That Scorecard Detour...

Now that I've found my new marching orders—to document my sisters-in-law's connection to a Revolutionary War Patriot—let's take a look at the scorecard for my husband's maternal line.

This is a diagram showing where I currently am, in transferring my research on my husband's line to my Ancestry.com account. The line I'm targeting to possibly lead my sisters-in-law to D.A.R. eligibility comes from Nancy Ann Jackson, wife of Simon Snider.

There are a few things to notice about this snapshot.

First is that, in following the line from Nancy Ann Jackson to the present, we realize that we are tracing my husband's matrilineal line. In other words, should either of his sisters (or he, himself) wish to have an mtDNA test done, it would reveal their deep ancestry following this very line of ascent.

The second feature of this family tree diagram is that it represents an incredibly convenient research feature for me: each member on this chart lived and died in one particular place in mid-Ohio, known as Perry County.  Over the years, while visiting family in the Columbus area, my husband and I have often walked the cemeteries of Perry County, notebooks in hand. We've sometimes visited the courthouse and gone through the old, old records there.

Of course, while in-person visits are wonderful, they are few and far between. That leaves the rest of the research year to depend on what can be found through other means—mostly through online research.

While there may not be many digitized documents specifically available from this county in such online repositories as Ancestry.com or FamilySearch.org, I have spent years researching this location and happen to have found a gem of a resource. It is a site done on a volunteer basis by a distant cousin of the family—everyone in Perry County is a distant cousin—who has painstakingly scanned and posted historic record after record on his own website. While we have, over the years, made several trips back to Ohio to visit family—and, of course, slipped away for some genealogical research while we were in the neighborhood—Tim Fisher's invaluable site has stood in the gap for those in-between-trip times when I needed to look something up, now.

Another plus for researching Perry County is the fact that, over the years, they have had an active genealogical society, diligent in preserving records and publishing books on their work. It was one of their publications—which I found during a trip to the Allen County Public Library in Fort Wayne, Indiana—that alerted me to the possibility that Nancy Jackson was indeed a descendant of a Revolutionary War Patriot.

So, that's where my research progress stands, up to this point. As you'll notice by the green arrows to the right of Nancy Ann Jackson's name, I've begun to add the next generation. But because Nancy Ann, herself, was likely born in 1823, there are many aspects to this type of search that don't conform to the usual approaches taken to research later arrivals on the family tree.

To get an idea of what's ahead of us, we'll take a closer look at what we know, currently, about Nancy in tomorrow's post.