Meet Elizabeth

 

Her name was Elizabeth Ambrose, and she entered life in a particularly turbulent year. Born in Pennsylvania on December 4 of 1776, her life was already thrown into turmoil. 

That she made it safely through to the other side of the American struggle for independence we can see from an 1864 headstone marking her grave in Ohio, far from the town of her birth. Hers was a life spanning two significant wars testing America: the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

Though Elizabeth was born 245 years ago, she was only my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother, courtesy of some long generations separating the two women. Yet, the era in which Elizabeth was born was characterized by a different set of records, one which sometimes left women invisible to the society in which they lived.

Elizabeth and her sister Susannah apparently married two brothers, Joseph and John Henry Flowers, and all together moved from Pennsylvania to settle in Perry County, Ohio.

Our challenge this month is not so much to examine Elizabeth as it is to confirm the identity of her father, said to have been Mathias Ambrose of colonial Pennsylvania—the sixth of my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for this year. We'll take the month of June to explore what we can find to connect Elizabeth and her sister Susannah to the Ambrose family of Pennsylvania—or to send us in a different direction, should that be what we discover.

No matter what details we unearth from our family history exploration this month, learning about Elizabeth Ambrose Flowers' roots will mean we'll familiarize ourselves with the history of that epic era and the minutiae of colonial life in Pennsylvania leading up to that key year of 1776.