According to the Book

 

Discovering a book dedicated to the recounting of one's own family line can be a mixed bag. On the one hand, we need to proceed cautiously, if we do consider the book's contents at all, just in case the published researcher has committed the same errors so many of us unpublished researchers are prone to making. On the other hand, since some of those family history volumes have the added advantage of being written by researchers one hundred—or more—years closer to the ancestors in question, they may contain personal knowledge of which those in our current century may not have been aware. My personal view is to find a reliable published researcher and use him or her as a trailblazer: someone who is pointing out the path back to more distant ancestry. For this, I adopt the motto: Trust, but Verify.

Now that we're tackling the ancestry of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, William Ijams of Maryland, for starters, I may as well proceed according to the book. "The book," in this case, would be Harry Wright Newman's Anne Arundel Gentry, a book published in 1933.

We've already seen from the Newman book that William was the eldest son of John Iiams and Rebecca Jones. The book provided the dates at which John Iiams' will was drawn up (October 9, 1782) and probated (April 21, 1783). Taking those dates to the FamilySearch Labs Full Text search engine, I was able to pull up the actual will and confirm what Harry Wright Newman had listed in his book.

It's time to move on to the next generations, so I'll test that process again for each new step. According to Newman's book, John Iiams was son of William Iiams and Elizabeth Plummer. Since the name Plummer seems to echo through subsequent generations of the Iiams and Ijams family, I'm keen to see what I can find on this maternal branch—but also mindful of my goal of following that Ijams line as far back as possible during this month.

Peeking ahead yet another generation, our William's grandfather William Iiams was in turn son of yet another Iiams by the name of William—you see now why that given name seems to have ricocheted throughout the generations of the Ijams family. This elder William—we're now talking about my mother-in-law's seventh great-grandfather—was married to another Elizabeth. (Not that we want to make this more complicated or anything....) 

The maiden name for this ancestral Elizabeth, wife of the elder William, has been alternately entered as "Cheyney" or "Cheney." She was apparently daughter of Richard Cheyney, born about 1652, according to Newman's calculations.

As for her husband William—listed as William Eyams—he was the founding immigrant ancestor of this line in my mother-in-law's ancestry. Though his name is not included in any records of arrivals to the colony of Maryland, we do have a date for his will, which was drawn up in 1698 and presented in court in Anne Arundel County—another document to verify through the FamilySearch Labs Full Text search.

Thus, the trailblazer—in this case, Harry Wright Newman—has laid out specific dates to guide us in confirming the Ijams family's story, once they arrived in the North American British colonies. Now, we'll begin tackling the search for documents and start reading between the lines to see what other information can be uncovered.