Looking for the REAL Robert Smith

 

When it comes to researching the family history of people possessing really common surnames, I'll admit it: I have a bias. I really don't like chasing after documents for folks named Smith or Jones. Even finding documents for the "right" Smith with the right given name in the right place can mean absolutely nothing. There may be another person by that same name, just around the corner.

That's the way it's been, looking for Robert Smith in 1850s Hocking County, Ohio. I got a promising start by discovering a statement in a court record asserting the fact that Mary Rinehart, daughter of Simon, was wife of Robert Smith of Hocking County. How explicit can this get? But finding the real Robert Smith? Now, that's another story.

Just when I had discarded one Robert Smith in that county, by virtue of his birth and family life in England, I discovered another Robert Smith in the same county. Added bonus: this Robert's wife was named Mary. I thought I had found what I was searching for, and began adding information on their children from census records, right into the Rinehart branch in my mother-in-law's family tree. 

I added Robert's wife Mary, and their seven children from the 1850 census, and was ready to follow the family lines down through the generations, when I spotted one detail that stopped me in my tracks: Robert Smith was named in an ancestral line in an application to the Sons of the American Revolution. When I followed the line of descent to the next generation, Robert's son, I saw something that didn't add up: Robert's wife's name was given as Maria Pitcher, not Mary Rinehart.

Out went all the details I had just entered in my mother-in-law's family tree. I pulled up that old delete button and slashed away, removing each of the children I had just added to Robert's family.

But after all the genealogical carnage, I had second thoughts. I went back to the 1850 census record. Sure enough, there was a gap in ages between the oldest child listed in the household—George, aged twenty five—and the next child, fourteen year old daughter Maria. Since the court records back in Perry County—the ones regarding two sets of children from different wives in Simon Rinehart's will—stated that Robert's wife was Simon Rinehart's daughter Mary, was it possible that Robert Smith was married twice, too?

I looked. Sure enough, there was an 1822 marriage record for Robert Smith and Maria Pitcher in Hocking County. And for the date of Maria's death, an old headstone in the Old Logan Cemetery reported that Maria Smith, consort of Robert D. Smith, died in 1832.

Back into the family tree went those children of Robert and Mary. As I worked my way through the children of Robert's second marriage, I ran across a will left by his daughter Mariah, an unmarried woman who died in 1873. Mariah appointed her brother Culver to be executor of her will, which contained a stipulation that, for the property he was to receive, he was to take two hundred dollars for "the erection of suitable tombstones at the graves of my father, Robert D. Smith, and his first wife."

Right next to the memorial for Robert's first wife, Maria, stood that "suitable tombstone," as Culver Smith was instructed to provide. Seeing that picture, however, made me want to start that family tree all over again, yanking the names I had just plugged back in, and looking once again for the real Robert Smith in Hocking County.

Why? Because on that same memorial stone to her father was listed not only the name of Robert's first wife, but his second wife, as well. And her name was listed as Mary Ankrum, not Rinehart.