To His Beloved Wife, Mrs. No-Name Rinehart

 

Why is it that some men bequeath large percentages of their possessions to their "beloved" wife without so much as mentioning her first name in the legal document granting her the man's parting tokens of love? I know it may be the 1850s we are discussing in following the last wishes of Simon Rinehart, but couldn't he have been just a tiny bit more expressive?

Simon Rinehart, my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, had lived a good portion of his adult life in Perry County, Ohio, though he had been born in Pennsylvania. Fortunately, I had found him in the 1850 census in Pike Township, though that discovery was hard-won; the enumerator's handwriting made his surname look more like "Phinebot" than the misspelled Rhinehart it was intended to be.

Seventy-six year old Simon appeared in that household along with his sixty eight year old wife. Here, we learn that his beloved's name was Anne—or at least that's how the enumerator spelled Mrs. No-Name's given name. With a flip of the census page, we can see that three younger adult women with the same misshapen surname also lived in the household: Hannah, Lucinda, and Charlotte, all three born in Pennsylvania.

Three years later, Simon was dead.

While I'm grateful to have found the Rineharts in the 1850 census, the first enumeration to include names of each member of a household, there was apparently much I had yet to learn about this household.

Thinking that perhaps Simon had done his due diligence and, before his demise, had deeded property to any other possible family members, I decided to go looking for a more thorough legal listing.

It's a good thing the will's sparse wording prompted me to look further. As it turned out, I found no such deeds bearing Simon's name when I took my query to the FamilySearch labs' Full Text search. But what I did find more than made up for that.

Apparently, Mrs. No-Name was Simon's second wife—I won't speculate on whether the first wife was also his "beloved"—so perhaps I discovered one reason why Simon chose to move from Pennsylvania to Ohio. Evidently, a son who still lived in Greene County, Pennsylvania, as well as a married daughter there, joined forces with several others among their siblings to contest that will.

While that act may have made life difficult for Simon's three (presumed) daughters still living in his household—to say nothing of his wife—the documentation which resulted from that family rift has been most informative for me, a nosy researcher trying to piece together the family picture from a vantage point of nearly one hundred seventy five years removed.

From those documents, I gleaned the names of each of the children from the first marriage, as distinguished from those of the second marriage—in addition to Hannah, Lucinda, and Charlotte. Added bonus: those daughters who were, by 1853, already married had not only their married surnames given, but the name of each husband to whom they had been "intermarried"—if the husband were still living.

One of those daughters, in fact, had already lost her husband, a fact I knew by virtue of that line being my mother-in-law's direct line ancestor, Sarah Rinehart. Sarah's husband, James Gordon, had died in 1840, thus explaining the reason why the mention of her name in the family's court case did not include her husband's name.

That convenient listing of each surviving member of Simon Rinehart's family may have helped me compose a more accurate and complete listing of the family constellation—but it also provided me with an unexpected narrative of the family's contentious dynamics at the point at which their father's last testament was publicly revealed.