Checking Out the Home Place

 

When facing a brick wall ancestor and finding no wiggle room from clues or other hopeful signs, my approach is to widen the spotlight when peering into the murky darkness. For Lidia Miller, my research project for this month, that is the only choice I have at this point. I've found very little on her, other than a marriage license bearing her name. I even lack an actual record of her death, although the implication of her orphaned son, living with his paternal grandmother in 1850, suggests that Lidia did not live long.

For this weekend, I thought I'd broaden that search by exploring the place that Lidia called home. Shortly after Lidia's marriage to William H. Gordon on April 24, 1838, William did appear in the 1840 census, calling Reading Township of Perry County, Ohio, his home. If that was so, let's check out the home place that—at least for a few years during her brief life—Lidia called her home.

Perry County, which was established in 1818 as a county in the relatively new state of Ohio, was where William's extended Gordon family had settled after leaving Pennsylvania. While I am not sure yet how Lidia and the Miller family came to call the place home, I do know that, at the time of that one census showing the couple's own family in 1840, they lived in a county with a population not yet reaching twenty thousand people.

Perry County contains fourteen townships, of which Reading was the one where William Gordon had settled. Reading Township surrounds the village of Somerset, which was established over a decade before the county itself was formed. The area also contains Saint Joseph's Church, home of the first Catholic parish in the state of Ohio, formed to minister to pioneer Catholics who had traveled along Zane's Trace to settle in the vicinity in the earliest days of Ohio statehood.

Whether Lidia Miller's parents were among those first settlers to the area, I can't yet say, though years later, her son Adam Gordon reported that his mother had been born in Ohio. I don't even know yet whether Lidia was herself Catholic, though a memorial erected after the death of her infant son can be seen at a Catholic cemetery in the area.

Reading through an old history of the township, I can spot a few mentions of early settlers claiming the surname Miller, but of course, no mention to clue me in to which of them might have had a daughter named Lidia. The sense of it, however, suggests that many of the settlers there may have had a German origin, having most recently migrated there from Pennsylvania.

Taking a look at who was in the area, I started first with the very page upon which Lidia's husband's name had been entered in the 1840 census. I didn't have far to look before I ran across the name of another man by that surname Miller. Reported to have been a man in his thirties, apparently with a wife, four sons and three daughters, if "Johnathan" Miller were related to Lidia, he could have been an older brother. Then again, he could have been a cousin—or no relation whatsoever. To find out, though, we'll have to poke around in the dark to find anything more on this mystery ancestor.