of the Jackson thirteen, Lucy, the eventual wife of Elisha Alderman. With eight children mentioned in the genealogy drawn up by researcher Horace Mortimer Jackson, there's still a lot of missing verification left for us to find.

A Biweekly Reflection

 

It's been two weeks now since I've begun adding descendants to my mother-in-law's family tree from the line of her fourth great-grandfather Lyman Jackson. While some lines have easily multiplied over the generations, there have been others which present more challenges in confirming their place in the lineage. Still, it was a nice surprise to see just how the many Jackson descendants have rounded out her family tree.

Over just these past two weeks, I've found 419 new Jackson descendants to add to that tree. That means my in-laws' tree now includes 42,625 direct line ancestors and the descendants of their collateral lines. All of these newly-added individuals are supported with documentation.

Granted, I have a long way to go before I complete the lines of descent for each of the Jacksons' thirteen children, but this is a significant start. While the numbers look impressive, though, I had hoped it would budge the needle on the count of DNA matches for Lyman and Deidama's Jackson descendants at Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool. Not yet, apparently. The count is still stuck at 71 DNA matches.

Collaborating with DNA matches on my own side of the family tree—a constant conversation in its own right—I managed to find an additional eighteen descendants to enter on that side of the family. That grows my tree to 41,926—even though I don't plan on researching that side of the family for another five months. Despite my "Twelve Most Wanted" research plan, the truth of the matter is that once we collaborate with cousins, the questions and conversations are ongoing—and so are the results!

Weaving Those Family Lines

 

I'm still at it, trying to trace the descendants of the one daughter of Lyman Jackson I've been researching for almost a week now. Susannah, next to youngest child of Lyman and Deidama Dunham Jackson, had married Henry Kennedy and moved west from her parents' home in Pennsylvania to a county in Illinois where some of her relatives had previously settled. Her children, in turn, had followed the same pattern, moving in stages across the American west.

With no way to assure myself that discovery of someone with her children's names were not merely name twins—after all, some of them showed up in records hundreds of miles from their Illinois home—I started looking around in those records for familiar names. If one Kennedy descendant surfaced in, say, Kansas, could I find any others from the family in that same new town? This was time to weave together all those extended family lines, tracing not only Susannah's children, but their children as well, to see how the families clustered.

The answer to my question, in the cases I've already researched, has been in the positive. At first, I was surprised, but upon further examination, I realized that line upon line, what might hold true for researching one individual family might hold true for cousins—or, complicating the equation, even half-siblings from second marriages of widowed parents.

In all, I've got seven Kennedy siblings to trace on their multi-decades move westward. I'm not finished yet, but the pattern, which seems to be holding firm, has become a guide for me in following a large family whose many stopping places along their westward migration seem designed to shake everyone off their trail. I'm hanging on to that cluster concept on every twist and turn—and hoping the process will also yield distant Jackson cousins who might just become DNA matches for added confirmation. 

Shaking it Up

 

Some family stories are just that—simply stories. Checking for details, the documents may lacking. When I saw the published report about one descendant of Lyman Jackson—his grandson Byron Kennedy—supposedly losing his own son to an earthquake in California, I had to check it out. That research question, however, led me down a bumpy path, prompted undoubtedly from the aftermath of the American Civil War, leading to a series of moves westward through the continent, partially unpredictable, had there not been siblings whose similar moves could be used for comparison.

Despite that, it is likely that I haven't been shaken loose in this genealogical chase. For one thing, an entry in any hundred-year-old genealogy book claiming "whereabouts unknown" can now easily be corrected through the many digitized resources now available to us. In Byron Kennedy's case, as it turns out, it may well be likely that he, himself, moved to California. In fact, the 1900 U.S. Census shows someone by that name living in Santa Rosa, California whose birth in Pennsylvania lines up nicely with our Byron's story.

That very location—Santa Rosa, California—was the one identified in the Jackson book as the place where Byron Kennedy's namesake son had supposedly died in an earthquake in 1906. That detail, too, could easily be verified. Though the most widely reported earthquake of that year was the one in San Francisco, Santa Rosa also suffered, being situated on the same fault line.

The impact, though focused on a series of city blocks downtown, was devastating. The destruction of historic buildings, followed by fires fueled by ruptured gas lines, did cause a significant number of deaths in what was then a city far smaller than San Francisco. Photographs of the aftermath, preserved in the digital archives of the Sonoma County Public Library, give a far more visceral effect than the sanitized State Earthquake Investigation Commission maps of the wiped-out downtown area, now preserved through the David Rumsey Map Collection.

Could Byron Kennedy have lost a son in the aftermath of the Santa Rosa earthquake? That someone could have lost his life in the collapsed buildings or ensuing fires is without question. Whether Byron Kennedy's own son was trapped in such circumstances is harder to determine.

However, just based on what can be found in the 1900 census, the only child remaining at the Kennedy home was their daughter Belle. Furthermore, following Byron's own death in 1912, the reading of his will listed three remaining children—all daughters. Granted, Byron did have a son who predeceased him in 1903, but he named that child Charles, not Byron.

Admittedly, tracing this branch of the Kennedy descendants of Susannah Samantha Jackson has led me on a convoluted trail. Piecing together the full story, in this case, requires tracking all branches of the Kennedy line at the same time—several independent family lines shaken up, only making sense in concert with each other. Just as the genealogical "FAN Club" concept teaches us to be aware of clusters in families, these Kennedy descendants demonstrate how tracing everyone at the same time helps identify the missing story lines in subsequent generations.  

Checking, Just in Case

 

When following the trail of genealogical crumbs left in books published years ago, I'm not above considering such leads, but I still make sure to check out the details, just in case. Yesterday, when we reviewed published accounts of Lyman Jackson's twelfth child, Susannah Samantha, there were some details that simply cried out for verification—and updates.

Among those details in the 1909 Horace Mortimer Jackson publication, The Family History of Michael Jackson, was information on the man Susannah married after her first husband, Henry Kennedy, had died. The book noted that Susannah then married someone named William Robinson. Checking to confirm that detail via documentation, it turns out that name was a close approximation, but not entirely correct. Susannah's second husband was actually recorded as John Robson.

While it is unlikely that Susannah, at age fifty one, would have had any further children in this second marriage, the lesson is well-taken: no matter the assertion, double-check with documentation.

There were other details about Susannah's history in the Jackson genealogy book that I want to double-check. For instance, the book stated, concerning Susannah's son Byron, that though he was married, his wife's name was unknown and that "their whereabouts are unknown." Furthermore, according to this account, they had a son named after his father, who was supposedly "killed in the earthquake at Santa Rosa, California, in 1906." 

Conveniently, I'm situated not far from Santa Rosa and, having personally known people who lived through a more recent earthquake in that same city, I'm aware that such a report could be quite possible, despite a much better known earthquake in another city nearby grabbing the majority of headlines in 1906. These are details which we can now verify digitally in many cases—a research step I intend to take, if for nothing other than to confirm or amend this published story.

Following the lines of the children can help confirm the entire family's story, not only in Susannah's case, but also regarding the instance of her sister Lucy, the youngest of all the thirteen Jackson children of Lyman and Deidama. Especially in Lucy's case, as we'll see tomorrow, I'll need some guidance from actual documentation, wherever it can be found.