A New Month, a New Research Project

 

We've spent a long, exhausting month examining what could be found on Elizabeth Howard, a child of colonial Maryland whose marriage to William Ijams transformed her into a pioneer resident of central Ohio in the early 1800s. With this new month, we'll switch tracks slightly to examine another family tangentially related to Elizabeth's own line: that of her son-in-law, John Jay Jackson.

John and his wife, Elizabeth's daughter Sarah, eventually became my mother-in-law's third great-grandparents. Because of Sarah's untimely death following the 1828 birth of her fourth child, Robert Jackson, I have struggled in the past to find information on Sarah and, by extension, her husband John Jackson. But with this month—especially given the success of last month's research project on Elizabeth's own ancestry—I'm hoping to tap into new resources to find out more about the roots of her son-in-law, the widower John Jay Jackson.

Since John spent the majority of his adult life living where he settled after marrying Sarah—in Perry County, Ohio, home of my mother-in-law—there is much to be found on his later years. After Sarah's death, John married Virginia immigrant Mary Cecelia Grate on August 28, 1829, and raised a second family of at least three more children: daughters Caroline and Clarissa, and another son whom they named Lyman J. Jackson.

Lyman, it turns out, may have been namesake for his paternal grandfather, the very person we need to seek next in examining the family history of John Jay Jackson. The elder Lyman Jackson, while never living in Ohio where his son settled, may have lived in New York and several New England locations before spending his last days in Pennsylvania.

At this point, however, that is all conjecture on my part. What we need to do this month is trace Lyman Jackson's history and construct a family tree including the collateral lines associated with John Jay Jackson's generation. That will be this month's first step in learning more about a man who lived his life during the tumultuous years of the American revolution.