NOT Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

 

If I stare at the headstone of Catherine Kelly Stevens long enough, I can barely make out the words, "wife of John Stevens." Or perhaps that is wishful thinking. I can't even decipher any entry for her own name. Only her date of death—May 3, 1858—seems clear enough to believe.

Truthfully, I can't even say it's beyond a reasonable doubt that James and Mary Kelly's daughter Catharine was married to John Stevens, my father-in-law's great-grandfather. Records are far more sparse for Indiana's Tippecanoe County in the 1850s than in those east coast locations boasting immigrant settlers as far back as the 1600s. And what few records can be found sometimes come with irksome abnormalities.

Take the presumed marriage license for John and Catharine. The license, dated on the twenty-seventh day of December in 1853, authorized "any person empowered by law to solemnize marriage" of the named couple. However, on that same document, the groom's name is given once as John Stevenson, and three more times as John Stephenson. Is this still our man John Stevens?

If this was the correct couple, they were married a little over three months after Catharine's father James had died—a likely possibility if a widow was seeking to find promising situations for her daughters after losing her own husband. But this could as likely have been the case of two people with the same name. After all, even in a city of barely six thousand people, it could be possible for someone named Catharine Kelly to have a name twin.

Of course, even the spelling variation on Catharine's own maiden name—Kelly or Kelley—would give pause to someone nowadays, but may not have been cause for concern in a previous century. But with no other records yet available to compare, we don't have much to go on beyond family tradition and these sparse indications.

There is, however, a way beyond this tangle, and that is to employ the records we can find of Catharine's collateral lines. As it turns out, because Catharine was a young mother when she died, the records of her own children will help guide us in the process of sorting out the details on this family—first for Catharine herself, then for her parents.

Tomorrow, we'll begin reviewing what's already been found on John and Catharine's three sons, then take a look at Catharine's own siblings to see what else can be discovered about the family.