Messy Discoveries

 

While family history researchers may hope for a streamlined outline of their ancestors' key life events, that is not always how the search progresses. When it comes to piecing together supporting documentation, there may be twists and turns. Today, I ran into one messy discovery that seems to turn the Miller family story on its head.

Having found the 1850 census showing Solomon Miller's widowed mother Catharine still living in Perry County, Ohio—and not in Indiana, as one biographical sketch of Solomon's life had claimed—I decided to look for corroborating evidence. 

Stop one was to look for what became of the two other people living in the widow's 1850 household. While I have yet to figure out who the child, Ann Boyer, might have been, verification on Catharine's mother, Catharine Humberger, was easier to find. At Find A Grave, Catharine Humberger's still legible headstone showed her burial place to be at the Zion Reformed Lutheran Cemetery in Thornville, Ohio, a village situated in Perry County's Thorn Township, where we had found her living in the 1850 census.

As often appears in Find A Grave entries, this memorial for Catharine Humberger included information provided by volunteers. A note indicated that this Catharine's maiden name was Snider, a pertinent discovery for tracing my mother-in-law's line, which is full of Sniders. A Find A Grave volunteer also provided links to three other memorials related to this Catharine, including one for Catharine Humbarger Miller, the mother of the Solomon we've been researching this week.

Looking at that linked memorial for Catharine, Solomon's mother, brought with it a surprise: according to that volunteer-provided information, Catharine was married twice. Her marriage to George Miller came after her previous marriage to someone named Herbert Winegardner.

Perry County being what it is—a place where many longstanding residents found themselves related to each other in multiple ways—this was not encouraging news for a researcher using DNA testing. Not only would the Snider connection cause problems seeking clarity on the Miller line, but my mother-in-law's Perry County roots—to say nothing of my father-in-law's connections there—intertwine with the Winegardner surname as well.

The Find A Grave information indicated that the Winegardners had a daughter born in 1816, as well as a son born in 1820, the same year as Herbert's death in 1820. That would explain the female in Catherine Miller's entry in the 1830 census, long after the deaths of both her husbands, Herbert Winegardner and George Miller—and discard my hoped-for resolution of where Lydia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother, fit into the picture.

That, at least, was according to the entries provided by Find A Grave volunteers. You know I had to check those details.

My first stop was to look for a marriage record for Herbert Winegardner and Catharine Humbarger. Voila! Thanks to FamilySearch.org, in a snap, I found a handwritten—and rambling—entry in the records for a May 7, 1816, marriage in Fairfield County for "Harbert" Winegardner and Catharine "Humbarge." (The record also indicated an alternate spelling as Humberger.) And the location in Fairfield County? Not to worry: Perry County wasn't established until two years later, when it was carved from Fairfield County in 1818.

So far, so good, right? Next step was to look for a marriage record for George Miller and a widowed Catharine Winegardner. Easy peasy: an 1823 entry, possibly signed by the same minister who had performed the earlier Winegardner marriage in Fairfield County, verified the Miller-Winegardner ceremony.

But wait! There is a problem with that second record. If Solomon's father George Miller died three months before Solomon was born in 1822, it would have been an eerily otherworldly ceremony indeed, if his father married his mother almost a year after that point. Not to mention, ten years after Herbert Winegardner supposedly died in 1820, there was someone by that name still showing in the 1830 census back in Fairfield County.

Complicating matters was the discovery that there might have been two Catharine Humbergers in Perry County, a discovery I made while mulling over all the Humberger men showing in Thorn Township in the 1830 census, some of whom were listed on the very page where I spotted Catharine Miller. Not to mention, after the demise of our short-lived George Miller, two others by that same name remained in Perry County in 1830, making it quite possible that we've been chasing the paper trail for the wrong name twins.

One result of these messy discoveries was to turn back once again to the published biographical sketch mentioning Catharine's son Solomon Miller. That 1907 narrative mentioned that Solomon's parents, George and Catharine, had been parents of ten children, the youngest of whom was Solomon himself. The three children counted in the Miller entry for the 1830 census were hardly ten, but perhaps they also didn't represent the two presumed Winegardner children.

With differentiating between name twins and ferreting out corroborating details, we may be facing some tree-building exercises for an ever-expanding Humberger family line. Or perhaps, delving into the identity of Ann Boyer, that mystery child in Catharine's 1850 household, might provide a shortcut to the answer identifying the right Catharine.