Unexpected

 

This month began with hopes to find information on the parents of Lydia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother. Lydia was my fifth choice among my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, a goal I have had for not just this year, but a brick wall that has plagued me for decades. While I can't say I accomplished that goal in the past month, I certainly can vouch for a month of unexpected results.

The prime unexpected result was discovering that, after the death of her husband and second-born son, Lydia went on to raise eight children from a second marriage. Since that discovery came late in the month, I am only now working my way through the lines of descent for each of those surviving children from her marriage to Benedict Palmer. My goal with this most recent task is to seek out any possible DNA matches among her Palmer descendants—but so far, no results for that goal. I suspect the time frame has been too short to see results yet.

A second result has been the unexpected disappearance of DNA matches which had formerly been linked to my account at Ancestry.com. Apparently, nobody else knows the identity of Lydia Miller's parents, either, yet at Ancestry, ThruLines had offered up a guess—an entry labeled "Jacob???? Miller." Yes, that's Jacob with four question marks.

Through some unexpected digital sleight of hand, Jacob???? Miller has now disappeared from my ThruLines listing for this family. No one else has replaced him, either. That, however, means that the DNA matches which ThruLines had previously proposed—and that I had already confirmed through documentation—have suddenly, poof!, disappeared. So much for the theory that Jonathan Miller might have been a brother of Lydia, or at least a first cousin. Checking on the ThruLines results today showed Lydia with absolutely zero DNA matches linked to her own line.

Where to go from here is my next question. The end of this month means it's a wrap for Lydia—at least for this year's research projects. I will need to revisit her case again in a future year. When that time comes, I will once again rely on DNA connections, if any materialize. In the meantime, my task will be to complete her line of descent from all surviving children, down to the current generation, as I have done for all other lines I've worked on in my mother-in-law's family. With eight Palmer children born from the mid 1840s through the early 1860s, that will be a lot of work to confirm each line with appropriate documentation.

Another task that needs completion is the cluster research approach I've taken to examine the Miller households in Perry County, Lydia's original home where she had married, first, William Gordon, and second, widower Benedict Palmer. Since I've decided to continue my subscription to Ancestry's ProTools, where I can access the beta Networks tool, this will facilitate continuing that rather broad survey of parental possibilities. Again, much repetitive work that may well become necessary if I hope to find any answer to my research question.

Granted, this isn't the first time I've come to the end of a month without an answer in hand to my research question regarding one of my Twelve Most Wanted. But at least I've come close to discovering more useful information about that targeted ancestor. That is the value of at least trying to attain research goals.

Next month, for the last of my Twelve Most Wanted for my mother-in-law's line, I'm afraid we'll be again staring down a decades-long research goal. Whether we accomplish what has been hoped for or not, I'm confident the effort will bring some useful but unexpected results, as well. Though not the target I hope to hit, at least those unexpected bonuses add helpful details to the picture of these long-ago ancestors' stories.  

Nothing to Write Home About

 

It's a day before the end of another month, and I'm feverishly working on last-minute tasks on my to-do list for Lydia Miller's side of my mother-in-law's family tree. Sometimes, though there is a lot of work being done, there's not much to say about it—as they say, "nothing to write home about." 

My task today was to wrap up my exploration of Miller families appearing in the early census records of Reading Township in Perry County, Ohio. That was the location of Lydia's first married home, which she shared with her husband, William Gordon, and her one surviving son, Adam.

To aid in the exploration, I've been using an Ancestry.com beta tool, called simply, "Networks." Early this month, I had set up a network which I dubbed "Miller Family in Perry County, Ohio." One by one, I've been adding specific Miller households to this tool, then locating them in as many documents as possible, before extending each hypothetical relative's line of descent several generations.

On the one hand, I've failed miserably in finding any confirmed connection between these other Millers and Lydia's own Miller roots, but on the other hand, I'm hoping the effort may produce some sign of DNA matches. An additional possible outcome might be to discover patterns, such as any Millers who might have followed Lydia and her second husband Benedict Palmer to their new home in Mercer County.

So far, no such promising signs have emerged. Thus, the repetitive grunt work—with nothing much more to say about it. Some work takes time but, regardless of the proportion of work, yields very little in the way of remarkable results.

Tomorrow, whether the work is done or not, we'll close out this exploration to discover Lydia Miller's roots. It will be time for a recap of the month's progress—including some unexpected discoveries—and an outline of what to do the next time I revisit this research puzzle. And if we are really lucky, perhaps Ancestry's algorithms will catch up with us and be ready to yield some new DNA matches from the descendants of Lydia's second family.

Piling on the Palmers — And Just in Time

 

Quick! To the chase—at least, before the end of the month beats us to the finish line.

Right now, to my mother-in-law's family tree I'm feverishly adding the children of Lydia Palmer—formerly the Lidia we had listed as widow of William Gordon of Perry County, Ohio. The reason for this rush to add the children of Lydia's second marriage is my hope that connecting them to my tree today will give us enough time for the algorithms at Ancestry.com DNA to pick up this additional line of descent. After all, no matter how people spelled her name—Lidia Gordon or Lydia Palmer—she was ancestor of not only those descending from her first son, Adam Gordon, but from her many Palmer children, too. There may be a lot more DNA matches out there to discover.

According to an article about ThruLines posted by Ancestry.com's support team on their website, changes in family trees at Ancestry are usually reflected in ThruLines within forty eight hours. That means, if I hurry, all these new discoveries about Lydia's second family may generate ThruLines results by May 31. Talk about a deadline!

Of course, I'll likely continue the chase into June, despite my promise to myself to move on to the next month's feature from my Twelve Most Wanted for this year. I'm curious to see whether any matches show up who share DNA specifically based on the Miller line—Lydia's as-yet unknown parents' line—rather than the Gordon line of her first husband.

In the meantime, here are a few details to wrap up the month.

First was the question about what became of Benedict Palmer's first wife. We found the 1839 marriage record for Benedict and Catherine Hovermill in Fairfield County, but her ominous absence just a few years after that marriage demanded a search for her burial information.

In what seemed to be a fluke from Find A Grave, I did indeed find Catherine's burial—but it came to my attention as a hint at Ancestry pointing to a Find A Grave memorial supposedly for her husband, not for herself. 

Once I clicked on the link provided by that hint, I could see that the headstone itself was for Catherine, not her bereaved husband.

We could already see that there was a monument marking Benedict Palmer's actual burial location in Mercer County, where he and his second wife Lydia had settled, but because the stone was engraved with the man's name spelled as "Benadict," it did not surface as a hint for his final resting place. I had to go in and manually change the search to the other spelling to get the memorial linked to the right person.

As for Catherine's son Jerome, he, too, was buried in the same cemetery in Mercer County, Ohio, where his father had moved the family. I suspect his Find A Grave entry contains some errors, though, as the memorial states that he was born in Mercer County, when we can see from the Palmer family's entry in the 1850 census that they had not yet moved from Fairfield County until after that point.

If Jerome Palmer, born about 1840, had lived a longer life, his death record might have confirmed his mother's name for us. As it turned out, though, Jerome died before his fortieth birthday, leaving a wife and two young daughters, long before the advent of such helpful documents.

Locating information on those two details from Benedict Palmer's first marriage, I can now get back to work, building out this newly-discovered branch of my mother-in-law's family tree. From Lydia Miller's additional eight children in the Palmer line, there surely will be multiple candidates for DNA matches to connect us to her unknown Miller parents. And while I impatiently wait out those forty eight hours, I have some wrap-up work to do on Lydia's possible brothers' families, back in Perry County, Ohio.

About That Other Lydia

 

Whenever we encounter conflicting assertions about a branch of our family tree, there is no route that possibly can be taken—at least, if we want a tree that reflects documented, correct information—other than to inspect all that can be found, according to each version of the "truth." In the case of that "other" Lydia, wife of Benedict Palmer of Mercer County, Ohio, that is exactly the task we need to attend to today.

Here's the assertion that got me started on this chase: a Find A Grave memorial for someone named Lydia Palmer, who was buried in Ellis Cemetery in Montezuma, Ohio, a tiny village in Mercer County that even today claims a population under two hundred people.

Nestled up against the state border with Indiana, Mercer County is on a road leading from Columbus, Ohio, to Fort Wayne, Indiana. From Perry County, where Lidia Miller lived, to Mercer County would be a trip of almost two hundred miles. If Lidia Miller, the widow of William Gordon, were indeed one and the same as Lydia Palmer, it would help to assemble records documenting the transactions that made that assertion a reality.

Let's check first to see what we can find on Lydia Palmer before her death in 1895. As early as 1860, I could find a census record for Lydia and her husband Benedict Palmer in Montezuma. The household included two daughters and five sons, with the oldest being named Jerome and the youngest, at one year of age, designated as his father's namesake, Benedict. The senior Benedict was noted to have been born in Delaware, while Lydia claimed to be an Ohio native.

The difficulty with the ages indicated for these children—Jerome listed as being twenty years of age in that census, meaning a birth year in 1840—was that "our" Lidia had given birth to her one surviving child, Adam Gordon, only a year prior to that. Not to mention, Lidia's husband, William Gordon, died at the end of 1840, certainly not in enough time for her to have remarried and brought another son to full term in the interim.

Looking for marriage information on Benedict Palmer, I did find a marriage record dated in February of 1839—the same time as our Lidia's son Adam was born—not from Mercer County where I had found the Palmers in 1860, but from Fairfield County, not far from Perry County. Benedict's wife's name, however, was listed as Catherine Hovermill.

Thinking this might have been a different Benedict, I went looking for someone by that name in Fairfield County. When I located him in the 1850 census, Benedict Palmer was indeed living in Fairfield County—but his wife's name wasn't Catherine at all. Despite the scrawl of the enumerator's handwriting—and his propensity to use abbreviations for names—the resultant entry for "Benidic" Palmer's wife looked far more like Lydia than Catherine.

It was time to branch out to more recent records—hopefully, those of the type which would include names of parents, such as death certificates. Remember that youngest son from the 1860 census, the one named after his father? I found what might—or might not—have been his death record. However, this Benedict Palmer died in Iowa, not Ohio. The informant, his wife, stated that her husband was born in Iowa, not Ohio. To complicate matters, she also reported that his father was born in Ohio—not Delaware, as we had seen from census records. 

The biggest problem, however, was that while this Benedict's death record noted his mother's name to have been Lydia, her maiden name, according to her daughter-in-law, was Barker.

Wrong Lydia? Don't be too sure. I kept looking—thankfully. Among the marriage records turning up in searches was one for a wedding performed in, of all places, Perry County, back where we had left our own Lidia Miller Gordon. On May 1, 1842, Benedict Palmer and Lydia "Gorden" stood before a Justice of the Peace, who solemnized their marriage.

To complete the tale, I'll need to look for any record of what became of Benedict's first wife, Catherine, who was evidently the mother of the oldest son, Jerome, whose burial was also noted with a Find A Grave memorial in Montezuma.

And that youngest son Benedict? Though he died in Iowa, he was indeed buried back in Montezuma—and, despite her provision of incorrect information on her husband's death certificate, so was his wife Rachel.

Thanks to an unexplained entry at Find A Grave—one which, without that documentation, seemed to make no sense at all—we now have the rest of the story, as far as Lidia Miller's life went. The birth dates for the sons of each husband, while seeming to contradict assertions about this marriage, made much more sense, once we followed through to find documentation to tell the full story.

Now, I'm left with far more to do on this month's research project. Besides documenting these discoveries for the family tree, I'll need to add the line of descent for children of Lidia's second marriage. Then, because those descendants may mean additional discoveries among perplexing DNA matches, I'll need to pursue that angle, as well—all before the close of this month, if all goes well.

What if That was All Wrong?

 

The month-long chase to discover the parents of Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother who seemed to materialize out of nowhere, is almost over. Only four more days remain to work on this month's selection for my Twelve Most Wanted, but while I feel I've made headway on this brick wall puzzle, I haven't come to any solid conclusion.

I feel good about the progress I've made—especially the discovery of DNA matches linking to Jonathan Miller, a Perry County, Ohio, neighbor whose descendants may be telling a story I couldn't find through the traditional paper route. There is, however, one nagging question: what if that discovery—and all the documentation it led me to—turns out to be all wrong? What if Lidia Miller's story was far different than what we've discussed so far?

There's a good reason for asking—perhaps one you have noticed too, if you followed the links I've included with this month's posts. Notice the 1840 burial information for Lidia's husband, William Gordon, as presented by the volunteer posting his memorial on Find A Grave. As is often done by these volunteers, memorials are linked with those of family members, a helpful gesture—as long as the connections are correct. In this case, I'm not so sure the information is right, but I can't just not check it out. 

William Gordon's memorial has the usual listings for his parents, children, and siblings—and in William's case, his half-siblings, as well. As is often the case, volunteers also link a memorial with the burial information on a spouse. However, in William's case, information supposedly about his wife Lidia was cross referenced with the burial information of someone named Lydia Palmer.

This Lydia was born about the same year our Lidia's birth was estimated to be: 1820. That's where the similarity ends. Lydia Palmer was the wife of someone named Benedict Palmer, and she was buried with him in 1895, not in Perry County, the location where we'd expect to find Lidia in Ohio, but in Mercer County, a county halfway across the state on the Indiana border.

True, it could be possible that our Lidia, widowed with a young child in the early years of Ohio's statehood, might have sought out an eligible bachelor to fill her departed husband's shoes—but I can't just take anyone's word for it, not even that of a dedicated Find A Grave volunteer. This brings up a possibility that we need to take our due diligence to inspect for ourselves.

Memorializing Family

 

Today, Memorial Day in the United States, is one day set aside to honor those who died while in the line of duty in military service. A custom which began after the Civil War, when families decorated the graves of their lost loved ones—hence the original designation as Decoration Day—the day now also honors the memory of those who have fallen in subsequent wars and military engagements.

Though my husband's family includes many members through the generations who have served in the armed forces, they have very few relatives who have actually died while in service. But as I explore the family's collateral lines, I find more and more who had harrowing stories of service to share—or, more the case, didn't share those stories much farther than their own immediate family.

I've lately been exploring the Miller lines of possible siblings of my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor, Lidia Miller Gordon. In the extended family of one DNA match, I ran across an old news article concerning one such distant cousin, who had—finally, after five years of confinement—just been released from captivity as a prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict.

The newspaper report included one detail about those five years: the veteran's younger brother had enlisted, served, finished his tour of duty and returned home, all before his brother regained his freedom. If the news could have been shared with this brother in captivity, the family didn't want to do so, for so many reasons. While both brothers eventually lived to tell about their experiences, what a burden it must have been to suffer through. These types of stories need to be memorialized, too—not just hidden away in a newspaper article now long forgotten that only a genealogist would stumble upon.

Then, too, there are stories of military loss that were so traumatic at the time that those closest to the tragedy could not bring themselves to speak of it. Though even the thought may be painful for those who lived through the loss of their loved one in service, eventually it will become important to share those stories. The rest of us need to hear them, to be informed of them, to learn from them. Despite the pain. Despite the grief. We mourn with those who grieve—and gain a different perspective of what it was like to live through that loss. We never know until we are told. Share the story. Pass it on. That story is worth living through the generations.

Not the Usual Five Hundred This Time

 

It takes a lot of collateral relatives to put a DNA match in the proper place in the family tree. As I search for clues about my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor, Lidia Miller Gordon, there have been a lot of DNA matches connected to one growing branch of that family tree. And that means the numbers keep growing for every biweekly count—just not at the usual five hundred per fortnight rate experienced in the last two counts.

Still, in the past two weeks, my mother-in-law's tree has grown by an additional 416 relatives, mostly from known Gordon lines and those proposed Miller relatives whose descendants have turned out to be DNA matches. Granted, that falls short of that five hundred rate of the last two session, but my mother-in-law's  family tree now has 39,287 documented individuals included in the records.

In addition, this past two weeks brought in another seven DNA matches, including at least one related to my mother-in-law's Gordon line. As I work through the DNA results with my recent addition of Ancestry.com's ProTools assist, I'm connecting more and more of those Gordon and Miller collateral lines. Eventually, there will be enough information to figure out Lidia's connection to her own roots—and thus push back the curtain obscuring her origins at last. Someday.

In the past two weeks, I think the only reason that rate of increase on the tree has slowed has been because I've been traveling. It is, after all, Memorial Day weekend—not to mention graduation season. Hopefully, in the next two weeks, the celebrations and socialization will slow to a normal summertime pace, and I can get back to the typical five hundred additions for the next biweekly count. After all, it will only be a few more days, and we'll be on to a new research target for June's ancestor in my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025.

Off the Shelf: "Time Anxiety"

 

Not that I'm experiencing time anxiety myself, but Time Anxiety is a book I've wanted to read for the past, oh, thirty nine days. That's when the book was released, a perfect choice for a release date for a book like this: April 15, just in time for every American to release a collective sigh of relief over the national tax deadline.

Author Chris Guillebeau defines "time anxiety" as "the feeling of being crushed by the scarcity of time and the inevitability of things ending." He has been mulling over the problems with time management for a long time, and this newest of his books is a collection of his observations on what he calls a myth: Time cannot be "managed." 

Time management, this author asserts, "is a powerful story built on an entirely false premise." However, there is, he assures us, still much we can do about that.

While reading through Guillebeau's explanation of this predicament, I noticed a few thoughts that can be applied to genealogy—a pursuit which itself, much like the perennial "to do" list, is never really "done." Here's a sampling of some ideas which caught my eye.

• In a practical tip he calls "The Reverse Bucket List," the author urges readers to "make a list of the amazing things you've already done." It's not just a matter of a pat-yourself-on-the-back journey down memory lane; the process may inspire you to set new or revised goals, especially if the review lights up some previously obscured information or resources not available to you the last time you tackled the problem.
• In questioning just what constitutes "enough" for a project, begin by deciding on "a logical finish line" for the goal. Observing that a lack of boundaries for a project conditions us to "the idea that work simply never ends," the author sees the lack of "milestones and end points" as robbing us of a sense of purposeful accomplishment. Genealogy research in general can have that effect, as many of us have experienced. That's why I've chosen my Twelve Most Wanted research cycle for the year: to help me attain finish lines with each goal, even if it only turns out to be a wrap-up summary at the month's end with a next-step list of objectives for the next time I tackle that research question.
• When getting started on a research project, think about where you tend to get sidetracked or encounter stuff that throws you off your planned course. Rabbit trail? Yep, that's me, so I need to do an evaluation of the dips and twists in a typical project cycle, make a note of them, and create tactics for reshaping the behaviors. I don't worry so much about the rabbit trails—they generally lead me to some useful insights in the end—but it is helpful to have a rescue plan on hand to get me back on track when I veer off course.

Time, as Guillebeau observed, is "the greatest nonrenewable resource in the world." For example, unlike many other items—out of milk? go to the store; out of money? find a way to get more—he notes: "if you run out of time—you're done." 

"Time is limited, but desire is limitless" is an observation the author shared which likely resonates with so many who are pursuing questions about their family history. There is always something more we want to know, some new question that looms on the horizon of our latest family discovery. These are two facts in conflict which the book examines—and that those of us fascinated with pursuing our ancestors would benefit from considering, as well. While we have made considerable progress in unearthing our family's stories, there is always more work to be done.

Perhaps we can benefit from a tip in the book as Chris Guillebeau, an author known for his writing and speaking on entrepreneurship, considers what has come to be called "granny hobbies"—activities among which has been counted the pursuit of family history. Such activities, he explains, can bring us into a "flow state where time seems to feel more expansive." Noting a New York Times article on that very subject, he explains that such activities can be associated with "cognitive improvements related to both memory and attention." 

The main point that caught my eye in this section of Time Anxiety is this: doing such activities in groups—think knitting groups, quilting circles, book clubs—is not solely to execute the task, but to incorporate it into community. When we think of the quintessential avocational genealogist, we think of someone in pajamas and bunny slippers, hot cocoa in hand, holed up at home, feverishly scrolling through digitized documents long past midnight. What if we took a page from this chapter of Chris Guillebeau's book and considered genealogy to become a team effort, gathering to build family trees together?

Perhaps I can't take a detour away from genealogy without seeing applications which relate back to that endless pursuit of our family's long story throughout time. Every "granny hobby," as Guillebeau noted, has a "large ecosystem of teachers and practitioners." In the genealogy world, we certainly do. I'd like to see us energize that world even further—especially through local genealogical societies—by coming together in community to encourage each other as we discover more about our own families. That may well be our best option as an antidote to "time anxiety" for those of us who realize our family trees will never become "done." 

      

Exploring the Map

 

Now that we have several possible Miller names swirling about in this month's posts, it's time to take a different look at the possibilities: by exploring the map of Perry County, where those Miller relatives of my mother-in-law's brick-wall ancestor Lidia once lived. Geographic proximity can lend a sense of genealogical connection, and that's exactly what a plat map can provide.

Though finding such a map for Perry County in the 1840s—the point at which Lidia's family met with so much misfortune—would have helped, there was a plat map available online at the U.S. Library of Congress for 1859. Fine. I'll settle for that.

We've already seen that one property belonging to Jonathan Miller was described as the northwest quarter of section twelve in township seventeen and range seventeen. Based on the Public Land Survey System, which was historically a way to divide and describe public lands in the United States for eventual distribution, such a numbering system should make it easy for us to locate the property.    

Since Ohio was designated as a Federal Land State, a series of congressional laws established the process for doing so, eventually involving a rectangular survey system which divided and numbered land into a system of "townships," each township containing thirty six square miles. From that point, each township was divided into thirty six "sections," each containing 640 acres.

From that point, each section was numbered in a specific order, beginning with the northeast corner section, then proceeding across the six sections of the top row of the map's grid to the northwest corner section, then dropping down one row and snaking back in the opposite direction to continue the numbering system. 

Visualizing that sequence may seem complicated, until you view a diagram like this one at FamilySearch,  which makes everything much clearer—and should help me find Jonathan Miller's property in section twelve. 

Well, let me interject one caveat to that crystal-clear diagram: it helps to know that, when Perry County was established in 1818, the land system required the neighboring county of Fairfield to give up two rows of sections to complete the township of Reading, the precise place where Jonathan Miller's property ended up being designated after the reorganization.

Looking at the 1859 plat map I found at the Library of Congress, you can follow the PLSS numbering system across the northernmost row of sections, from right to left, section one through six. After section number six, though, there are two more unexpected sections continuing in that same row, oddly numbered out of sequence from section seven to what appears to be another section two. Drop down one more row from that additional section two, and we snake around to the other direction, beginning with what was obviously another added-on section, numbered section eleven.

Following that, in logical sequence—but only for that one section—is the section twelve we've been seeking for Jonathan Miller's property. Indeed, in 1859, the 139 acre parcel of land was labeled "J. Miller." Along with the label of his land, we see familiar names among his neighboring land owners: Anspach and Spohn, a surname which eventually married in to the Miller line.

From that point, the numbering system reverts to the usual PLSS system: sections 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and—strangely—another section 12.

If I hadn't found that explanation of the aberration when setting up Perry County's original land holdings upon the county's founding, it would have been puzzling to try and locate the Miller property. Likewise, finding Jonathan's other property, listed as the southwest quarter of section one, should have been directly above section twelve, if we followed the established numbering system.

Sometimes, despite such orderly systems for naming and describing land, it helps to know a bit more of what the locals already knew. 

Notes From Long Ago

 

Sometimes, the old trumps the new. In the case of reading nineteenth century headstones, I'd take a seventy-two year old transcription any day, so when I found just that, I sat down for a good read.

My question lately has been, "Where was Lidia Miller Gordon buried?" It was not with her Catholic husband and in-laws, apparently. When I discovered a number of Miller family members buried in a humble, farmland-based burial ground in Perry County's Reading Township, I thought I'd take a look around.

While Find A Grave has photos of many of the still-legible headstones in the Binkley Cemetery—like Lidia's possible brother, Jonathan Miller—the earliest burials have suffered the ravages of time, weather, and unkind trespassers. Fortunately, while I was looking online at FamilySearch.org/labs for any documents to resolve my research dilemma about Lidia, one search result produced a transcription of Binkley Cemetery headstones.

The beauty of this discovery was that, though they are mere typewritten transcriptions of the engraved headstones, they represent work done in 1953—a full seventy two years ago. Granted, 1953 is a long time after the first burials occurred in that cemetery in 1810, but it is still a vantage point much earlier than our present day.

I thought I'd take a look, line by line, page by page. Job number one was to keep an eye out for any mention of Lidia Miller Gordon, my mother-in-law's brick wall second great-grandmother. There were indeed a number of Millers recorded in that transcription, so now that I've created a Miller Network through my Ancestry ProTools, I'll be careful to add those entries into the appropriate places as I build out the Miller Network. Every bit of detail helps.

The FamilySearch entry continued for several pages. While organized alphabetically by surname, it appeared to cluster information pertaining to family plots. Thus, I could find the cluster for Jonathan Miller's family, and, just below that on the same page, a grouping for Michael Miller's family, another family which might be considered relatives to Lidia. In addition, there was a set of burials listed for the Dupler family, likely a connection to Jonathan Miller's wife Catherine, who was herself born a Dupler.

No matter how helpful it was to find this seventy two year old cemetery transcription, there was one detail missing: any sign of a burial for Lidia Miller, wife of William Gordon.

Taking a Cue From the Cemetery

 

Sometimes, assumptions can sneak up on us. That was what was fixin' to fool me in this process of seeking Lidia Miller, the young mother who died in 1840. Unable to find any further information on her, I reached outward to the rest of her possible family relations in search of clues to solve Lidia's riddle.

Lidia's husband, William Gordon, died at the end of the same year in which he had lost Lidia: on Christmas Eve in 1840. As would be expected for a member of the Gordon family, William was buried in the Catholic Cemetery in nearby Somerset, a village within the Reading Township where we had found him listed in the 1840 census. Likewise for William and Lidia's baby, also named William—and, unsurprisingly, so were William's own parents, the senior William and his second wife, Mary Cain Gordon. From that, a natural assumption would be to take a cue from these burials and assume that younger William's wife Lidia would be buried in the same cemetery.

Wrong.

Well, at least it seems to be a wrong assumption. I can't find Lidia's final resting place, as of this point. But what I did find was surprising—surprising enough, that is, to make me doubt the connection between Lidia and her supposed Miller relatives, Jonathan and his wife, the former Catherine Dupler. You see, with all the family burials at Holy Trinity Cemetery, it was easy to assume that Lidia would also be Catholic. Perhaps she wasn't.

Now that we've found Jonathan Miller, a possible brother or cousin to Lidia, according to DNA matches, I followed him to his final resting place, a cemetery in New Reading called simply Binkley Cemetery. With a name like that, it would be easy to assume this was just a family's private burial grounds within their farm property. Perhaps that might have been true at one point. However, Find A Grave now notes over one hundred seventy memorials posted for this cemetery, with burial dates ranging from the namesake ancestor Johann Jacob Binckley's burial in 1810 through the most recent burial noted in 1947.

Not surprisingly, included with several of those burials in the Binkley Cemetery were headstones for the Miller surname. Perhaps seeing a couple by the name of Binkley—Samuel and Elizabeth—residing in Jonathan's household in the 1860 census may have been my first hint, though at the time I discovered that, I hadn't yet made any connection between the two families.

In addition to Jonathan and his family, however, the Binkley Cemetery's burials included another Miller family, that of Michael Miller and his wife Mary. Mary, if we can rely on the notes posted on her Find A Grave memorial, was born a Binkley.

Michael, according to the age given on his headstone, was likely born in 1812. That year of birth would put Michael too young to have been Lidia's father. Considering Jonathan Miller's burial in the same small cemetery and the fact that Binkley family members once lived in Jonathan's home, I'd consider that a suggestion that Michael and Jonathan might have been brothers.

That makes one useful cue gleaned from this burial discovery. But the final clue I gained from discovering this burial spot was the reminder that at least Jonathan and Michael Miller were not practicing Catholics. If Lidia turns out to have been their sister, despite her marriage to a Catholic resident of the same township, that means I would have to look elsewhere to find those useful documents we rely on for genealogical information prior to itemized census records and civil birth records.

Whether such records are still in existence—or even whether I can discover what faith these families adhered to—remains a big question. The consistency of Catholic baptismal records has certainly been a benefit to me in researching this Gordon family's past. Stepping outside the faith may leave me with no recorded options at all. 

Hacking Into the Network

 

It may have been the shortcut of DNA testing which revealed just who the relatives of brick wall ancestor Lidia Miller might have been, but we are still missing the specific details I am after. Sure, Lidia might have been related to Jonathan Miller—as well as being his neighbor in Perry County, Ohio—but we can't be sure just how they were related. Siblings? Cousins? We need to get down to a more granular level with these Miller family DNA matches, yet the documentation doesn't seem to be there.

There is one other way that keeps calling us back, though: cluster research. This is our call to return to that network of those who knew each other best: the Miller family's traveling partners who made the journey with them to the frontier of Ohio in the early 1800s. While we as researchers may not have the convenience of birth or death certificates from that time period—let alone census records naming each member of the household—we still need to find a way to hack into that network of relatives and traveling partners who accompanied each other into the (very risky) wilds of the frontier. 

Face it: this was not the time period in which one's future grandfather hopped onto his Harley to check out the chicks hanging out in the town square, one county away. Getting around was slow and ponderous, took planning, and required security measures. Those whom you knew—and trusted—became an essential element in your immigration plan. And wherever our ancestors went, those Friends, Associates, and Neighbors—or F.A.N. Club for short—were sure to go, as well.

Though we're into our third full week of chasing information on young Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother who lived only long enough to marry and give birth to two sons, we have little to show for our efforts. We have discovered that Lidia's one surviving son, Adam Gordon, was named in his paternal grandfather's will—but we have not been as successful in finding a similar mention in the will of a maternal grandfather. We traced the records for a Miller neighbor of Lidia and her husband, William Gordon, in hopes of discovering any relationship, and then, hopefully, finding his parents' names. DNA matches tip us off that Lidia and Jonathan Miller were indeed related, based on the DNA of their descendants. But that doesn't confirm the exact relationship.

Following land records, we can see that Jonathan's property once was owned by someone named Adam Onsbaugh—or Anspach—who eventually deeded the land to a daughter, who married a Dupler. And discovering that Jonathan's own wife was born a Dupler dangles yet another tantalizing hint before our eyes.

Thus, we have Duplers related to Anspaches, and Duplers related to Millers, but how the Millers relate to each other, I can't yet uncover. Still, knowing how important those networks were to early immigrant settlers, I'm convinced there has to be a connection. After all, the population of the entire county in 1820—well over a decade after Adam "Onsbaugh" acquired his property—was only eight thousand people. Back then, people stuck with those they knew. And those they knew were often family members.

To hack into that network—those friends, associates, and neighbors—will take following those other surnames which seem to keep re-appearing, every time I research Jonathan or Lidia Miller. The ultimate goal will be to zero in on parents' names for either Jonathan or Lidia, of course, but it may take us around in more circles before we close in on the answer—if, indeed, we can do so before the end of this month.  

Finding the Fastest Route

 

While I've been taking the long way around my genealogical problem—finding the parents of Lidia Miller in Perry County, Ohio—there is a speedier way to find my answer...maybe. The fastest route, it seems, would be to follow the suggestions at ThruLines, Ancestry's tool for connecting DNA matches.

Granted, ThruLines has an Achilles Heel of its own: suggestions are based, in part, on the family trees posted by subscribers. As we all can see, some trees are more accurate than others, hence the need for caution for anyone using this approach. But if the trees used are all correct—and adequately documented, I might add—it's worth following the family line from a shared ancestor down to the present-day DNA match.

In Lidia Miller's case—that unfortunate young woman who lost her life after giving birth to her second child in 1840—there is a suggestion for her father. While I've already looked at the documents available for this possible father—Ancestry suggests a man named Jacob Miller—the difficulty with that suggestion is that there may be more than one resident of Perry County with that name.

However, ThruLines also suggests a possible sibling for Lidia, for whom there are five possible DNA matches.

Granted, looking for DNA matches sharing an ancestor that many generations back in time—this would be my husband's fourth great-grandfather who was possible parent of both Lidia and the assumed brother—stretches into the murky area of the tiniest of shared genetic segments. In other words, the connections could border on coincidence—either from Perry County's notoriously high incidence of intermarriage of family lines over generations, or from the possibility of all the matches coming from the same geographic origin.

In what seems like a coincidence of its own, the suggested brother for Lidia turns out to be one and the same as the Jonathan Miller I've already been tracing this month. He was my first candidate to include in my "Millers of Perry County" Network on Ancestry's ProTools. While I am still following the ownership of that property which was mentioned in Jonathan Miller's will, a far quicker process would be to explore what can be documented on these five DNA matches descending from Jonathan Miller.

Looking at those five matches, right away I could eliminate two of them. One match was a person whom I had previously examined as part of my mother-in-law's Gordon line—the same line as Lidia's husband, William Gordon, descends from—who also had Snyders intermarried into that line of descent. Even if this match was descended from Jonathan Miller, that information wouldn't tell me much.

The other match had a line of descent outlined by ThruLines which I couldn't replicate by documentation, so I discarded that possibility.

However, there were three other DNA matches. I followed each one's line of descent, as outlined by ThruLines, being careful to find several documents confirming the connections. Again, despite the paper trail seemingly nodding yes to this connection, each DNA match is quite distant, containing one small segment for each match shared. Better yet, using ProTools to view shared matches of these Miller candidates, I then identified several other matches descending from this same Jonathan Miller line.

Does this point to a confirmation for Lidia and Jonathan? Possibly. But that still means identifying the right Jonathan and confirming who his father was. While DNA might have been the fastest way to speed up the process, it still requires verification by those monotonous plodding trips through the paper trail.

Reminiscing — And Reusing

 

The other day, I ran across an article on Family Tree Magazine about RootsWeb, the "granddaddy of genealogy websites." For those of us who wandered the site frequently in those early days of online genealogy, the forums and information posted could be useful—sometimes essential. Thinking about those old websites launched me into a reverie of reminiscing—but not so long that I didn't heed the article's advice to remember to check it out now.

Even though RootsWeb is frozen in time, due to the evolution of computing leaving this technological dinosaur vulnerable to hacks, there is still much that can be accessed. Remembering those many useful posts I had found there on Perry County, Ohio, resources, I thought it might be worth my while to give it a look, via a site-specific Google search. 

What I remembered finding back then were burial records transcribed from decades ago when headstones weren't quite so faded, and researchers who had hand-entered data from handwritten records. I had saved some of these resources to my own computer, in the prescient fear of maybe someday seeing the site go down, but others which I hadn't saved could have come in handy now, in my current search for Adam Gordon's mother, Lidia Miller, before her untimely death.

I did find some notes readable, including a post reminding me to check out the history of the early Catholic Church in Perry County. One entry pointed to Internet Archive, which now hosts the digitized version of the A. A. Graham tome, History of Fairfield and Perry Counties, with its listing of early church members. Someone named Adam Gordon was listed among those early members of the church, though I doubt it was our Adam Gordon. Still, it was informative to page through the 1883 publication to see what was happening in this ancestral location so long ago. I'm keeping an eye out for any biographical sketches on Miller families, despite there being so many people by that name in Perry County.

Another link I found in my exploration brought me to a site from long ago called Ohio Genealogy Express. There, a page transcribed from another early Perry County history book laid out the brief history of the formation of each of the county's townships. Since Lidia's family and the Gordon family had settled in Reading Township, I took a look at the explanation there. Apparently, Reading Township was originally established prior to the formation of Perry County. When that reorganization took place in 1818, two rows of sections which originally were in Fairfield County's Richland Township were now added to complete Reading Township as part of the new Perry County. Knowing this may help explain the location of the original land purchased by Adam "Onsbaugh" in 1806, long before Perry County was even in existence.

I'll probably continue to search through the potpourri of material still accessible through the old RootsWeb and other old genealogy websites. After all, someone once knew the details that now have me puzzled. You can be sure that someone once knew the names of Lidia Miller's parents and siblings. Sometimes, that F.A.N. Club concept is useful for that very reason: someone out there once knew the answer. The key is finding just where that someone stashed that missing kernel of truth.

Meanwhile, on the Miller Side

 

While the routine grunt work of plowing through Anspach records continues in the background—not the scintillating reading material one would prefer—I thought I'd wander over to the other side of the family representing my mother-in-law's Miller roots in Perry County, Ohio. While I seldom like to pay attention to hints copied from other people's trees, I thought just this once, I'd explore a suggestion about mystery ancestor Lidia Miller's possible father.

The suggestion, from ThruLines, was to look for someone named Jacob Miller. Since there was a Jacob Miller listed in the 1820 census in Reading Township, the same place in Perry County where Lidia and her husband William Gordon lived, that was as good a place to start with this suggestion as any.

Though the age brackets used for the 1820 census aren't very helpful for our purposes—the adult age bracket stretches from age twenty six through forty four—I first wanted to check for signs of a young daughter. Indeed, there was one, though the bracket included all girls under ten. Since Lidia died early in 1840, not even two years after her marriage, I have no way to know how old she was. However, we can safely guess she was about twenty when married, putting her birth before 1820, and thus within that "under ten" age bracket for Jacob Miller's 1820 census readout.

At the same time I noticed the one girl in the Jacob Miller household, I spotted three sons, also under ten years of age. Could one of them have been Jonathan Miller, the one whose property we've been following this past week? Hard to say at this point, though the broad age bracket could include both Lidia and Jonathan, as he appears from other records to have been almost ten years Lidia's senior. 

Using Ancestry.com's ProTools, I'm building a Miller network which includes all three of these Millers from Reading Township, just to have a place to park all my discoveries on this possible F.A.N. Club. But as I stockpile records on Jacob Miller from Perry County's Reading Township, I begin to notice a few detracting details. One is that there may have been more than one Jacob Miller in the neighborhood. And for this particular Jacob Miller in the 1850 census, his arrival in America was not only after having married, but just before the birth of his sixteen year old daughter Margaret.

In other words, the Jacob Miller in the 1850 census couldn't have been the Jacob Miller of the 1820 census. 

Tracking the Tract

 

Some research processes take time, and this month's pursuit of possible relatives of my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother Lidia Miller has led me to unexpected resources—which requires time to unfold the winding trail.

The trail follows a tract of land more than it does the person who owned the land. We first found that land described in Jonathan Miller's precise stipulations included in his 1866 will. That document pointed to the southwest quarter of section one, and the northwest quarter of section twelve in township seventeen and range seventeen in Perry County, Ohio.

We first traced that land back to the original owner through the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records, a man identified as Adam Onsbaugh but likely one and the same as Adam Anspach. Now, it was time to see what other mentions could be found for that land description in other legal documents. Since not every document has been digitized and placed online, I first tried my hand at a collection of will abstracts from the old book, Gateway to the West, which is now online at Ancestry.com.

I searched for entries for the surname Anspach without any success, and was about to look for the alternate spelling of Onsbaugh, when my eye caught an entry for Adam Ausbach. Most likely the result of a transcription error—the book did mention something about the text being in German—"Auspach" could merely have been the result of a more European style of writing the letter "n" like the letter "u."

The abstract outlined the names of the will's legatees. The sons included Anspach names I had found in the 1840 census, helping to tie the family unit together. The more helpful part, though, was identifying the daughters by their married names, including the given name of each daughter's husband.

Right away, I spotted one name: Elizabeth Dupler, wife of Philip. It was not lost on me that Jonathan Miller—the possible relative of Lidia Miller who had first gotten me started on this chase—had married a Dupler. Any relationship? You bet I'd go following this trail.

My next step was to turn to FamilySearch.org's Full Text search, where I entered "Adam Anspach" as my search term, adding a keyword "Dupler." Because the Gateway to the West book had given 1833 as the date Adam Anspach's will was drawn up, I set the date parameters rather narrow, to limit the results.

Without including the description of the tract of land I was tracing in my search terms, almost immediately a search result popped up with that precise property description. In that document, Adam Anspach sold that specific property to Elizabeth Dupler for one hundred dollars.

This, of course, caused me to wonder whether Jonathan Miller's wife, Catherine Dupler, might be daughter of Elizabeth Dupler, who in turn was daughter of Adam Anspach, the likely original owner of that parcel. Nothing is ever easy, though. It sounded like a reasonable premise, but you know I had to do some additional checking to see what other documents could connect the two Dupler women.

Circling Back Again

 

The saying that everyone in Perry County is related to each other may be a concept that has roots which reach generationally deep. Or maybe that is a description which keeps circling back again. In seeking family connections for Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother, I'm starting to see the same surnames pop up, generation after generation.

When we considered the original owner of the land which Jonathan Miller willed to his two sons in 1866—a man by the name of Adam Onsbaugh—that chase led us to another similar name: Adam Anspach. In the same census record where we first found Jonathan Miller's entry on the same page as Lidia's husband William Gordon—the 1840 census—we not only found mention of someone named Adam Anspach, but David, Christian, and Benjamin, as well.

That wasn't the only place where the surname Anspach popped up. I had seen it in Jonathan Miller's own will. Only problem was, this time the mentions had to do with Jonathan's daughters.

The 1866 Miller will had granted Jonathan's two sons fairly equal portions of his land, but to his five daughters, he had stipulated that his sons pay them (or their heirs) $650 each. Fortunately for us, Jonathan mentioned each daughter by name: Mary Elizabeth Crist, Belvida Anspach (for whom her portion was to pass to her children), Barbara Anspach, and Catherine and Isabella Miller.

Adding these two daughters to the Miller family tree who had married men surnamed Anspach had me looking forward to the next generation, but it didn't take long for me to circle back again to the generation preceding Jonathan's own time. Jonathan's daughter Barbara had married someone named Leander Anspach in Perry County on November 28, 1852. And Jonathan's deceased daughter—whose name apparently turned out to be Belinda, according to her 1864 headstone—once again had her name mauled in her 1847 marriage record, which stated that Malinda Miller had married Adam Anspach.

What's interesting about that Adam Anspach—in addition to ringing the bell for us with that same name we had seen one generation earlier—is that he was son of a man named John Adam Anspach, whose namesake father, Johann Adam Anspach, was of an age to have been the 1806 purchaser of the property we have been chasing.

These details have indeed kept me running in circles. Granted, this is merely a simple sketch of possible relationships, and details need to be inspected more closely. But no different than the many intermarriages I've witnessed from my mother-in-law's parents' generation in Perry County, the tradition seems to have been far more deeply rooted than just during that time period.

That brings up another question. If Jonathan Miller was related to the original Adam "Onsbaugh" Anspach, what was the exact connection? And more pertinent to my search for Lidia Miller's roots, does she even connect with Jonathan Miller's family at all? After all, we can't lose sight of the original research goal that led me down this circling trail.

Think Phonetically

 

The search for Adam Onsbaugh was on. I had found him in the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records as the 1806 owner of a parcel of land which bore the same township, range, and section number as the property which, years later, Jonathan Miller was bequeathing to his two sons. Could I find any other records on this man?

I probably wouldn't have launched such a search, if it hadn't been for the unknown roots of my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother. Also bearing the surname Miller, Lidia had become the wife of William H. Gordon; after the couple's untimely deaths in Perry County, Ohio, their orphaned son Adam was raised by his paternal grandmother, herself a widow by that point. To connect Lidia to her past meant exploring any possible connections through the friends, associates, or neighbors surrounding the unfortunate young family. Searching Miller neighbors was one approach to this cluster research method.

Land owner Adam Onsbaugh, I reasoned, must be somehow connected to that Miller F.A.N. Club, and I needed to at least examine who he might have been. Could the Millers and Gordons have migrated en masse from Pennsylvania with Adam Onsbaugh? Did they know him in the past, and thus get inspired to follow his migration trail west to Ohio? I had to at least find him in the census records in Perry County to learn a bit more about this pioneer settler.

Searching for Adam in the 1810 census—the first enumeration after he acquired his land in Ohio—presented a problem. Perry County itself was not a county until 1818. The county was formed from portions of Fairfield, Washington, and Muskingum counties. Thus when the Land Office Records identified the location of the Onsbaugh property as Perry County, they were apparently identifying that land by current jurisdiction, not the county in existence in 1806. So I wouldn't have been surprised if no  Adam Onsbaugh showed up in the 1810 census in Perry County—but there was no one by that name listed in the entire state of Ohio.

No matter; let's fast forward to the 1820 census. There, I did find an Adam Onsbaugh in nearby Hocking County, but no one with that spelling in Perry County. However, there were two other listings: one for Adam Onspough, and another one for someone named John Onspough, both in Reading Township where our Jonathan Miller eventually lived.

I moved further on to the 1830 census, where I found several others with similar spelling variations. All in the same Reading Township, I found someone named John Anspaugh heading up one page of the census, and several others listed two pages earlier. All with that same surname spelling, they were David, Christian, Adam, and Benjamin.

Could Onsbaugh be the same as Anspaugh? I barely had time to consider that, when the 1840 census brought me more discoveries. There was a Benjamin and an Adam Anspach listed, again in Reading Township—in fact, on the same page which launched us on this journey when I discovered William Gordon's listing on the same page as "Johnathan" Miller. 

If you think about this morphing surname situation phonetically, it seems quite possible. We started with Onsbaugh. Realizing that several languages pronounce the letter "a" more like an "ahh," it could be possible that an "Onsbaugh" could also have been spelled "Ansbaugh." Then, too, the guttural ending, "gh" could seem similar to some ears as the German rendition of the ending "ch" and thus be substituted in spelling. Thus, we could move from Onsbaugh to Ansbaugh to Anspauch—and possible even to Anspach, as we saw in the 1840 census, all by thinking phonetically.

I couldn't help but notice the Find A Grave memorial for one Johann Adam Anspach, buried in Somerset—the town in Perry County surrounded by Reading Township—in 1838. The sponsored memorial includes a listing of his many possible children, including married names for the daughters. Though this list would represent descendants from a generation removed from our Jonathan Miller, I couldn't help but notice some similarities from names listed in a previous page of another document I had already been reviewing: Jonathan Miller's own will.  

Searching for Seventeens

 

I admit: searching for Millers in Ohio can be a challenge. Even searching for Millers during the earliest years of Ohio statehood can overload a researcher with too many search options—more specifically, with false leads. Yet, here I am, armed with the description of the land in Perry County which Jonathan Miller willed to his two sons at the end of 1866, trying to find a record of how, years before, he himself had received the land.

My thinking was rather straightforward. If Jonathan Miller did happen to be a sibling of the brick wall ancestor I've been seeking—Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother—then discovering how he obtained his property might reveal his relatives. And possibly hers.

Jonathan Miller's will identified what appears to have been two parcels, one on the northwest quarter of section twelve, the other on the southwest quarter of section one. Both were identified as being in township seventeen and range seventeen.

My first thought was to check the records at the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records. Just in case it wasn't a laughable idea, my first search there was for any land in Perry County obtained by someone named Miller. There were plenty of options—two pages of listings, in fact, none of which belonged to someone named Jonathan Miller. 

Remembering Jonathan Miller's mention of one parcel of land having once been where "Shelly Dupler had resided," I wondered whether that was the former owner of the Miller land, and searched for the Dupler surname. After all, Jonathan's wife was born a Dupler. Though Dupler was a surname far less common than the overwhelming Miller surname, that search for land records brought up absolutely zero results.

I noticed that the Land Office search results had some columns which, by clicking on the heading, could be sorted in number order. Township and Range were both sortable. I clicked, looking for seventeens. Nothing came up, except for one parcel registered to a man named John Miller in 1809. Though it might have been possible that our Jonathan Miller could have identified himself as "Jon" Miller for short—and thus be mistakenly transcribed as John—I already knew from his entry in the 1840 census that he would have still been a child in 1809.

Rather than manipulate the spread sheet aspect of the file, I tried something else. The Land Office records could also be searched specifically by location. Keeping the main "location" state entry as "Ohio," I scrolled down on the "search documents" landing page to the section labeled "Land Description," and entered my information there. For township, I entered seventeen; likewise for range. For section, I entered twelve. And clicked on "Search Patents." That was it.

Only one result came up for my search: not a property owned by anyone named Miller, but a parcel obtained in November of 1806 by a man named Adam Onsbaugh.

My next question was: could it be worth my while to search for this new surname? Would it lead me to any helpful information about Jonathan Miller—or, more importantly, to my brick wall ancestor Lidia Miller? While it seemed strangely similar to one of those wild rabbit trail diversions, it was worth a try to check it out.

One Hundred Years Ago

 

Much as some people might celebrate a friend's birthday—say, their fortieth, or some other mere decade's amount of life—by buying a reprint of the front page of that exact day's newspaper, I thought I'd do the same today for my mother. Today would have been her birthday, one hundred years ago, and I was curious to see what the world might have held for her family that day.

Since my mother was born in a tiny farm town called Oelwein, Iowa, I couldn't pull up any copies of the local paper from archival collections. Perhaps there wasn't any local newspaper. After all, at the time, Oelwein boasted not quite eight thousand residents, although ever since the arrival of the railroads there at the turn of the century, it had seen a growth spurt. To read the news of the day, I had to rely on the publication at Cedar Rapids, an hour's commute to the south.

There, The Evening Gazette focused mainly on leftover news from a recuperating Europe after the Great War had subsided. Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, inaugurated that day as President of the German Republic, made three separate appearances on the Gazette's front page, as did French General Charles Mangin, who died that very day. Lawsuits and murder trials rounded out the day's news, as well as an announcement of big plans to bring a replica of Cheyenne, Wyoming's Frontier Days to town. To round out the day's news, an ominous mention of a bank failure in nearby Mason City, juxtaposed with reports of the state's banking situation being "in fine condition," pointed to history yet to be made.

My grandparents' brief stay in Oelwein—a railroad center grown out of a corn field bought from the town's namesake farmer—was an odd juxtaposition of my grandfather's current employment and my grandmother's oddly out-of-place roots as a southern lady whose impetuous marriage to a tall, dark, and handsome eligible bachelor brought her where she never expected to be. The stories of those farm-based days when my mother was born I know well. After all, it was my mother who passed on the family stories from her own relatives; why not share stories of her own parents' lives? But the stories providing the context of her young life and what blend of news mixed to create her own social environment I hadn't before explored.

Sometimes, in addition to gaining the right details about birth dates and places and the names to which they belong, it is helpful to spend a moment surrounded in the news of the day. To see what has yet to come down the road for an ancestor—those newsworthy items which to us are "old news"—can open up new vistas to us and help gain an appreciation for what shaped those family members from past eras.

Above: Headlines from the front page of the May 12, 1925, Cedar Rapids newspaper, The Evening Gazette; image courtesy of newspapers.com. 

Mother's Day Takes the Lead

 

If genealogy were a race, in my case I'd say the moms take the lead. I can't yet be sure, however, whether it's my mother's tree that's out ahead or my mother-in-law's tree.

Right now, I've been working on one brick wall ancestor in my mother-in-law's tree: her second great-grandmother Lidia Miller, wife of William B. Gordon of Perry County, Ohio. However, don't let that "brick wall" status give you any notions of stalled forward motion. I've been working every angle I can on this roadblock, trying to do an end run around Lidia. I'm hoping DNA will play a part in unraveling this mystery.

Of course, with an advanced Mother's Day gift to myself—Ancestry.com's ProTools addition to my subscription—I've had some additional tools to play with, and I've been running comparisons on every DNA match I can find. Using the ProTools Shared Matches option, I've been flagging each close relative of those ThruLines matches and then adding them to my mother-in-law's tree, as well.

End result? I'm still on a tear with that Gordon and Miller line. In the past two weeks, I've added 500 more individuals to my in-laws' tree, which now has 38,871 researched people. Many of them are ancestors leading to newly-discovered DNA matches. Others are collateral lines filled with people just waiting to fulfill their role as connectors for more DNA matches to come.

That's not the only progress made in these past two weeks. While I was showing a fellow genealogy society member what I've been finding with ProTools, I tested out the Shared Matches option on my own tree. And voila! A recent DNA connection resulted in adding thirty four new individuals to my own mother's line, so I now have 40,257 people in my own tree.

It's a race. But I concede; my mother-in-law's tree grows far faster, thanks to those large Catholic families who settled in rural Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota. Though the count of DNA tests potentially linked to that tree are much less than mine—my DNA match count is a bit over twice the size of my in-laws' results—the sheer number of family members over the generations makes my in-laws' tree a robust one, indeed.

We have three more weeks before we move on to the last of my mother-in-law's Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, and then we'll shift to my father-in-law's side of their family tree. It will be interesting to see how much that tree grows between now and then. For the past two biweekly reports, the tree has been growing at a clip of about five hundred individuals for each report sequence. Three more reports at that rate would add another 1,500 names to that tree—at which point, the in-laws' tree will indeed take the lead.

Speed, however, is not the point of this exercise. While it may take learning the personal history of every Miller who lived in Perry County before 1850, the result will hopefully be that the end of the month brings us an answer to the question, Who were the parents of Lidia Miller Gordon? That's one young mother about whom I'd like to learn so much more.

A Point of Digression

 

Would you even realize it if you had crossed paths with a fourth cousin? How about a third cousin? Some people aren't even aware of who their second cousins are—but now that some of us are using DNA testing to round out our family tree, we are growing an awareness of these distant relatives.

This weekend, I'm taking a break from the search for Lidia Miller's parents, that seemingly orphaned second great-grandmother to my mother-in-law. Instead, I've jumped to her husband's line, whose parents I do know about, in hopes of discovering even the tiniest hints about their extended family. After all, this being a community of early settlers in Perry County, Ohio—a place known for its many intermarried lines over the generations—there could be another connection to that mysterious Miller family coming at me from a different angle.

My approach right now has been to work off the suggestions at Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, and trace each descendant listed from the selected ancestor. Working with the line of William B. Gordon, Lidia's father-in-law, I zeroed in on his children from his second wife only, since that is the line from which Lidia's husband was born.

While that may sound particularly restrictive to you, keep in mind that William B. Gordon had eight children, including Lidia's husband William H. Gordon—and that was just the family from his second marriage (he had eleven more with his first wife).

And so the work begins. From each child, beginning with the oldest, I add that child's marriage and descendants to my mother-in-law's family tree. Then I move on to the second-born of William B. Gordon's children, adding each descendant in that line. Eventually, I've laid out a basic working descendancy chart for William B's progeny, from which I can then plug in DNA matches in their proper place in the extended family tree.

Yesterday, I was working on William's daughter Susan, who married David Hewitt in 1846. While the Hewitts had seven children (at least that I can find), when it comes to current-day DNA matches, there were none showing on the ThruLines chart. Curious, I worked my way through the descendants for this couple—and that is where I spotted one of those rabbit-trail-worthy points of digression.

Susan Gordon Hewitt had a granddaughter, Grace Doyle, who was a second cousin to my mother-in-law's own grandmother. This Grace married a man considerably older than she was at the time. For that fifty three year old man, it was his second marriage.

Like so many people from rural Perry County, Grace's parents had chosen to move to a big city. First to Cleveland, where Grace was born, the young family eventually moved to the state capital, Columbus, a city not more than an hour's travel from Perry County. Likewise, Grace's future husband eventually moved from his native West Virginia to Columbus, and there they married.

Looking closely over the details in that 1931 marriage license, an unusual entry jumped out at me: Grace's intended—a man by the name of Harry Westerman—listed his occupation as cartoonist. I thought finding that occupation listed was rather unusual—and that's where the rabbit trail beguiled me.

With a quick check at Google, I found very little on the man, but the search did lead me to some illustrations at Wikimedia Commons. For one, there was a line drawing labeled as Harry J. Westerman, attributed to an entry in a 1904 book, The Art of Caricature.

Quick! To Internet Archive to see whether anyone had uploaded the now-public domain book. Yes! There it was, with the same image visible on page 173. Whether that was a drawing by Mr. Westerman or one portraying his likeness, I couldn't tell from the information, but the trail was getting warmer.

Looking for the man's biography—after all, there must have been some reason why he was mentioned in a book, right?—I found very little at first. But each step opened up a glimpse of a possible second step. Moving along the research path can help, even one step at a time.

Since the 1904 Grant Wright book had attributed Mr. Westerman's work to a publication called the Ohio State Journal, I tried searching through the usual newspaper collections we use for genealogy work. With no luck at two different subscription sites, I turned to the Internet search engines again, and found the Journal uploaded to the website "Ohio Memory," a collaboration of the Ohio History Connection and the State Library of Ohio.

There, searching the newspaper collection for the name "Harry Westerman" plus the publication title, I found one example of the man's work as a cartoonist from January 30, 1909. Digital collections at the Columbus Metropolitan Library informed me that H. J. Westerman began his career with the Ohio State Journal in 1897.

Working in a state in which there was "so much political activity and strife," as Wright's 1904 Art of Caricature book observed, perhaps it is no surprise to discover that Westerman the cartoonist targeted political topics. Of course, from my vantage point of having just stumbled across this rabbit trail, I had no idea of the political interests of Ohioans at the launch of the twentieth century, but when I read the report of Harry Westerman's sudden demise—he died of a heart attack en route with his family to New York City—and saw his death covered in newspapers from the nation's capital to rural Iowa, that research excursion led me to find at least one of his books.

Called simply, A Book of Cartoons, the 124-page collection of Westerman's work, now in the public domain, is easily viewed at Hathi Trust.

After exploring this man's life story—not to mention his tangential connection to my mother-in-law's family—I had to take a look. Not that I have any knowledge of the back story for the political commentary flowing from his pen via newspapers of the time, I still was curious to get more of a sense of who this person was, and to imagine what his family must have gone through on that train trip to New York which, unbeknownst to them, was Harry Westerman's final journey.

I think so many times about that "sound advice" to develop research questions and stick with research plans—but then I realize how much I'd miss if I heeded that advice. There will always be tomorrow to look further into Lidia Miller's kin, but when a story unexpectedly presents itself with more questions than answers, I simply can't resist turning aside to chase that target.

Last Wishes — With Precise Details

 

When Jonathan Miller drew up his will in Perry County, Ohio, on December 7 of 1866, he provided a small gift to future generations of curious genealogists by the insertion of one particular stipulation. He wanted not only to leave a specific piece of property to two of his sons, but to personally ensure that the boundaries of each split portion be designated precisely as he wished.

To that end, Jonathan not only provided the verbal description of each surveyed lot, but sketched in the lines of the perimeter for each parcel: the north section to his son Andrew, and most of the southern portion to his son John, with the exception of a small section alongside John's portion also designated for Andrew.

The gift to us—particularly for our purposes in finding the roots of this Jonathan Miller, and hopefully his connection to my mother-in-law's ancestor, Lidia Miller Gordon—is the description of the property. Not so much the landmarks—the surveyor's notes running from a maple tree to a hickory tree, then to a beech tree, then ash, and finally elm—but the legal description is what I'm seeking. 

Just from the fine print in this document, I can see mention of possible family connections. Before I had even found the marriage record for Jonathan and Catherine—she was formerly a Dupler—I had spotted one mention in Jonathan's will. Noting Jonathan Miller's mention of a particular acre of land "on the north side of the Columbus road" which once had been "the same lot on which Shelly Dupler had resided," I had wondered even then if this was a sign pointing to a relative.

With the land described as being part of the northwest quarter of section twelve, and also part of the southwest quarter of section one in township seventeen and range seventeen, I now have some details that might help trace the ownership of this parcel back through the years. If I'm fortunate, this could reveal the name of the owner from whom Jonathan originally obtained the land. Better yet, it might reveal another relative from a previous generation—maybe even help us discover the identity of Jonathan's father.

Diagram above from 1868 will of Jonathan Miller of Perry County, Ohio, illustrating property subdivision; image courtesy FamilySearch.org; in the public domain.