What About Walter?

 

We've been searching for ways to discover the names of any unidentified daughters of Ohio settler William Ijams this week. As we work our way through the Ijams women who were married in Fairfield County, Ohio, in the early 1800s, we've narrowed down our list of possibilities to two: one named Rebecca, and the other named Mary. Rebecca, as we discovered yesterday, was likely the daughter of William Ijams' brother Thomas Plummer Ijams, who had migrated with William to Ohio at the turn of the century. But what about Mary? Was the woman who married Walter Teal in 1804 a possible daughter of William Ijams?

Going back to one source we had used in the past few weeks, Harry Wright Newman's Anne Arundel Gentry, I looked through the listing of children for the two brothers who had migrated with William Ijams to Ohio. Thomas Plummer Ijams apparently did not have a daughter named Mary, so we won't be snared again with yesterday's problem. While the other brother who joined them in Ohio—named Isaac—did have a daughter named Mary, Newman's book identified her husband as Joseph Ijams, her cousin who was a son of William. So we can continue to search for the answer to our question about William's unnamed daughters knowing that we've already eliminated the other possibilities.

But what about Walter? Would this marriage indeed be that of one of William Ijams' daughters? By process of elimination, that might seem so—unless there were other Ijams family members in the migration party which we don't yet know about. Let's see what we can discover about Walter.

Not much, it appears, at least from records I can find so far. Walter Teal does appear in the 1830 census, still in Fairfield County, Ohio, along with a family of unnamed sons and daughters—plus the wife whom we can assume was still Mary. It appears Walter was there to stay in Fairfield County, for just two years after his November 29, 1804, marriage to Mary Ijams, he, along with Arthur Teal, both "assignees of Edward Teal," laid down money on a parcel of land there.

While I can't find much more about Walter than those details, we could presume that Walter was related to Arthur and Edward Teal, the two other men mentioned in the land transaction. Searching further using those names, I discovered that Arthur was son of Edward, who happened to be a Revolutionary War Patriot (spelled "Teel" in DAR records). 

Though Edward's burial site is no longer known, a memorial was dedicated to his memory at a nearby cemetery, the Stevenson Ruffner Cemetery, calling to mind two other surnames affiliated with the Ijams name. Edward Teal's memorial is close to that of his identified son, Arthur Teal, at that cemetery—though no word can be found on the one we are looking for, Walter. A newspaper article shared by a Find A Grave volunteer does mention some of the names I've seen among the friends and family of the three Ijams brothers, but it did not include any mention of Walter, nor the identity of his wife Mary.

There are, of course, other sources which affirm the names of two other possible daughters of William Ijams. I hesitate to grab those without documentation, but perhaps it would be worth our while to examine what others have asserted about these missing Ijams women.