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.
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