Drove right by that fork in the road, I did. Didn't even see it. The sense of being blind to something so obviously staring me in the face can be startling to realize. And that, essentially, is how I felt when I discovered I had missed an entire branch of my mother-in-law's family tree.
That "fork in the road" was an additional daughter whose life story fell into the cracks in a century when married women were almost as invisible as they were as unmarried daughters. Being born, marrying, and dying all before the 1850 U.S. Census could have called any attention to their existence, these women can be hard to find on paper. That is pretty much what happened to William Ijams' granddaughter Rosanna.
Born to one of William's youngest daughters—Sarah, wife of John Jay Jackson—Rosanna arrived during the early years of Ohio statehood. Since she was born about 1821 and married in 1840, I had entirely missed her existence. It was only thanks to a DNA test at Ancestry.com—and a tip from the ThruLines tool there—that one of Rosanna's descendants showed up as a match to my husband, beginning the head-scratching process of examining available documents in hindsight.
Perhaps because the process began with a DNA test, it made sense to bolster the data I'd need for any future possible cousin matches. Since that discovery, I've been working on adding all the descendants of Rosanna and her husband, Walter Mitchell, as collateral lines on my mother-in-law's family tree. My real focus at this point is the matriline leading up to Rosanna, since her female descendants will also be passing along the same matriline that my mother-in-law passed along to her son, my husband. And right now, I'm still stuck with some mtDNA matches whose connection to that most recent common ancestor—whoever that ancient mother might have been—is still a mystery.
At least now I've got a few more resources to help point to the answer.
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