We're on a bluff overlooking a whole new month, and it's time to make our leap into a new research project. But before we move forward, it's good practice to take a look backwards, review what we've accomplished over the past month, and make plans for the next time we visit this specific research adventure.
My goal for April had been to examine my mother-in-law's matriline, starting with one particular ancestor: her fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth Howard, eventual wife of William Ijams. This fourth of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024 I had hoped held the key to determining just how my husband's mtDNA matches connected to his mother's matriline.
Step one in that process was to push the trail back as many more generations as possible, but in that one month, we only gained two generations before discovering that William Ridgely's wife Elizabeth, if she was indeed a Duvall, was not daughter of the Lewis Duvall to whom genealogists of past centuries had attributed her parentage.
From that point, we did an about-face, keeping in mind there were several daughters whose lines could be followed in that multi-generational process bringing us back to the present. After all, William and Elizabeth Ridgely, no matter who she might have been, were said to have been parents of at least eleven daughters.
Only problem: that was back in the mid-1700s, when women may have been seen, but seldom documented. A better approach was to start with what I already knew, and work the same plan from there. Hence, the start with Elizabeth Howard, herself, and the careful work to document each of her own daughters.
At that point—partially thanks to autosomal DNA matches linking back to Elizabeth Howard—the unexpected happened. There was another daughter in the matriline, someone I had entirely missed. I now needed to carefully construct her life story. That was the discovery of Rosanna, granddaughter of Elizabeth Howard and daughter of my mother-in-law's direct line ancestor, Sarah Ijams, wife of John Jay Jackson.
It is easy to see how I could have missed Rosanna. Sarah, her mother, died at a relatively young age in 1829 in a place then still considered a frontier. Rosanna had married, and with her husband and children, eventually left the family's home in Perry County, Ohio, for new farmland in Iowa. Perhaps there was not much community built around that new home to remember Rosanna at her own early passing.
Rosanna, however, had daughters. And those daughters still need to be researched. With that on my to-do list, I need to set up plans for when I revisit this research question. Among the items I want to assemble would be records regarding Rosanna's husband, Walter Mitchell—his will, in particular. For each of their daughters, a next step would be to trace their own generations, at least for those who married and had children. Checking for any other autosomal DNA matches will be helpful, but my main focus in moving to the next generations would be to identify Rosanna's daughters, then their daughters, and onward to the present with those same female descendants. Remember the research goal: identify possible mtDNA matches by building out that aspect of Rosanna's tree.
Granted, there still is that other puzzle on the distant end of the generations: the other Elizabeth, wife of William Ridgely, who as my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, was also on her matriline. She, too, had female descendants to trace, women who also may have carried that same mitochondrial DNA signature. Putting all this on my research to-do list for a future year sounds more like the makings of at least two projects, rather than one month's goal.
That, however, is a task to puzzle over in another year. Tomorrow, we'll start fresh with another of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024. This time, we'll turn to the Maryland ancestors of William Ijams, husband of this month's focus, Elizabeth Howard.
No comments:
Post a Comment