When Eight Becomes Seven

 

Sometimes, the only way to learn the rest of the story is to hunker down and read the entire text of court documents. 

Whenever the Rineharts took each other to court, they apparently kept coming back for more litigation. We saw that after Simon Rinehart's death in Perry County, Ohio, back in 1853. Discovering mention of another court case—this time, brought by Simon's son-in-law, Isaac Brown—I went back to look at the details of this subsequent case. That litigation, in turn, brought up arguments between some of the children of Anna Rinehart, Simon's second wife, and his son Jesse. The contention centered around whether Simon had, before his death, given his son Jesse a certain additional piece of land.

Meanwhile, to complicate the matter following the death of their mother, who died intestate, Anna's remaining eight children squabbled over whether her land should be divided eight ways or seven. But don't think we'd arrive at the end of the story with a simple legal decision. During the time those Rinehart descendants' case worked its way through the court system, other events occurred.

For one thing, Anna's three single daughters who had been residing with their parents in the 1850 census—Hannah, Lucinda, and Charlotte—began to experience health problems as they aged. Charlotte, in particular, had been noted in that census to have been "idiotic." Sometime before the death of their mother, Charlotte was in such need of extra care that the Perry County court appointed her brother Jesse as her guardian.

In the midst of the court proceedings due to Anna dying intestate, mention was made of Charlotte's subsequent death in 1861. That, perhaps, might not have been noted, except that in the squabble over division of their mother's land, Jesse brought up the issue of costs borne by him for his sister's funeral and burial expenses, which he felt should be addressed as they considered division of Anna's estate.

There was, however, that one other contention: whether before his death, Simon had given another parcel of land to Jesse, and if that resolved whether Jesse should be included in this later division of Anna's land. 

The resolution of that dispute? I can't say. I'm still reading through pages and pages of court documents. However, one thing is sure: you can learn a lot about a family, just by reading up on all their arguments aired in the public setting of a courtroom.