Where's Walter?

 

When relatives disappear, the natural question arising in a genealogist's mind is: where did they go? Since I've lately been working on the female ancestors comprising my mother-in-law's matriline, thanks to testing that full mitochondrial DNA signature, I can't simply wonder what became of her third great-grandmother's sister Mary Ijams. I need to ask what became of her husband. Thus, my question this week is: where's Walter Teal?

We've already seen that Walter Teal was the man who married Mary. Though the only accessible digitized copy of their marriage record somehow managed to cut off Mary's maiden name, we fortunately have documentation of her receipt of her portion of her father's inheritance—thankfully, received after her marriage to Walter Teal.

Because this detail leaves us researching a woman during the invisible decades for women in the early 1800s, I can only hope I found the right Walter Teal when locating such a name in the 1830 census for Fairfield County, Ohio, the same place where the couple had married twenty five years earlier. But when we turn to the 1840 census to look for Walter's family, there is no mention of this head of household in the place where they had lived for decades. 

However, using the Full Text search at the FamilySearch Labs, it was apparent that Walter's name had been mentioned in a number of deeds in Fairfield County over the years. Perhaps this made me a little less apprehensive of the discovery that there was indeed a Walter Teal in the 1840 census—but not where we thought we'd find him. This time, a Walter Teal showed up in Indiana. Was this our guy?

Once again, the census wasn't really of any help in identifying who else might have been part of Walter's household. We can see from the readout that whoever was in the Teal home—we have no way to know whether they were relatives or, perhaps, farm hands—it was headed by a man between the years of fifty and fifty nine, exactly ten years difference from the report we found back in Ohio for the 1830 census.

The 1840 entry was for a household in Pleasant Township in Wabash County, Indiana. Along with that older man in the Teal household was one between fifteen and nineteen years of age, along with two younger boys, one of whom was five years or younger. The data for the women in the family paint a far different picture than what we had gleaned from the previous enumeration, however. The oldest woman this time was in her thirties. She was accompanied by one other female, aged fifteen through nineteen.

This might have been our Walter, alright, but it certainly couldn't have been his wife Mary. Looking elsewhere for confirmation—or at least explanation of what might have happened in the past ten years—I spotted a General Land Office record for someone named Walter Teal. It was, as I had hoped, for property in Wabash County, Indiana. Thankfully, where his name was to be entered in the document, the actual detail stated: "Walter Teal of Fairfield County, Ohio."

It may be possible that Walter's wife Mary had died before the 1840 census, and that he had remarried. Depending on when he acquired the Indiana property, Mary may have died before he made the decision to leave Ohio—or she may have made the trip with him, then died shortly afterwards. It is my guess that that youngest child in the household could serve as a clue as to how long it had been since Mary's death—if we are unable to locate any death record for her in either state.

In my pursuit of the family's matriline, though, it will be to those possible daughters of Mary that I will turn my attention next. Not only that, but in following the family—hopefully to some point beyond the 1850 census—we can see whether that matriline was carried forward to future generations.