Dodon and Bridge Hill

 

Yesterday, I had wondered whether it might be possible to simply search the names of tracts of land mentioned in family wills, following the family by following the land. My reasoning was this: if the land was known by a singularly distinguishing moniker, could it help point me to the ancestral origins of its owners?

The two tracts of land mentioned in the wills of my mother-in-law's Maryland ancestors did have identifying names. While the one granted by William Ijams to his son John had the seemingly common name of Bridge Hill, it was often coupled with the mention of another, more remarkable name: Dodon.

Sometimes written in documents as "Doden," that particular tract of land had passed from the Stockett family to the Plummer family and then eventually to the line of the senior William Ijams. While I am still working on pushing the timeline back before the Stocketts claimed the land, in the meantime, I have discovered that the property has, moving forward, had a long history of multiple owners.

Just entering the name of the land—Dodon—in a search engine, either on its own or coupled with the name of the paired property, Bridge Hill, has been informative. While my original attempt to find results through FamilySearch's Full Text Search for those property names in colonial Maryland's Anne Arundel County yielded no land or tax records—material which might better be found through Maryland State archives—taking that question straight to the Web turned out to be a more productive route.

Also, searching the line of inheritance of Dodon in Harry Wright Newman's Anne Arundel Gentry produced seven passages in the book. The land moved through branches of the extended family until two Ijams brothers sold the property in 1796, and, as Newman noted, "thus passed from the family the hereditary estates...which had been in the...family for five generations."

Dodon as a parcel did not entirely disappear with that sale, however. Nor did it simply cease to be part of a family's estate, no longer passed from generation to generation. It was interesting to discover its new identity, once it had been sold out of the Ijams family's possession. We'll take a brief detour tomorrow to explore what can be found, simply by searching online for the name of a family's estate. 

Letting the Land Lead us

 

In reviewing the legacies bequeathed by Thomas Plummer to his descendants, I began to spot property names which seemed familiar. Just to double-check, I returned to the will I had found for Thomas' son-in-law, William Ijams, husband of the baby of Thomas' family, Elizabeth Plummer, to review the details.

In William's 1734 will, for three particular sons he had named specific properties in Anne Arundel County, part of colonial Maryland. To his son William, he had bequeathed a one-hundred-acre parcel called "Cheney's Resolution." To his son John, he had designated one hundred acres which he had called "Bridge Hill." And to his son Plummer, he had mentioned sixty four acres of land adjoining Bridge Hill, "the said parcel of land called Doden."

Upon stepping back another generation to review William's father-in-law's will, I began to see familiar names given to some of the properties that Thomas Plummer gave to his own children. While "The Seamas Delight" might not have been a familiar name for that hundred acre parcel Thomas gave to his namesake son, nor the parcel "Scots Lot" which went to Thomas' daughter Mary, wife of William Jackson, when it came to the part of Thomas' will mentioning his daughter Elizabeth (and his wife, also named Elizabeth), I started recognizing some property names.

To his daughter Elizabeth, Thomas Plummer had granted all 164 acres of his current dwelling and property known as Bridge Hill. And until his wife's passing, that land was first meant for the elder Elizabeth.

After Thomas appointed his wife Elizabeth as his executrix, he explained that the land granted her was "part of Bridge Hill and Doden." Thus we see how those property names became repeated in the next generation's wills.

There it was: those same parcel names as we had seen in the Ijams will. Those parcels may have been passed along from previous relatives to Thomas Plummer, then to the Ijams family. I wondered if there might be a way to let the land lead us: to simply follow the history of the land itself to learn more about the families. 

Stepping Backwards to Move Forward

 

Sometimes, a step backwards can get us moving forward.

After working on my mother-in-law's Ijams and Plummer line for half a month, I thought I'd check on the most distant ThruLines report for that family line at Ancestry's DNA to see if there were any updates. There were—well, there were, if you count a diminishing number of results as progress. 

In the past, Ancestry's ThruLines had shown five or six children descending from William Ijams, grandson of Elizabeth Plummer Ijams, and fifth great-grandfather of my husband, who is the surrogate tester standing in for my mother-in-law. Today, however, there were only two descending lines, and each of them, thankfully, can be confirmed through documentation.

Since connections with fifth great-grandparents is as far back as ThruLines shows for autosomal DNA tests, William himself would have to stand in as proxy for his paternal grandparents' DNA composition—the best I could do under these testing conditions.

Today, however, those stray other lines—names listed in previous ThruLines results that I hadn't been able to confirm through documentation—have simply vanished. Poof! If the DNA test candidates represented by those ThruLines results were indeed distant cousins, they obviously must have been connected through a different genetic route. Perhaps, someone had presumed there was a connection and had made a mistaken entry in their own tree which, repeated as others copied that tree, got picked up by ThruLines.

Though it is theoretically possible to find DNA matches who share a most "recent" common ancestor at a level of seventh great-grandmother, as Elizabeth Plummer Ijams would have been to my husband, it is not likely to confirm such a match. On average, DNA matches who are eighth cousins, as such a descent from seventh great-grandmother would yield, would share 0.000763% of their genetic makeup, according to a chart drawn up by Hope Carnicle, reported by a post on the ISOGG.org wiki.

In other words, eighth cousins could share up to forty two centiMorgans. Or they could share none.

In most cases, we'd never see such DNA matches, because the odds are against us. In my mother-in-law's case, a second strike would come in the form of multiple intermarriages over those many generations spanning her family's heritage, so even if a segment match registered, we'd have to delve deeper to determine which ancestor actually contributed that match. It might not be the ancestor we were suspecting.

In the end, while this change in results at Ancestry's ThruLines report doesn't strictly lead us to matches who share Elizabeth Plummer's DNA, it does zero in on those matches who actually were descendants of Elizabeth's grandson William Ijams. A far more accurate report may do nothing more than bolster my confidence in the tool, but a gesture like that can go a long way, in my opinion.

"How Far Back?"

 

The other night, I became my husband's plus-one at an event hosted by an organization he advises. At such social gatherings filled with people I don't know, conversation invariably turns to, "what do you do?" When my answer is genealogy, now, thanks to multiple television series, the response has moved far beyond the inevitable question of past decades, "genealogy, what's that?" The question has now advanced to, "Oh? How far back have you gone?"

While I like to spread the word about family history, even that question used to make me wince. Genealogy for me has never been a race to the past. I don't like to get hyper-fixated on one ancestral line. Especially for those who solely trace their surname, my answer would have been beyond boring; that patriline for me has been an immovable brick wall up until only recently, thanks to DNA testing.

With this month's Twelve Most Wanted focus on Elizabeth Plummer, however, I'm actually approaching a fairly decent answer. No, I haven't traced my line to Charlemagne—though there are signs someone has in Elizabeth's case—and I certainly haven't been so bold as to presume connections to Adam (or even Eve). But I'd say approaching the 1600s in colonial Maryland is far more distant than my mother-in-law ever hoped I'd get with her research.

For that advance, I have many to appreciate. First is to be thankful for those who helped launch me on my research journey in those first formative years—everyone from the librarian who launched my eight-year-old self from the children's library across the hall to where the "grown-ups" went to get their books, to the many online friends in genealogy forums of the early nineties.

Mostly, I'm grateful for the pioneers of online family history resources. Just the other day, I met with our webmaster as our genealogy society prepares to launch an updated version of our website, and we found ourselves discussing broken links to bygone sites of online genealogy's formative years like RootsWeb. Before that, people during the earliest years of publicly-accessible online technology experimented with "listservs" and social forums where newbies could ask questions without fear of blowback, trolls, or other forms of techno-rudeness. People helped people find their roots.

Beyond that, I'm ecstatic about those technology whizzes who kept experimenting over the decades, bringing us gifts like the first online searchable 1880 census index at FamilySearch.org. We've come a long way since then, of course, and we've not stopped improving yet. I'm over the top about FamilySearch's Full Text Search, which has made excerpts from those billions of pages of digitized documents from around the world find a home in my very own family tree.

And just like that, a will drawn up by a man who died in the 1690s gives me in the twenty-first century a snapshot of his family portrait. In words, of course—but just imagine how hard it would have been to find those specific words by a mission to personally access and read all pertinent record sets without that computer-assisted direction.

To say that I found Thomas Plummer's 1694 will is not entirely correct. FamilySearch.org found it. While in answer to a trivial question posed by a stranger at a party, I can say "eighth great-grandfather," it was really all those dedicated computer engineers whose efforts over decades have yielded us the ability to go that far back—with ease.

Baby of the Family

 

Researching a sixth great-grandmother is apparently easier than I had thought. At least I can say that about my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Plummer Ijams. Despite appearing in documents drawn up by a liberal hand at spelling—not to mention letter formation itself—Elizabeth has been far easier to find in colonial Maryland than I had expected, something more than I can say for our ancestors in Europe from even the more recent 1800s.

The latest attempt at pursuing Elizabeth's trail has been looking for her father's will. Thomas Plummer, the man identified in the Harry Wright Newman book, Anne Arundel Gentry, was easily found in the court records for that county, a copy of which will has thankfully been digitized at FamilySearch.org. In that 1694 record, we learn that Elizabeth was the baby of the Plummer family, the last of four daughters named in their father's will.

In the stylized handwriting of the court's clerk, Thomas' surname was rendered as "Ploumer" in the July 12, 1694 will. In that document, Thomas specified his "only son Thomas," who received his hundred acre plantation known as "the Seamas Delight" in Calvert County.

But for the stylized handwriting, I'd now know the married names of Elizabeth's older sisters. "Margrett" was by then wife of someone named Hugh, but whether that surname was "Proily" or "Doily" or another variation, I can only guess. This will take additional research to confirm.

Following the eldest daughter was a far easier couple to decipher: second daughter Mary had married William Jackson. Easier to read, but likely much harder to locate with such a common name.

Third daughter Susana had me stumped at first, with husband Francis' surname rendered as something vaguely similar to "Swarson." Thankfully, that name was repeated more clearly in an additional item towards the end of the will as Swanson.

And then there was the baby of the family. Elizabeth, apparently not yet married, had been granted eight hundred pounds of tobacco, in addition to 164 acres of land in Anne Arundel County in a parcel known as Bridge Hill.

The names of these estates become a helpful clue as we wind our way through the generations, tracing each of the next owners of the property through time, until the parcel is sold out of the family entirely. Sometimes, in piecing together mystery genealogies, all we have to go by can sometimes be those whimsical names given to a piece of land.

Disappearance of the Children

 

At first glance, comparing the wills of William Ijams and his wife Elizabeth gives us two different lists of heirs. Not that the names of their children do not match between the two documents, but that the heirs listed in the later will comprise a much smaller list of family members. Why the disappearance of all those Ijams children?

When William Ijams drew up his last testament in 1734, his was a large family. William named five sons and four daughters when he filed that will in Anne Arundel County, Maryland: John, Plummer, William, Richard, Thomas, Ann, Elizabeth, Mary, and Charity.

Granted, William included so many contingencies in his will that it left me wondering whether he knew some of his sons might not outlive him—or at least not produce heirs of their own to whom they could pass their inheritance, should tragedy strike son as well as father. So when I saw the reduced list of heirs named in his wife Elizabeth's own will in 1762, I assumed that was indeed the case: tragedy surely had struck the extended Ijams family.

Not necessarily so, I'm realizing now as I rethink this list from Elizabeth's own will.

Filed in the same colonial Maryland county, Anne Arundel, Elizabeth's 1762 will mentioned only three sons: John, "Plumer," and Thomas. Of the four daughters only one was named—thankfully with her married named, Ann Williams. An additional name, Ruth Ijams, was noted to be Elizabeth's daughter-in-law, but the will did not identify which son had married Ruth, though I presume it would have been one of the three sons mentioned in Elizabeth's will.

Yet a stipulation added at the end of the document mentioned, "if any one of the rest of my children," seeming to indicate that there were indeed other surviving children. For those others, Elizabeth seemed to indicate that she felt, according to her husband's will, that those other children were not entitled to anything else.

Nor are we, the silent witnesses two centuries later, entitled to know their names, unfortunately. The rest of them may have all survived—or at least some of those descendants. But which daughters married, if any, and what their married names might have been, Elizabeth's will won't be informing us. Nor will that document explain what became of William or Richard Ijams, the two sons left out of their mother's listing.

There likely were other ways to trace those descendants, should any Ijams descendants wish to do so. Other than our curiosity regarding Elizabeth's will, I likely won't do so, either. My interest would solely be in pursuing Elizabeth's son John, who would be in my mother-in-law's direct line.

More to my point would be to push back yet another generation to see where Elizabeth might have been mentioned in the documents drawn up by her own parents.

Evolution of a Letter

 

To find mention of a woman in colonial America, the most likely place to look might be in her husband's records. Thus, in my search for Elizabeth Plummer, wife of William Ijams, it would be reasonable to look for mention of her name in his will. Since William died in 1734 in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, it would seem a reasonable step to look there for his will.

There is only one problem with that assumption: the evolution of the letter "J." If you thought it would be a simple matter to look for a surname like Ijams, think again. That letter "J" can play tricks on the unsuspecting researcher. I've struggled with that very topic, every time I return to this Ijams research.

Take, for instance, my post written three years ago on the history of the letter "J." I assure you: the struggle is real.

I didn't, however, anticipate the one variation which took me by surprise this month when seeking a will for Elizabeth's husband William Ijams. I hardly expected to see the will indexed under the name "Jiams," but that is exactly how it was handled.

Let's take a look at the situation. In a document signed on June 28, 1734, Elizabeth's husband set out to put his house in order. He made provisions for his wife Elizabeth from his personal estate, and bequeathed property to his sons William, John, and Plummer. In addition, he named sons Richard and Thomas, as well as daughters Elizabeth, Mary, Charity, and Ann.

The only problem? His name was indexed as "Jiams."

Looking more closely, I checked for every time the document used what to me—and apparently to others, as well—looked like the letter "J." Perhaps it is no surprise, seeing this excerpt of the will, to realize that it began with the statement, "Jn the name of God Amen J William Jiams of Ann Arundell County in the Province of Maryland...."

No, those Js are not typos. Every handwritten letter appearing to be the letter "J" actually made more sense as an "I." Thus, the man writing that document in such a stylized hand was referring to someone named William Iiams, most likely husband of the Elizabeth I'm researching. 

The next task, I discovered, was to actually find Elizabeth setting her hand to a last will and testament of her own. We'll need to fast forward, tomorrow, to 1762 to compare the children's listings from the two documents.