When we Last Left Lydia

 

It was May 31 just one year ago when I had to close the books on my search for Lydia Miller's parents. Lydia had been May's focus for my Twelve Most Wanted last year, simply because she had evaded detection for more years than I care to recall. But what was more difficult than simply calling off the chase for yet another year was the fact that, only days prior, I had discovered that Lydia hadn't died a young mother, after all. In fact, as a young widow, she had remarried—not only that, but she had moved to a new county on the far end of the state to become mother to eight more children.

That unexpected discovery made me wish I had found out at the beginning of the month, not the end. Behind the scenes—while I was supposed to be researching yet another brick wall ancestor—I kept building out the tree for Lydia Miller and her new family in Mercer County, Ohio.

Eventually, though, I had to set the task aside and focus on the work at hand for June, then July, then...well, you get the idea. This is one month I wished I could have kept at the research trail, but I had made myself the promise that I would keep rotating through research challenges as a principle to help keep from burning out on one information dead end.

When I had started that research goal last May, all I had was the detail that "Lidia" Miller had married William H. Gordon in 1838 in Perry County, Ohio. In a very short amount of time, she gave birth to two sons, the eldest of whom became my mother-in-law's great-grandfather, Adam Gordon.

The other major detail about Lidia—one I thought I knew, given the appearances—was that she, along with her husband and second son, had died by 1840, or at least before 1850, when her eldest son was being raised in his paternal grandmother's home.

How wrong I was. It turns out that Lydia, as a widow, had married a young widower who was then the father of one son, himself. By the time I discovered documentation verifying that turn of events, we were fast approaching the end of the month.

Despite working feverishly to trace that new family's line of descent, the month closed out long before I had done this new task justice. This month will become our chance to revisit Lydia—once Miller, then Gordon, then Palmer—and see what else we can learn about this entirely new family. Hopefully, by the end of this month, we may also look to the opposite direction to close in on the story of just whose daughter Lydia Miller was, herself.