"Uh Oh"

 

Somehow, unexpected realizations can push that grade-school response out into the open when we least plan for it. And "uh oh" was exactly what slipped out of my mouth when I took a look at one of the ancestors I hadn't worked on in years.

You know how it can go. You work on one line of the family, moving backwards in time, but perhaps attack another part of the line from an ancestral vantage point and work forward. However it happened, the end result was that my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather Simon Rinehart was born nine years before his father was.

Yes, I know that is not humanly possible. But that's what ended up in her family tree.

In my defense, there are a lot of ancestors in my mother-in-law's family with the name Simon Rinehart. It was apparently a top-ten hit for naming sons born into that extended Rinehart clan, back in Greene County, Pennsylvania. In fact, there were so many Rinehart pioneers in that region that I'm sure I'll need to rework far more than just this one Simon Rinehart's line.

But, still: a son born before his father? C'mon now. It's a good thing Simon made it to my Twelve Most Wanted list for this year. We've got a lot of work ahead of us this month.

What I do know about Simon, however, is that while he was likely born in Greene County, Pennsylvania, he died in Perry County, Ohio. And while I have yet to find his final resting place there, I have a pretty good idea of when he died: 1853. A date I gleaned from Simon's will—a simple document which barely filled a third of one page in the county's court records—the document was presented there on March 8, 1853, launching the family into a multi-year, contentious struggle over Simon's purported desire to give his entire possessions over to his wife, and no one else.