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.