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.
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