Many Millers

 

Continuing the quest for a possible Miller father for our Lydia, we have many Millers from which to choose. And I don't mean a choice from among the many Millers resident in the state of Ohio—although the Miller surname does happen to be one of the top three surnames in that state. Back in 1830, the first census taken after Lydia was born, there were at least thirty five heads of household in Perry County, Ohio, claiming that surname.

Although it was possible that Lydia's immediate family might not have stayed in Perry County—after all, as we've already seen, some Millers came from Somerset County, Pennsylvania, and could just have kept on traveling—I'm hoping that gleaning information from this one snapshot of 1830 might give a chance at discovering members of Lydia's immediate Miller family.

In tandem with a search through the Perry County Millers of 1830, I am reviewing the rest of the DNA matches tying my husband to candidates with Miller roots. To continue this search in a way that would yield meaningful results for our search for Lydia's parents, we need to remember some details:

• The Miller DNA match must represent a line which is not intertwined with the many other surnames in Perry County which have, over the centuries, intermarried with my mother-in-law's family.
• The potential match would need to be someone who could be identified, placed within the context of a family tree, and verified by documentation—thus, no enigmatic labels replacing match names.
• The tree needs to convey a reasonable story: no wild migrations over hundreds of miles of rough terrain in a matter of days; no births to teenaged couples barely old enough to parent children; no unexplained surname changes or other fingerprints of confused identities.

I have already found six DNA matches at Ancestry who all descend from Jonathan Miller and his wife, Catharine Dupler. Since then, I've located almost as many more Miller matches satisfying my prerequisites, but who descend from a different Miller ancestor. The challenge now is to build out trees for those matches, confirm the assertions, and watch to see where the Miller nexus might occur between our Lydia and the DNA match's ancestor.

This, as you can imagine, will be a time-consuming process....