About the Daughters

 

We've spent a month exploring what can be discovered about my mother-in-law's Metzger roots, yet not mentioning much about the daughters of immigrant ancestors Michael and Apollonia Metzger. You'd think from all this that the Metzger family was comprised solely of sons, but there were actually three daughters: Joanna, Mary Ann, and Elizabeth. Each was born in a different location, and each can be said to represent a different stage of their parents' traveling life.

Joanna, the eldest, was born about 1813, back in the Metzgers' country of origin, wherever that turns out to be. There are some records asserting that the family's homeland was in Switzerland. Some census records label the family as coming from Germany. I have yet to find any verification of the young Metzger family's passage to America, but whenever the family arrived, Joanna was with them.

Mary Ann joined the immigrant family after their arrival in America, but apparently before the Metzgers settled in Perry County, Ohio, where they eventually raised their family. Mary Ann's entry in census records alerts us to the fact that the traveling family made a stop in Pennsylvania long enough to welcome her birth at the end of 1822.

Neither Joanna nor Mary Ann married. Along with their younger siblings after their parents' death, Joanna and Mary Ann likely lived with their eldest brother Gregory on the Metzger family farm in Jackson Township of Perry County, Ohio. Each lived a fairly long life—Joanna was seventy two and Mary Ann was sixty seven at time of death—and the two were buried together at the Saint Joseph's Cemetery in Somerset, Ohio.

Unlike her older sisters, third daughter Elizabeth married and raised a large family of her own. She likely lived her entire life in the same place where she was born, despite losing her father when she was barely fifteen years of age—and her mother only a year after that. Her 1852 marriage to Bernard Clouse tied her to an immigrant who was alternately said to have been born in either Germany or France—causing me to wonder whether that might signify the oft-war torn Alsace region for both Elizabeth's husband and her parents.

With a family as large as the Clouse family, it is no surprise to see some of their descendants showing up in my husband's DNA matches. Of course, with marriage, a wife's maiden name can become lost to time, and those focusing on Metzger roots may not remember to include the married daughters from the family. However, we can't lose sight of such connections when applying DNA test results to genealogy. I'm convinced it is from those ancestral daughters that some of our many puzzling matches may arise, so I want to keep an eye on these seven DNA matches who descended from Elizabeth, with a brief check tomorrow.