About Catharine

 

Some family stories progress predictably. From the earliest stage of boy-meets-girl to marriage, then children, then grandchildren and beyond, the history plays out in a logical manner. The family, perhaps, has lived in the same town for generations. No one died prematurely. Or changed their name without confirming it legally. The play-by-play details have been laid out publicly for all to see in retrospect, the kind of predictability appreciated by genealogists.

George and Catharine Miller were not, apparently, such a couple. At first, I was elated to discover a biographical sketch about their son Solomon which seemed to provide key details about the family's roots. Once I began reconstructing the story via documentation, though, the path to their past became a bit bumpier.

As I had mentioned yesterday, I saw that the narrative in the 1907 publication, History of Whitley County, Indiana provided three particular guiding details about Solomon and his parents:

• Solomon's parents, George and Catharine, had moved from Pennsylvania to Perry County, Ohio.
• George and Catharine were parents of ten children.
• When Solomon moved west to Indiana about 1843, he was accompanied by his wife, his daughter, and his widowed mother. 

My first clue about reliability, in tracing those details, was when I tried to follow Solomon's mother, Catharine, in records. While the published narratives mentioned that Solomon's move west was in a group of travelers including his mother, that could only be true if she had accompanied them for only a short while. In today's world, that sort of arrangement might be feasible, but when I checked the 1850 census for Catharine's name, it led me to a different indicator.

There, as predicted, in 1850 in Whitley County, Indiana, was Solomon and his family: his wife Melinda and six children, five of them born in Indiana. The one glaring omission from that growing family was the widowed mother who supposedly had made the journey westward with Solomon.

Where was Catharine? Back home in Perry County, Ohio.

Catharine's 1850 census entry showed her in a small household including two other people: seventy seven year old Catharine Humberger, and a six year old girl named Ann Boyer. Though I have yet to figure out how young Ann Boyer might have been related to the two women, we already know that Catharine Miller's maiden name was Humberger, thus leading to the conclusion that after Solomon's departure, Catharine was still living in Perry County with her own mother. Plus, in this census, Catharine was living in Thorn Township, where we had seen her before, after the 1822 death of her husband George Miller.

In fact, in Catharine Miller's appearance in the 1830 census, my hopes had been lifted by the fact that her household included two boys and a girl between the ages of ten and fifteen. The Miller child we've been pursuing this month, my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor Lydia Miller, born in 1820, would have fit perfectly in that category. After all, the Whitley County narrative mentioned that Solomon was one of ten children. But now I'm not so sure that biographical detail was correct, either.

The reason for my doubt? Another discovery about this Catharine and who those other children in her household might have been.