When Searching for Smith

 

Any time I face having to research a family member named Smith, I proceed cautiously. Well, that's not entirely true; first I fervently hope I never have to run into a predicament like that in the first place...but marriages do happen, and sometimes they involve suitors named Smith.

In the case of Simon Rinehart's will, contested by the children of his first wife, I had the helpful listing of all Simon's living children, as of the 1854 date in which they had filed the lawsuit in Perry County, Ohio. Even though I was overjoyed to receive a full listing of all Simon's children—I had missed the majority of them in previous work on this family line—I noted (with dismay) that one of Simon's daughters had married a man by the name of Smith.

Groan.

To make matters worse, this daughter's given name was Mary. I guess I am fortunate that her husband's name was not John Smith.

Setting aside those complaints, I did realize that the court records specified just where Mary and her husband—named Robert Smith—had settled by the time the complaint was filed in court. Though Mary likely was born back in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where Simon Rinehart had originated, the court record identified the couple as residents of Hocking County, Ohio.

Hocking County has a history much like that of Perry County, and in fact was a neighboring county, lying to the southwest of Perry County. Just as Perry County was formed in 1818 from neighboring counties, Hocking County was likewise organized. Both gained land from Fairfield County, as well as from other nearby counties, upon their establishment.

Finding Robert Smith in Hocking County was a search that, for the first attempt, did not turn out well. I began by searching through the census record for the decade after the 1854 court case. For that search, estimating Mary's age based on the year of birth for her sister Martha, I presumed that Mary would have married a man born during the early 1800s. I made the search parameter as wide as possible on Ancestry.com, setting the target year as 1810 and expanding the range ten years in each direction.

Bingo! I found Robert Smith! But he was a man without a wife, though several older children in the household hinted at a deceased wife by 1860. Second drawback: this Robert Smith was born in England, not Pennsylvania. Though admittedly that could have been possible—after all, some immigrants from England did historically pass through Pennsylvania—I noticed that his children were also listed as having been born in England. This gave us a profile which didn't fit what I was looking for.

With a second attempt, I pulled the possible date range for our Robert Smith's year of birth to an earlier setting—but not too much earlier. I wanted a range that overlapped the first attempt, just in case I had missed something.

Sure enough, there was a second Robert Smith, also resident in Hocking County. Added bonus: in the 1850 census, he claimed to have a wife whose name was Mary. And both Robert and Mary were reported to have been born in Pennsylvania.

The children's names did not seem to echo any family names from previous generations in the Rinehart clan. From oldest household member George Smith at age twenty five down to the youngest, five year old Wesley Smith, all were born in Ohio, not Pennsylvania, giving us a date marker to estimate their arrival from Pennsylvania. This date estimate puts the Smiths' arrival in Ohio much earlier than Simon Rinehart's arrival, as Simon was still showing in Greene County, Pennsylvania, in the 1830 census.

Does this mean I've found Simon's daughter Mary and her husband Robert Smith? Not necessarily so. After all, this Robert wasn't the only Robert Smith in Hocking County. There could be more.

As I'm doing for Mary's sister Martha Rinehart Fordyce, I'll start building a proposed family tree of descendants, not just in my search for more documentation, but to scope out any possible DNA matches linking my husband's family with this Smith family.