Supposed Siblings and Their Possible Patriarch

 

I confess: I cheated. This wearying search for possible siblings and parents of my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor Lydia Miller has nigh worn me out. So when I spotted an Ancestry hint that perhaps Lydia's possible sibling Jonathan Miller was son of a man named Henry Miller, I decided to check it out. 

Since Jonathan was said to have been born in Pennsylvania—at least, according to his Find-A-Grave entry—it made sense to look for such a father both in Jonathan's home in Perry County, Ohio, and for his supposed home town back in Pennsylvania.

Checking the 1830 census in Perry County, Ohio, however, led me nowhere. That was the first census in which Jonathan had appeared in Ohio after his 1824 marriage to Catharine Dupler, but the significant number of Miller residents in 1830 in Perry County told me the search might be challenging. Besides, the lone Henry Miller in Perry County that year, himself a man under forty, turned out to be far too young to have been father of Jonathan, himself born in 1802.

The suggestion at Ancestry, however, was to check out a Henry Miller still residing in Pennsylvania. While on its surface, a card transcribed from Mennonite Church records, offered up as documentation of Henry Miller by Ancestry hints, seemed plausible as father of Jonathan—and thus, possibly, of our brick wall ancestry Lydia Miller.

Plausible, that is, until a closer look revealed that that Henry Miller couldn't possibly have been father of Lydia. If Lydia's own burial record contained the correct age, her date of birth would have been in 1820. Pennsylvania Henry, according to the card gleaned from Mennonite records, had died by 1812. Indeed, one Henry Miller, dying intestate in Somerset County, Pennsylvania, became subject of a court appointment of administrators late in that same year.

While this Henry might well have been father of Jonathan Miller, he certainly couldn't have filled those same shoes for Lydia. It's back to the drawing board for another hypothesis on just who Lydia's father might have been.