Sarah’s Mother’s Husband

Now that I’ve disabused myself of any notion that John Jackson married his bride, Sarah Howard Ijams, in the year of 1816, where did that date come from?

I accidentally stumbled upon some information that might clear up that discrepancy. Wondering just what additional information I could find on the family—despite not being able to glean enough on Sarah’s own generation—I thought I’d jump back a step and look at her parents’ generation.

Now, I usually don’t like to make that move so soon. In most cases, I find lots to keep me occupied within one generation, discovering all there is to know on the siblings of one given family. It takes quite a while before I get the sense of having found all I can find. It’s only then that I will move back to the parents’ generation.

In this case, though, being stuck on this case of Sarah-in-Ohio marrying John-in-Missouri, I figured there had to be more to this story. Maybe the Sarahs of 2012 find no problem in saying “I do” to an eligible bachelor living several states away. But this was 1816—or, more likely, 1818—and frequent flier miles had not yet been invented.

I had hoped that just maybe I could uncover the story that connected this Ohio outpost in Fairfield County with a fort in a place that wasn’t even a state yet.

I went to one of my favorite sites for genealogy information pre-dating the usual governmental records: Find A Grave. Now, you and I know that Find A Grave doesn’t have everything there is to know about every cemetery. But it is a good start.

Fortunately, it was the right start for me. Using the Find A Grave search form, I started by searching for any results in Fairfield County, Ohio, with Sarah's father’s name: William Ijams. With a surname like Ijams, I had an edge on chances of finding something useful in the search results.

Photograph by Linda Huffman Powell

Right away, I spotted a William Ijams at the Stevenson Ruffner Cemetery just northwest of Rushville in Fairfield County, Ohio. One of the reasons I wanted to locate Sarah’s father’s gravestone was to see the dates. I thought the mention in the biographical sketch I had found—the one mentioning John Jackson’s return trip to Ohio with Sarah, her mother and siblings, but no father listed—needed some verification. The headstone provided explanation: William Ijams passed away in February, 1815.

Reading the Find A Grave entry provided a second hint: William’s entry there was linked to that of his wife. The added bonus was that her full name was listed. Not only did that confirm that her maiden name was Howard, but it revealed that, after William’s death, she had remarried.

What is interesting to find about this second man that Elizabeth Howard Ijams married is that he also served in the United States Army—and, to be more precise, that he had served, among other places, at one particular fort. Yes, you guessed it: John Whistler served at Fort Bellefontaine, the very fort near Saint Louis that we have been discussing in the case of John Jay Jackson’s travels.

Elizabeth Howard Ijams’ second husband, John Whistler, had a full and interesting military career spanning over two decades. Upon orders, after the War of 1812 was fully under way, to remove from his post at Newport Barracks in Kentucky to Fort Wayne, he received word that his own wife had died. That was in April of 1814.

By the time the war had drawn to a close, John Whistler was stationed at Fort Bellefontaine. He was honorably discharged in 1815, but stayed on as military storekeeper at the fort. It is quite possible that John and Elizabeth were married there, most likely by 1816. They remained at the fort for the rest of their lives—Elizabeth dying in or near Saint Louis in 1826, her husband following in 1829.

I still have questions about how and why Elizabeth ended up connecting with John Whistler at Fort Bellefontaine. More than that, I’m still curious to know why a recent widow in the Ohio frontier would be venturing even further west on her own. There’s more to this story, which makes me regret even more that there weren’t better documents from that era to help me out with this question.

Those of us who yearn to do so much more in researching family history than just serve as data collector sometimes find that we have to be satisfied with what little we can uncover of these stories of the past.


Above left: photograph of the headstone of William Ijams at Stevenson Ruffner Cemetery near Rushville in Fairfield County, Ohio. Information on inscription gleaned from cemetery records, as the gravestone itself is partially sunk into the ground. Photograph courtesy of Find A Grave contributor, Linda Huffman Powell. Used by permission.