Tracking the Tract

 

Some research processes take time, and this month's pursuit of possible relatives of my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother Lidia Miller has led me to unexpected resources—which requires time to unfold the winding trail.

The trail follows a tract of land more than it does the person who owned the land. We first found that land described in Jonathan Miller's precise stipulations included in his 1866 will. That document pointed to the southwest quarter of section one, and the northwest quarter of section twelve in township seventeen and range seventeen in Perry County, Ohio.

We first traced that land back to the original owner through the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records, a man identified as Adam Onsbaugh but likely one and the same as Adam Anspach. Now, it was time to see what other mentions could be found for that land description in other legal documents. Since not every document has been digitized and placed online, I first tried my hand at a collection of will abstracts from the old book, Gateway to the West, which is now online at Ancestry.com.

I searched for entries for the surname Anspach without any success, and was about to look for the alternate spelling of Onsbaugh, when my eye caught an entry for Adam Ausbach. Most likely the result of a transcription error—the book did mention something about the text being in German—"Auspach" could merely have been the result of a more European style of writing the letter "n" like the letter "u."

The abstract outlined the names of the will's legatees. The sons included Anspach names I had found in the 1840 census, helping to tie the family unit together. The more helpful part, though, was identifying the daughters by their married names, including the given name of each daughter's husband.

Right away, I spotted one name: Elizabeth Dupler, wife of Philip. It was not lost on me that Jonathan Miller—the possible relative of Lidia Miller who had first gotten me started on this chase—had married a Dupler. Any relationship? You bet I'd go following this trail.

My next step was to turn to FamilySearch.org's Full Text search, where I entered "Adam Anspach" as my search term, adding a keyword "Dupler." Because the Gateway to the West book had given 1833 as the date Adam Anspach's will was drawn up, I set the date parameters rather narrow, to limit the results.

Without including the description of the tract of land I was tracing in my search terms, almost immediately a search result popped up with that precise property description. In that document, Adam Anspach sold that specific property to Elizabeth Dupler for one hundred dollars.

This, of course, caused me to wonder whether Jonathan Miller's wife, Catherine Dupler, might be daughter of Elizabeth Dupler, who in turn was daughter of Adam Anspach, the likely original owner of that parcel. Nothing is ever easy, though. It sounded like a reasonable premise, but you know I had to do some additional checking to see what other documents could connect the two Dupler women.