Phantom Genealogy

 

It is an eerie feeling, discovering an ancestor's sibling when none used to be there before. I sometimes feel like I've been researching phantoms in my family tree when those mystery relatives appear. Where there had been no indication of the person's existence, suddenly there he was.

Now that I'm revisiting the family line of my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather, Michael Metzger, this is one detail I'll need to tackle. Though I can explain away the missing family member—Michael apparently had three children born in his European homeland before traveling to Pennsylvania, where two more were born before the final move to Ohio, all before 1825—I still do need to document his existence. The trouble is, while the others dutifully remained with their parents through the entire immigration journey, this one phantom family member did not. With a scenario like that, it could be easy to imagine missing that son entirely.

While Michael Metzger died before the 1850 census—plus, with no sign yet of a will,  no other paper trail to indicate the names of everyone in his household—almost all of his children remained in Perry County, Ohio, where they can be found in that 1850 census listing plus every subsequent decade's record until the last of the Metzger children passed in 1911.

Notice, however, that that is almost all of his children. One son apparently left and headed west to Dubois County, Indiana, shortly after his 1852 wedding in Perry County. I've seen him listed in some records as John Metzger, while others represent his name as Johann, making the search more challenging. If it hadn't been for a volunteer's work on his Find a Grave memorial and eight DNA matches flagged by Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, I would have totally missed this collateral line.

So far, I've worked my way through seven of those eight DNA matches, and the lines all lead back to this same Metzger ancestor. I keep pinching myself to make sure I have not fallen asleep or daydreamed my way into imagining this connection. But the paper trail holds out. The DNA told the real story. It's time to learn more about this phantom relative Johann Metzger's story and try to discover why he left the rest of the family in Ohio to strike out on his own in Indiana.