Nothing is Ever Easy

 

I've said it before. I'll say it again: nothing is ever easy. In research, this limiting factor gives rise to warnings such as "don't believe everything you read" and other sayings. In the case of Solomon Miller and his parents, George Miller and Catharine Humbarger, we are about to see that sentiment played out for us. This, I discovered while congratulating myself on perhaps solving the puzzle of just where my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother Lydia Miller might have originated. It's time to think again.

Thanks to a distant DNA match to my husband who directed my attention to Solomon Miller, I had found two biographical sketches regarding this man. Looking more closely at the more detailed sketch from Whitley County, Indiana, I thought I'd use the details to point the way to Solomon's roots. 

According to the narrative in the 1907 publication, History of Whitley County, Indiana, I gleaned three particular guiding details:

• 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. 

As I began tracing those details, it became obvious that those three hallmark details from the Whitley County biography were not entirely correct. There were, apparently, missing parts of the story involving not only what happened after Solomon married Malinda Anspaugh, but also what happened before Solomon's own birth.

Those missing parts may turn out to embed key details of an untold story, if what I'm finding in documentation turns out to tell a fuller version of the same couple's history. George and Catharine may both, for instance, have come from Pennsylvania, but they may not have migrated at the same time. Also, between the two of them, George and Catharine may have claimed ten children, but not all from the same marriage—a detail which will take some research to not only confirm but clarify. And the widowed Catharine may not have been her son's constant companion in his journeys westward to Indiana.

Knowing that Miller was such a common surname in Ohio back then as it is today, we'll need to tread carefully through the archived details pertaining to our couple's life story. There may have been much more than what was told in that handy published biographical sketch. Then again, those details could have been a story reserved for another couple by the name of George and Catharine Miller. It's up to us to uncover the full report.