Pushing Further Into the Past

 

Selecting specific individuals to research for each month of the upcoming year has been my main focus during these twelve days of Christmas. For each day, I select one specific ancestor I'd like to research for a subsequent month of 2026. I usually divide those Twelve Most Wanted ancestors according to family groupings, so that I have three relatives from my mother's line, followed by three of my mother-in-law's ancestors, then on to three selections for my father-in-law's research list and, finally, three from my own dad's line to wrap up the year.

By now, we've reached ancestor number six, the selection I'll be working on during next June and the last selection from my mother-in-law's family. Here I've bumped into a quandary: many of her roots came, centuries ago, from regions which are now part of the modern country of Germany. Do I choose to jump "the pond" and try my hand at research in the Old Country—wherever that might actually have been—or stick with what will turn out to be ancestors from colonial America? Having given that question much thought, I opted this coming year for the route of pushing further into the past in my own country.

Thus, with this last research selection from my mother-in-law's lines, I'll be focusing on an ancestor from her Ijams line. Launching from where we left off with this family last year, researching my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather William Ijams, we've moved to his parents, and then, on the Ijams line, to his grandfather, also named William Ijams. More than that, I'd like to learn more detail on the senior William Ijams' wife, Elizabeth Plummer.

With a lifetime well within the time frame of colonial America, Elizabeth Plummer and her family lived in Maryland where, fortunately, there still is access to some useful records helping to push research on this family further back into the past. Sometimes, we struggle to gain merely a toehold on a brick wall ancestor's life story. At other times, it is simply a matter of perseverance to move from one generation to the next, holding our breath to see how far back into the past we can go. It is this type of research adventure I'm looking forward to taking with Ancestor #6: finding more about Elizabeth Plummer.