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.