Right Time, Right Place

 

This month's research task is to discover documentation showing whether a specific man was in the right place at the right time to have been an American Patriot. That specific man would be my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, Lyman Jackson.

Right away, in beginning to research the details of Lyman Jackson's life through my subscription at Ancestry.com, I received hints demonstrating that Patriot possibility. An entry in a DAR lineage book provided one such example of a descendant of Lyman and his wife, Deidama—or, as it was spelled in that edition, Diadama.

Sure enough, going straight to the source at the website of the Daughters of the American Revolution, I found a listing for Lyman Jackson. From that material, I gleaned the basics of his birth, death, and service. Born in Simsbury, Connecticut, on February 29 in 1756, Lyman served in both Massachusetts and New York, attaining the rank of sergeant before his terms of service were completed. He eventually moved from New York to Albion in Erie County, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1835.

A Find a Grave entry verifies that Lyman was buried in Albion Cemetery following his March 20, 1835, passing, agreeing with the records at DAR. With that, it might seem an easy task to put together the documentation for a supplemental DAR application linking my daughter with her sixth great-grandfather.

That, however, is not as easy as it sounds. There are sticky details standing in the way between now and then. And that is what brings me back to this Jackson research problem over and over again. To resolve those details, we'll first need to go back to Lyman's son John Jay Jackson, son-in-law of William Ijams and Elizabeth Howard, the woman whom we spent the last month researching. In particular, we'll need to retrace our research steps on Elizabeth's daughter Sarah, the one who married John Jackson. Tomorrow, we'll lay out the particulars and pinpoint the problems with that story.