Tipping Towards Summer

 

Perhaps there's something about passing the longest day of the year that begs me to crest other tipping points. We've waved the flag for Flag Day and bid everyone a happy Juneteenth while celebrating dads and the last of the grads. It's time to get on with summer. For some reason, I'm already chomping at the bit to move on with my next project before July ever gets here.

First, though, comes some spring cleaning. Yes, I know we are officially into summer already, but there is no such picturesque way to classify summer cleaning. Dusty, sweaty, and chores are words that come to mind for such a designation, but what I've been working on in the past two weeks has edged into something far less distasteful than that.

Having decided that I'm as good as done with this month's research project—finding the roots of Elizabeth Plummer Ijams, my "Twelve Most Wanted" for June—I decided to do some cleaning up of old projects which didn't have the luxury of acquiring the satisfying label of "done."

First on the list was to return to May's research project, my quest to discover the parents of my mother-in-law's brick wall ancestor, Lydia Miller. I continued building out the lines of descent for three DNA matches sharing ancestors by the name of Anspach, a surname strangely linked to the circle of people connected with Lydia in her earliest years. There's still a lot of work yet to do, but I'm edging closer. Maybe next year, I'll finally cross that finish line.

Next came a general housecleaning of all the open tabs on my computer. When I am building out a line of descent, I keep a tab open specifically for that family. Locking that tab in place allows me to return to the place where I last left off with that family, making it easy for me to pick up the trail at a moment's notice. I went through each of those tabs—after a year or so, that collection can grow cumbersome—and deleted those which are not on my research radar at this point.

That process left me with some Polish lines remaining from my father's ancestry, plus some other more recent lines I'm still wrestling with. All that considered, I actually gleaned eighteen more names for my father's side of the family tree, so that count edges up to 41,957 documented people.

The main focus for this month—actually, the culmination of three months' work—has been my mother-in-law's family. Granted, I didn't add many people this month as I wandered through reports of colonial family in 1600s Maryland, mostly because seventh through tenth great-grandparents won't add much meaningful data for my quest to place DNA cousins in that tree. But in returning to Lydia's project—a much closer reach for my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother—I had plenty to add to that tree.

All told, the past two weeks advanced the count by less than usual—166 new relatives—due to the different nature of the work on those Maryland ancestors. My in-laws' tree now contains 43,629 documented individuals, a number that will remain at about that level as we close out this month's research project.

For the last few days of this month, I'll revisit a few of those older projects and provide updates. After that point, we'll jump into summer both feet first as we move from my mother-in-law's family to my father-in-law's Irish roots. Hopefully, new resources there will allow for some encouraging progress in our research for that side of the family. 

. . . But Then, There's Charlemagne

 

Notwithstanding my reasons given yesterday about not needing to pursue my mother-in-law's colonial Maryland ancestors any longer, there is yet one nagging thought. What about Charlemagne? After all, I have a book that says as much: that my mother-in-law is a descendant of an emperor.

So what? Some sources speculate that, based solely on statistics, anyone of Western European descent could have a chance of being Charlemagne's descendant. After all, Charlemagne was said to have had five wives and several other partners. Those, in turn, gave him at least twenty children. Then, just do the math to see how those generations could multiply over the centuries since Charlemagne's death in the year 814.

Granted, tracing one's lineage back to a date smack dab in the middle of the Middle Ages can be a challenge. Just think of how much I struggled to get back to colonial Maryland.

There is, however, one catch: if we can manage to latch on to European royalty—or at least nobility—someone in our distant past has been diligent to keep proper records of such details. From those records, one organization has, over the decades, compiled three volumes of such lines of descent. Not surprisingly, that organization is known as the Order of the Crown of Charlemagne, whose Genealogist General has been tasked with overseeing such verification.

Published by the Order in three volumes over nearly forty years, Pedigrees of Some of the Emperor Charlemagne's Descendants happens to include a chapter concerning the family line of none other than my mother-in-law's ancestor, Elizabeth Plummer. Thankfully, I was able to access that second volume through a subscription to Ancestry.com, where I easily followed the trail from Elizabeth to her mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, just as I had noted here in the past few days from other records.

Winding my way back through the genealogy laid out in that chapter was an eye-opening excursion. Sure, there were earls and lords, but there were also ancestors who "died" at the Tower of London, or were beheaded, or hanged for whatever political infraction they might have committed.

The litany brought me back from Elizabeth Plummer's point to the lead entry in the chapter for Isabel de Vermandois. From Isabel's vantage point—she died in 1147—there would still be a long way to go before reaching Charlemagne's era. The book refers the reader to three previous chapters to continue the genealogical saga.

But the story actually does reach back to Charlemagne, himself. Who would have thought? Especially since my mother-in-law, during my initial interview with her before launching into her family history, was so certain that the generation preceding her grandparents had "just gotten off the boat." How wrong she was.

As for my pursuit this month of Elizabeth Plummer's life story and that of the ancestors preceding her, it's sufficient—not to mention, fun—to see someone's research pointing the way to Charlemagne. Do I wish to replicate that search myself? Hardly. There are too many other questions yet to resolve—research adventures for which no keepers of the royal line of descent would care to concern themselves.

To go Deep, or Wide, or Not at All

 

Perhaps this is the genealogist's question: to go deep or wide when researching family lines. At the beginning, for many people, the idea of going deeply into the past seems a compelling goal. How far back can we go? What will we find in the stories of past generations?

The advent of genetic genealogy may have upended the draw of that proposition. After all, a sure-fire way to locate those umpteenth cousins in our tree is to build out the branches of our ancestors' collateral lines.

For the most part, that is where I've focused my time. After all, with upwards of twenty thousand DNA matches—if you count all the distant cousins in the mix—it takes a bushy tree indeed to find a place for each of those cousins. That is mostly the point of my biweekly count, incidentally: keeping track of the expanding family tree and my progress in filling in the blanks.

But when I get to a case like Elizabeth Plummer's—my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother—it hardly does me any good to add that ancestor's siblings into my in-laws' tree. Why? Because most DNA tests show matches that are capable of reaching back to the sixth cousin level. That means connecting descendants of fifth great-grandparents—if those cousins even share any genetic material in common at all.

Since it's my husband who stands in as test taker for my mother-in-law's genetic legacy, it would be a rare match indeed that would connect him to his seventh great-grandmother Elizabeth. And examining descendants of Elizabeth's siblings would mean tracing the lines of an eighth great grandparent.

That is the result of using the most widely available DNA test, the autosomal test. If, however, we had used either the Y-DNA test or the mitochondrial DNA test (mtDNA), our reach could be extended even farther. But those tests, in our case, would not apply. For one thing, Elizabeth Plummer lies on my mother-in-law's line of the family, so my husband's Y-DNA results would be of no help there. But for the mtDNA test, we could almost have qualified. The necessary matriline held steady for six generations—but then veered off to that woman's father's line, before returning to that ancestor's paternal grandmother, Elizabeth.

And so, we are left in the nether reaches of genetic genealogy. Choosing to trace the lines of Elizabeth Plummer's siblings would be an exercise chosen simply for the fun of it. With so many other fifth and sixth great-grandparents still a mystery to me, I'd take that as my cue to move on to other family history puzzles.

More Trailblazers

 

When first starting my search for Elizabeth Plummer, my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, I was concerned about access to records from such an early time period in American history. After all, researching ancestors from the mid-1800s onward is so nicely facilitated by multiple record sets, documents which were not so robust in their more formative years of governmental oversight.

As it turns out, I am finding more trailblazers willing to lead me to those earlier ancestors than I've found for the average "garden variety" specimens of more recent ancestral eras. A twirl through FamilySearch's Full Text Search the other day, using for a key word the property name "Dodon," the lone results came not from documents, but from two published genealogies.

They're not actual documents, but I'm not proud; I took a look. Trailblazers are simply that: researchers willing to point the way. It's still up to us to determine that genealogy assertions can be properly verified with documentation, whether we accessed the trailblazer's announcement through a published book or from Aunt Mary's oft-repeated family tale.

A closer look revealed that the original source of the collections, which FamilySearch had listed as United States Genealogies 1891-1995, turned out to be Genealogical Records of Members of the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in Maryland.

In those collections of membership applications to The National Society of the Colonial Dames of America, the Full Text results zeroed in on references to Thomas Plummer, whose daughter Elizabeth married William Ijams. From that one paragraph of a genealogist's report regarding the membership application, we find several points explained:

• that Thomas Plummer was father of Elizabeth, the eventual bride of William Ijams
• that Thomas Plummer had married someone named Elizabeth Stockett, not Elizabeth Yates
• that the elder Elizabeth's parents were Thomas Stockett and Mary Wells, daughter of Richard and Frances Wells.

We had seen elsewhere that there was confusion about Elizabeth Plummer Ijams' mother—mainly in the work of genealogist Harry Wright Newman, before he had amended the error. The annotated NSCDA membership application helped point the way to a trail of explanatory records.

And with that, as long as the trail proves reliable, I've been gifted with a path to the past moving far beyond what I had expected to find in the quest for this month's Twelve Most Wanted. Indeed, going to the national organization's website today, I can search for those names in their Register of Ancestors, but I find the annotated applications preserved at FamilySearch.org for all to see to be a far more complete guide than I had expected.

There Were Three Brothers. . . or was that Four?

 

Looking for the history of the properties mentioned in various wills connected to the family of Elizabeth Plummer Ijams—Dodon and Bridge Hill—I thought the name of the one estate, Dodon, was unusual enough to try my hand at an online search for more information. That attempt led me quickly to an entry on Wikipedia which involved generations of an entirely different family. Sorting out the actual narrative meant searching even farther down a convoluted path.

Inevitably, the tale led me to one of the banes of genealogy: that legendary opener, "there were three brothers." Or was that four? Even that story line had me confused.

The chase started with an entry in Wikipedia. According to that article, Dodon—also spelled Doden in some documents—is currently a 550 acre farm in Maryland near a village called Davidsonville. The farm, still in operation, is said to have been in the hands of family members descended from the Scottish immigrant who originally obtained the land in 1669.

That the ancestor, called James Stewart in one descendant's memoirs referred to in the Wikipedia article, was the original owner of Dodon was countered by another report in that same Wikipedia page. The second version noted that a doctor, Francis Stockett, had owned that very land in 1668.

The Stockett version of the property's history was thankfully footnoted in the Wikipedia article, so I jumped to the identified source, Joshua Dorsey Warfield's 1905 history, The Founders of Anne Arundel and Howard Counties, Maryland. 

The Warfield account did provide some helpful details, yet at the same time gave off the air of legend with its genealogy trope, "there were three brothers."

The information referred to by the Wikipedia article was contained in a section of the Warfield book headlined, "The Stockett Brothers." There, the author explained that there were four Stockett brothers, naming them: Thomas, Lewis, Henry, and Francis. These brothers had first obtained land grants under the Calverts in Maryland in 1658.

The book then provided some background information on each of the Stockett brothers and their involvement in the early years of the province. Following that brief history, the author picked up the timeline ten years later, stating, "In 1668, all three brothers removed to Anne Arundel." No explanation for what became of brother number four, making my confidence in the account diminish.

Despite that glitch, Warfield noted the names of the properties obtained after the Stocketts' arrival in Anne Arundel County. Familiar property names surfaced with this note. For Henry Stockett, there were 664 acres of land called "Bridge Hill." To his brother, Dr. Thomas Stockett, an equal portion of land was designated, "Dodon."

With that explanation, we're now left with our earliest sighting of land called by those two estate names, and the explanation of who obtained those two parcels in 1668. The next goal is to find documentation to map out how those estates came to be part of the inheritance passed down to Elizabeth Plummer's Ijams descendants.

Even after that sequence, though, there are gaps in the explanation of who owned the land. As we noticed yesterday, Harry Wright Newman had explained that brothers Isaac and Thomas Plummer Ijams had inherited both Bridge Hill and Dodon and, in 1796, had sold the properties to someone named James Davidson.

But how did Dodon move from that new owner to the ancestor of Dodon's current proprietary family, George H. Steuart? Steuart, according to a Wikipedia article, had purchased the property in 1747 from Stephen Warman. Could there have been two different properties in Anne Arundel County called by that same unusual name?

The dizzying effect of conflicting narratives is almost enough to make me want to start from scratch and scroll through microfilms of early property records to see for myself—or at least hope to find accessible digitized versions of such records to answer some questions.

 

Dodon and Bridge Hill

 

Yesterday, I had wondered whether it might be possible to simply search the names of tracts of land mentioned in family wills, following the family by following the land. My reasoning was this: if the land was known by a singularly distinguishing moniker, could it help point me to the ancestral origins of its owners?

The two tracts of land mentioned in the wills of my mother-in-law's Maryland ancestors did have identifying names. While the one granted by William Ijams to his son John had the seemingly common name of Bridge Hill, it was often coupled with the mention of another, more remarkable name: Dodon.

Sometimes written in documents as "Doden," that particular tract of land had passed from the Stockett family to the Plummer family and then eventually to the line of the senior William Ijams. While I am still working on pushing the timeline back before the Stocketts claimed the land, in the meantime, I have discovered that the property has, moving forward, had a long history of multiple owners.

Just entering the name of the land—Dodon—in a search engine, either on its own or coupled with the name of the paired property, Bridge Hill, has been informative. While my original attempt to find results through FamilySearch's Full Text Search for those property names in colonial Maryland's Anne Arundel County yielded no land or tax records—material which might better be found through Maryland State archives—taking that question straight to the Web turned out to be a more productive route.

Also, searching the line of inheritance of Dodon in Harry Wright Newman's Anne Arundel Gentry produced seven passages in the book. The land moved through branches of the extended family until two Ijams brothers sold the property in 1796, and, as Newman noted, "thus passed from the family the hereditary estates...which had been in the...family for five generations."

Dodon as a parcel did not entirely disappear with that sale, however. Nor did it simply cease to be part of a family's estate, no longer passed from generation to generation. It was interesting to discover its new identity, once it had been sold out of the Ijams family's possession. We'll take a brief detour tomorrow to explore what can be found, simply by searching online for the name of a family's estate. 

Letting the Land Lead us

 

In reviewing the legacies bequeathed by Thomas Plummer to his descendants, I began to spot property names which seemed familiar. Just to double-check, I returned to the will I had found for Thomas' son-in-law, William Ijams, husband of the baby of Thomas' family, Elizabeth Plummer, to review the details.

In William's 1734 will, for three particular sons he had named specific properties in Anne Arundel County, part of colonial Maryland. To his son William, he had bequeathed a one-hundred-acre parcel called "Cheney's Resolution." To his son John, he had designated one hundred acres which he had called "Bridge Hill." And to his son Plummer, he had mentioned sixty four acres of land adjoining Bridge Hill, "the said parcel of land called Doden."

Upon stepping back another generation to review William's father-in-law's will, I began to see familiar names given to some of the properties that Thomas Plummer gave to his own children. While "The Seamas Delight" might not have been a familiar name for that hundred acre parcel Thomas gave to his namesake son, nor the parcel "Scots Lot" which went to Thomas' daughter Mary, wife of William Jackson, when it came to the part of Thomas' will mentioning his daughter Elizabeth (and his wife, also named Elizabeth), I started recognizing some property names.

To his daughter Elizabeth, Thomas Plummer had granted all 164 acres of his current dwelling and property known as Bridge Hill. And until his wife's passing, that land was first meant for the elder Elizabeth.

After Thomas appointed his wife Elizabeth as his executrix, he explained that the land granted her was "part of Bridge Hill and Doden." Thus we see how those property names became repeated in the next generation's wills.

There it was: those same parcel names as we had seen in the Ijams will. Those parcels may have been passed along from previous relatives to Thomas Plummer, then to the Ijams family. I wondered if there might be a way to let the land lead us: to simply follow the history of the land itself to learn more about the families. 

Stepping Backwards to Move Forward

 

Sometimes, a step backwards can get us moving forward.

After working on my mother-in-law's Ijams and Plummer line for half a month, I thought I'd check on the most distant ThruLines report for that family line at Ancestry's DNA to see if there were any updates. There were—well, there were, if you count a diminishing number of results as progress. 

In the past, Ancestry's ThruLines had shown five or six children descending from William Ijams, grandson of Elizabeth Plummer Ijams, and fifth great-grandfather of my husband, who is the surrogate tester standing in for my mother-in-law. Today, however, there were only two descending lines, and each of them, thankfully, can be confirmed through documentation.

Since connections with fifth great-grandparents is as far back as ThruLines shows for autosomal DNA tests, William himself would have to stand in as proxy for his paternal grandparents' DNA composition—the best I could do under these testing conditions.

Today, however, those stray other lines—names listed in previous ThruLines results that I hadn't been able to confirm through documentation—have simply vanished. Poof! If the DNA test candidates represented by those ThruLines results were indeed distant cousins, they obviously must have been connected through a different genetic route. Perhaps, someone had presumed there was a connection and had made a mistaken entry in their own tree which, repeated as others copied that tree, got picked up by ThruLines.

Though it is theoretically possible to find DNA matches who share a most "recent" common ancestor at a level of seventh great-grandmother, as Elizabeth Plummer Ijams would have been to my husband, it is not likely to confirm such a match. On average, DNA matches who are eighth cousins, as such a descent from seventh great-grandmother would yield, would share 0.000763% of their genetic makeup, according to a chart drawn up by Hope Carnicle, reported by a post on the ISOGG.org wiki.

In other words, eighth cousins could share up to forty two centiMorgans. Or they could share none.

In most cases, we'd never see such DNA matches, because the odds are against us. In my mother-in-law's case, a second strike would come in the form of multiple intermarriages over those many generations spanning her family's heritage, so even if a segment match registered, we'd have to delve deeper to determine which ancestor actually contributed that match. It might not be the ancestor we were suspecting.

In the end, while this change in results at Ancestry's ThruLines report doesn't strictly lead us to matches who share Elizabeth Plummer's DNA, it does zero in on those matches who actually were descendants of Elizabeth's grandson William Ijams. A far more accurate report may do nothing more than bolster my confidence in the tool, but a gesture like that can go a long way, in my opinion.

"How Far Back?"

 

The other night, I became my husband's plus-one at an event hosted by an organization he advises. At such social gatherings filled with people I don't know, conversation invariably turns to, "what do you do?" When my answer is genealogy, now, thanks to multiple television series, the response has moved far beyond the inevitable question of past decades, "genealogy, what's that?" The question has now advanced to, "Oh? How far back have you gone?"

While I like to spread the word about family history, even that question used to make me wince. Genealogy for me has never been a race to the past. I don't like to get hyper-fixated on one ancestral line. Especially for those who solely trace their surname, my answer would have been beyond boring; that patriline for me has been an immovable brick wall up until only recently, thanks to DNA testing.

With this month's Twelve Most Wanted focus on Elizabeth Plummer, however, I'm actually approaching a fairly decent answer. No, I haven't traced my line to Charlemagne—though there are signs someone has in Elizabeth's case—and I certainly haven't been so bold as to presume connections to Adam (or even Eve). But I'd say approaching the 1600s in colonial Maryland is far more distant than my mother-in-law ever hoped I'd get with her research.

For that advance, I have many to appreciate. First is to be thankful for those who helped launch me on my research journey in those first formative years—everyone from the librarian who launched my eight-year-old self from the children's library across the hall to where the "grown-ups" went to get their books, to the many online friends in genealogy forums of the early nineties.

Mostly, I'm grateful for the pioneers of online family history resources. Just the other day, I met with our webmaster as our genealogy society prepares to launch an updated version of our website, and we found ourselves discussing broken links to bygone sites of online genealogy's formative years like RootsWeb. Before that, people during the earliest years of publicly-accessible online technology experimented with "listservs" and social forums where newbies could ask questions without fear of blowback, trolls, or other forms of techno-rudeness. People helped people find their roots.

Beyond that, I'm ecstatic about those technology whizzes who kept experimenting over the decades, bringing us gifts like the first online searchable 1880 census index at FamilySearch.org. We've come a long way since then, of course, and we've not stopped improving yet. I'm over the top about FamilySearch's Full Text Search, which has made excerpts from those billions of pages of digitized documents from around the world find a home in my very own family tree.

And just like that, a will drawn up by a man who died in the 1690s gives me in the twenty-first century a snapshot of his family portrait. In words, of course—but just imagine how hard it would have been to find those specific words by a mission to personally access and read all pertinent record sets without that computer-assisted direction.

To say that I found Thomas Plummer's 1694 will is not entirely correct. FamilySearch.org found it. While in answer to a trivial question posed by a stranger at a party, I can say "eighth great-grandfather," it was really all those dedicated computer engineers whose efforts over decades have yielded us the ability to go that far back—with ease.

Baby of the Family

 

Researching a sixth great-grandmother is apparently easier than I had thought. At least I can say that about my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Plummer Ijams. Despite appearing in documents drawn up by a liberal hand at spelling—not to mention letter formation itself—Elizabeth has been far easier to find in colonial Maryland than I had expected, something more than I can say for our ancestors in Europe from even the more recent 1800s.

The latest attempt at pursuing Elizabeth's trail has been looking for her father's will. Thomas Plummer, the man identified in the Harry Wright Newman book, Anne Arundel Gentry, was easily found in the court records for that county, a copy of which will has thankfully been digitized at FamilySearch.org. In that 1694 record, we learn that Elizabeth was the baby of the Plummer family, the last of four daughters named in their father's will.

In the stylized handwriting of the court's clerk, Thomas' surname was rendered as "Ploumer" in the July 12, 1694 will. In that document, Thomas specified his "only son Thomas," who received his hundred acre plantation known as "the Seamas Delight" in Calvert County.

But for the stylized handwriting, I'd now know the married names of Elizabeth's older sisters. "Margrett" was by then wife of someone named Hugh, but whether that surname was "Proily" or "Doily" or another variation, I can only guess. This will take additional research to confirm.

Following the eldest daughter was a far easier couple to decipher: second daughter Mary had married William Jackson. Easier to read, but likely much harder to locate with such a common name.

Third daughter Susana had me stumped at first, with husband Francis' surname rendered as something vaguely similar to "Swarson." Thankfully, that name was repeated more clearly in an additional item towards the end of the will as Swanson.

And then there was the baby of the family. Elizabeth, apparently not yet married, had been granted eight hundred pounds of tobacco, in addition to 164 acres of land in Anne Arundel County in a parcel known as Bridge Hill.

The names of these estates become a helpful clue as we wind our way through the generations, tracing each of the next owners of the property through time, until the parcel is sold out of the family entirely. Sometimes, in piecing together mystery genealogies, all we have to go by can sometimes be those whimsical names given to a piece of land.

Disappearance of the Children

 

At first glance, comparing the wills of William Ijams and his wife Elizabeth gives us two different lists of heirs. Not that the names of their children do not match between the two documents, but that the heirs listed in the later will comprise a much smaller list of family members. Why the disappearance of all those Ijams children?

When William Ijams drew up his last testament in 1734, his was a large family. William named five sons and four daughters when he filed that will in Anne Arundel County, Maryland: John, Plummer, William, Richard, Thomas, Ann, Elizabeth, Mary, and Charity.

Granted, William included so many contingencies in his will that it left me wondering whether he knew some of his sons might not outlive him—or at least not produce heirs of their own to whom they could pass their inheritance, should tragedy strike son as well as father. So when I saw the reduced list of heirs named in his wife Elizabeth's own will in 1762, I assumed that was indeed the case: tragedy surely had struck the extended Ijams family.

Not necessarily so, I'm realizing now as I rethink this list from Elizabeth's own will.

Filed in the same colonial Maryland county, Anne Arundel, Elizabeth's 1762 will mentioned only three sons: John, "Plumer," and Thomas. Of the four daughters only one was named—thankfully with her married named, Ann Williams. An additional name, Ruth Ijams, was noted to be Elizabeth's daughter-in-law, but the will did not identify which son had married Ruth, though I presume it would have been one of the three sons mentioned in Elizabeth's will.

Yet a stipulation added at the end of the document mentioned, "if any one of the rest of my children," seeming to indicate that there were indeed other surviving children. For those others, Elizabeth seemed to indicate that she felt, according to her husband's will, that those other children were not entitled to anything else.

Nor are we, the silent witnesses two centuries later, entitled to know their names, unfortunately. The rest of them may have all survived—or at least some of those descendants. But which daughters married, if any, and what their married names might have been, Elizabeth's will won't be informing us. Nor will that document explain what became of William or Richard Ijams, the two sons left out of their mother's listing.

There likely were other ways to trace those descendants, should any Ijams descendants wish to do so. Other than our curiosity regarding Elizabeth's will, I likely won't do so, either. My interest would solely be in pursuing Elizabeth's son John, who would be in my mother-in-law's direct line.

More to my point would be to push back yet another generation to see where Elizabeth might have been mentioned in the documents drawn up by her own parents.

Evolution of a Letter

 

To find mention of a woman in colonial America, the most likely place to look might be in her husband's records. Thus, in my search for Elizabeth Plummer, wife of William Ijams, it would be reasonable to look for mention of her name in his will. Since William died in 1734 in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, it would seem a reasonable step to look there for his will.

There is only one problem with that assumption: the evolution of the letter "J." If you thought it would be a simple matter to look for a surname like Ijams, think again. That letter "J" can play tricks on the unsuspecting researcher. I've struggled with that very topic, every time I return to this Ijams research.

Take, for instance, my post written three years ago on the history of the letter "J." I assure you: the struggle is real.

I didn't, however, anticipate the one variation which took me by surprise this month when seeking a will for Elizabeth's husband William Ijams. I hardly expected to see the will indexed under the name "Jiams," but that is exactly how it was handled.

Let's take a look at the situation. In a document signed on June 28, 1734, Elizabeth's husband set out to put his house in order. He made provisions for his wife Elizabeth from his personal estate, and bequeathed property to his sons William, John, and Plummer. In addition, he named sons Richard and Thomas, as well as daughters Elizabeth, Mary, Charity, and Ann.

The only problem? His name was indexed as "Jiams."

Looking more closely, I checked for every time the document used what to me—and apparently to others, as well—looked like the letter "J." Perhaps it is no surprise, seeing this excerpt of the will, to realize that it began with the statement, "Jn the name of God Amen J William Jiams of Ann Arundell County in the Province of Maryland...."

No, those Js are not typos. Every handwritten letter appearing to be the letter "J" actually made more sense as an "I." Thus, the man writing that document in such a stylized hand was referring to someone named William Iiams, most likely husband of the Elizabeth I'm researching. 

The next task, I discovered, was to actually find Elizabeth setting her hand to a last will and testament of her own. We'll need to fast forward, tomorrow, to 1762 to compare the children's listings from the two documents.

Stuck at the Crossroads

 

In chasing my brick wall ancestors, I sometimes feel like the cartoon character standing at the crossroads, saying, "Which way did they go?"

Following a trailblazer sometimes helps with such research, but that's a proposition which requires follow-up. See how that adds up for my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Plummer, who became wife of William Ijams (or Iiams).

I found a brief entry in the Harry Wright Newman book, Anne Arundel Gentry. The book explains that William "Iiams," who married Elizabeth "Ploummer" on August 27, 1696, had a deed recorded at the State House concerning sixty four acres of a tract of land in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, known as "Dodon."

The Newman narrative explained that the deed was likely brought to the State House to be filed "after the fire at the State House." Checking the timeline of county history I had recently found for Maryland's Anne Arundel County, I saw nothing regarding such a fire, though I did see an entry for 1696 in which construction on the State House was begun in that year.

The entry, as quoted in the Newman book, indicated that Elizabeth was the legatee and daughter of Thomas Plummer, who in turn was the grantee of someone named Francis Stockett. The grant, originally occurring in July, 1686, transferred property rights concerning sixty four acres of "Dodon" from Francis Stockett to Thomas Plummer.

Another purchase of land, also mentioned in this deed, involved a hundred acre parcel called "Bridge Hill," which Elizabeth's father Thomas Plummer had obtained from another Stockett man, this one named Henry, along with Henry's presumed wife, Katherine. 

This passage in the Newman book indicated that Elizabeth was daughter of "Thomas and Elizabeth (Yate) Ploummer." Yet, between that page and the previous one was a typewritten insert, hand signed by Harry Wright Newman, stating that 

Elizabeth, the wife of William Plummer, is now proved to be the step-daughter of George Yate and not "daughter" as expressed in his will...therefore, she was born Elizabeth Stockett. Elizabeth, the wife of William Ijams, is consequently of Stockett descent and not Yate.

I believe the intent of the insertion at this point in the Anne Arundel Gentry book was to indicate that Elizabeth Plummer, wife of William Ijams, was daughter of Elizabeth, wife of Thomas Plummer (not William), and that the senior Elizabeth, though raised by her step-father George Yate, was actually descended from a man named Stockett.

However, seeing the two Stockett men mentioned in the deed filed by William Ijams gives me pause. Which one of the two was the elder Elizabeth's father?

Furthermore, and to the point of yesterday's post, in his rush to correct an entry on the following page of his book, the author may have propagated yet another error—all to say that it's best that, though gratefully when it proves helpful, we follow trailblazers cautiously.

Above image from insert after page 394 in Harry Wright Newman's 1933 book, Anne Arundel Gentry.

To Trust a Trailblazer

 

One predicament in finding our way to documentation from previous centuries is to actually locate such records. Finding aids can be key, but when it comes to researching our seventeenth-century ancestors, those trailblazers were more likely to embed their wisdom in the pages of books than to post them online. The question becomes: can we trust such a trailblazer? Does the printed page make a report more reliable than a digitized synopsis? Or more suspect?

As I did last year in chasing after the details of my mother-in-law's ancestors in Maryland, I've relied on the published works of one specific genealogist: Harry Wright Newman. A genealogist focused on the history of early settlers to the colony of Maryland, Newman published at least nine genealogical works during his lifetime—at least I've found there are more than nine which are currently accessible online.

Two of those books I've already benefitted from examining. The Flowering of the Maryland Palatinate, includes a brief history of the arrival of the first settlers from England to Maryland aboard The Ark and the Dove, a copy of which book I own. The second Newman book I've examined, Anne Arundel Gentry, is available online and features biographical sketches and genealogies of the colonial county's early families, including the in-laws of my focus ancestor for this month, Elizabeth Plummer, who became wife of William Ijams.

The trailblazer factor comes into play when we consider the challenge of searching for records that are, in some cases, approaching four hundred years old. Of course, technology—in particular, AI assisted searches through handwritten documents—is bringing us all closer to successful outcomes, but it helps to have the guidance of someone who has already passed down that research path.

But are those trailblazers reliable? I had asked myself that question before, and in Mr. Newman's case, I had already considered that question last year. Just to be sure, though, I revisited that question. While the consensus gleaned from my search last year seemed to provide a seal of general approval, I was somewhat taken back with this year's search results. 

While Harry Wright Newman was known to many as a professional genealogist, he also served abroad as a commercial attache at various American embassies until his retirement from that service in the 1950s. In the genealogy world, he was perhaps best known as one of the first directors of the American Society of Genealogists, where he was also elected as a Fellow of the society in 1942.

A small detail in that listing of all Fellows honored for the quality of their genealogical publications is that the honor is meant for a lifetime. In other words, before anyone else can be elected to that cadre of fifty esteemed researchers, by tradition, some other fellow has reached the end of his lifetime. And yet, the small note on line number fifteen for Mr. Newman indicates that in 1950, he resigned from that designation.

Because we can in this Internet age, I searched to find more information on this detail, and found but one comment. I can't vouch for how reliable that entry is. In a now-defunct yet still readable online forum, Google Groups, I found one person's opinion that Mr. Newman was "capable of excellent work," but that he should be used with caution. The comment continued with an explanation for his possible demise, but concluded that no fraudulent entries had ever been spotted within the Newman books.

So...do I trust what I've found on the Ijams and Plummer ancestors in Maryland's early colonial years? That's why I want to remember the role of a trailblazer: someone who marks the path for the benefit of others who follow. It's up to us to confirm or reject whether that path points us in the right direction. We'll take a look at some of the details tomorrow.   

Building out the Lines

With one week devoted to wrapping up Lydia Miller's story and another week tracking Elizabeth Plummer Ijams, the current biweekly report has produced 287 new additions to my in-laws' family tree. Granted, most of that increase is due to building out the lines of descent for Lydia's two families—Gordon and Palmer—but I suspect we still have much more to learn about this month's Plummer and Ijams pursuit.

With those newly-added relatives, that tree now includes 43,463 documented individuals. Of course, while I focus on my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother Elizabeth this month, there's hardly time to take a peek at my side of the family. That tree now is holding at 41,939 individuals, and will likely remain that way until the fall, when I turn to my father's tree.

Meanwhile, with this coming week, it will be back to the records, seeking mention of yet another invisible woman, this time in documents from the late 1600s and early 1700s.

Whether digging deeply into colonial Maryland records produces the same amount of resources for the Plummers as Lydia's nineteenth-century lifespan yielded for us last month is yet to be seen. Right now, the quest for Elizabeth's story involves far more searching than it does documentation. Thankfully, there are some trailblazers out there to help guide our research path. We'll take a peek at what can be found in the writings of one genealogist tomorrow. 

Taking a Tip From Last Month

 

Since June is my month to research my mother-in-law's Ijams ancestors, I've been stretching back through the generations far beyond the usual reach of autosomal DNA testing. After all, Elizabeth Plummer was my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, thus making her seventh great-grandmother to the surrogate test taker in this line (my husband). It would be a rare hit indeed to be able to find a DNA match who was an eighth cousin descended from that seventh great-grandmother.

Rare—but not impossible. Keeping in mind my experience from last month's research project, I thought I'd take a tip from what I did to find—and isolate—matches who were related to Lydia Miller. Last month, I used an unusual but related surname which I knew would be far easier to isolate than the ubiquitous Miller surname. I then took that surname—Anspach—and plugged it into the search bar for all my husband's DNA matches. That was how I came up with three viable Miller DNA matches without having to sort through numerous unrelated Millers.

This month, I'm looking for a maiden name which, although not as common as Miller, certainly is more popular than Anspach. I took that Plummer surname and repeated the process I had used to figure out how Lydia Miller's unknown ancestors connected to my mother-in-law's family.

I can't say that I had the same luck I had experienced with the previous month's process. Apparently, there were more Plummers in collateral branches of our DNA matches than I had seen for last month's Anspach attempt. 

Thinking again, I decided to try that same approach with a variation: instead of Plummer, I next searched for Ijams. But Ijams starts to edge into "endogamy lite" territory. The search results brought up matches who descended from related surnames which have also woven themselves into this intermarried family. That wasn't going to lead me to any answers, either.

Apparently, every research quest varies enough to require a different approach. Last month's tip doesn't seem to work for this month's research problem. While I did find a place in the family tree for several interrelated Metzger and Snyder DNA matches connected to this line, this still leaves me searching for any Plummer-Ijams matches among the thousands yet to place in my mother-in-law's tree.

While the forward-looking approach hasn't yielded any discoveries this month, perhaps delving back into Maryland history may provide some insight in the Plummer family and how they got from the home they left in the mother country to a fresh settlement in a wild and new world.

A Lifespan Within a Timeline

 

Finding one document to pinpoint Elizabeth Plummer Ijams' life on the timeline of colonial Maryland history cemented an idea in my mind: whoever Elizabeth's parents were, they surely must have been among the first British settlers to take up residence in the colony.

Granted, Elizabeth's will placed her death some time after May 5, 1762, but we already know from her husband's will in 1734 that back then, she was already mother to at least nine children. Whenever she was born, Elizabeth's birth most likely occurred in the late 1600s. As I begin researching this ancestor, I want to place her lifespan within a timeline of local history.

Like many American history researchers, I already was aware of the 1620 arrival, further north, of the Mayflower. But looking up the history of the Maryland region where Elizabeth's family lived—Anne Arundel County—I was surprised to see the first entry in that timeline: 1608. That, it turns out, was barely a year following the 1607 settlement of the Jamestown colony in Virginia.

That 1608 date, it turns out, marked the arrival of an explorer, not the founding of a settlement. Reviewing the rest of the timeline of historic events in Anne Arundel County revealed a tumultuous series of events, once the colony was formed.

The first settlers to Maryland didn't arrive until 1634, aboard two ships: The Ark and the Dove. Whether Elizabeth's parents—or even grandparents—were aboard either of those two vessels, I am a long way from discovering. We'll first need to delve into Elizabeth's own life and locate what we can secure from documentation, but it is clear that the Plummer family must have been among some of the first British transplants to arrive on a newly-settled continent.

To Begin at the End

 

You know the genealogy drill: begin at the end and work your way backwards in time, from death to birth. It was in such a search for indications of the last days of Elizabeth Plummer Ijams that I started by looking for a will.

Actually, to be more precise, knowing that Elizabeth, my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, had died in 1762, I was fairly certain that I wouldn't find such a document. After all, most women of that time period didn't have property to dispose of, legally. I was sure the only mention I'd find of Elizabeth would be in her husband's will.

There was, however, a mention of such a document for her in a note affixed to a Find A Grave entry for Elizabeth. The note referred to a publication, the Maryland Calendar of Wills, of which there were several volumes, some available online at FamilySearch. Not finding the volume noted in the Find a Grave entry—volume twelve—I gave up and went looking elsewhere.

After trying some other resources—a register of Maryland wills at FamilySearch and a note at the Maryland Genealogical Society regarding their indexing project—I gave up Googling and went back to Ancestry.com to see what I could find. 

Surprise, there it was: the 1762 will drawn up by Elizabeth, widow of William Ijams, providing her last instructions to her children about her property in Anne Arundel County in colonial Maryland. Such a contrast it was to see the listing of her surviving children, so many years after her husband had drawn up his own will in 1734.

Reading between the lines on those two documents may help us piece together what became of Elizabeth's family in the interim, part of the task we'll need to undertake as we explore the life and times of this distant ancestor in my mother-in-law's roots. But first, we'll take some time to orient ourselves to the general history of the region that Elizabeth once called home.

Finding the Way

 

Searching for an ancestor like Elizabeth Plummer brings with it challenges not encountered in the usual genealogical research. That is for one specific reason: Elizabeth lived in the 1600s in colonial Maryland, not in the more modern era of multiple government-mandated records. When digging into a new research arena such as this, it's best to get some help in finding the way to such centuries-old documents.

While I've had plenty of experience following the trail of more recent ancestors in places like Ohio or Virginia, it's been a rare ancestor for whom the foray has led to Maryland. Venturing into colonial records for such ancestors brings me even more of a challenge.

My first inclination, in heading into unfamiliar research territory, is to look to the FamilySearch wiki. But I don't simply take that step; there are ample ways to get lost in all the diversions awaiting us at that front door. Rather than that, I use a different tactic: I Google what I want to find within the wiki by using it as a subheading. Thus, I might search for "FamilySearch wiki colonial Maryland." That search approach allows me to pick the links I want to follow, then examine each one individually.

Just in a few minutes' exploration, I discovered several useful links, all at FamilySearch.org, to bookmark for this month's exploration of Elizabeth Plummer's family.

Unsurprisingly, a wiki article headlined "Maryland Colonial Records" provided links to specific record sets held at FamilySearch.org. But it also included a helpful synopsis of colonial history in Maryland, particularly exploring the political background impacting land and church records with changing regimes. In addition, this link also included a bibliography of helpful books providing abstracts of key record sets.

My search also provided a list of links under the wiki headline, "Maryland Online Genealogy Records." It's a snap I won't be traveling to Maryland anytime soon, so "online" is my favorite word right now. This wiki page provides subheadings for types of records, such as vital records, land records, biographies, cemetery records, and some items I'm keenly interested in, such as probate and tax records.

For those appreciating a more in-depth review, the wiki "Maryland History" provides a timeline of colonial and early state history, including the border disputes leading up to the drawing of the Mason-Dixon Line. In addition, this wiki page provides a bibliography of useful books on Maryland history, for those who appreciate a more detailed accounting of what life was like for their Maryland ancestors.

To widen the lens even further, the FamilySearch wiki on United States Colonial Records provides a broader picture of the widespread immigration which occurred from the colonial era onward. Particularly useful on this page is the chart labeled "Thirteen Colonies Records at a Glance," which provides earliest dates of availability for church records, land records, and court records for each of the thirteen original colonies.

Of course, outside the many records compiled at FamilySearch.org, there is the Maryland State Archives itself, including the featured online items there.

All told, while that will involve a lot of searching and evaluation of records, a list like that provides enough wiggle room for me to surely find more on the family of my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother Elizabeth Plummer.   

Just Because we Can

 

There are some ancestors we research simply because we can. Elizabeth Plummer is such a case. My mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, Elizabeth was an antecedent of William Ijams, the more-recent fourth great-grandfather in my mother-in-law's line whom I've long since traced from his native Maryland to Fairfield County, Ohio.

The Ijams roots, fortunately, have been recorded in various genealogy books over the years, providing the help of a trailblazer to point the way. As we've seen last month, however, there is always the possibility that such a published resource may include mistakes, or even typos at the least. The best policy is to access original documents, if possible. This month will be my experiment to locate those for William's paternal grandmother.

There are a few details I already have spotted about Elizabeth Plummer. One is the year of her death: 1762. At least that is the date reported by a volunteer on Find A Grave, said to have been based on the date of her will. The challenge is to locate a copy of that actual document.

Likewise with Elizabeth's marriage to the senior William Ijams, reportedly in 1696, according to compiler Robert Barnes in his book, Maryland Marriages 1634-1777.  This is simply another detail to verify through original documents. A helpful addition to all that verification would be to confirm the identities of her nine children.

Besides exploring repositories providing digitized copies of colonial Maryland records, we'll need to spend part of this month exploring the more updated verification of the Ijams line through DNA. While a specific subset of Elizabeth's female descendants might possess her unique mitochondrial DNA signature, such would not be the case with my mother-in-law. And Elizabeth's own autosomal genetic makeup would likely be too far removed from appearances through her modern-day counterparts. However, her grandson, William Ijams, appears as a fifth great-grandfather in my husband's line, and so far we have sixty six DNA matches in that ThruLines result to verify. Perhaps we may stumble upon some interesting details as we add that aspect to this month's research tasks.

But first, before we dive into this quest to learn about Elizabeth Plummer, let's look at what resources are available to us for researching any records from colonial Maryland. 

A Sixth Great-Grandmother

 

It's a new month, and time to extract ourselves from the convoluted search for Lydia Miller's roots. For our sixth ancestor from my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026, I selected my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Plummer.

Not that I wanted another challenging research project to follow last month's struggle, but Elizabeth will present an entirely different kind of search. Elizabeth spent most of her adult life—that I know of—in the British colony of Maryland. She supposedly married William Ijams—or Iiams—in 1696. That alone makes her the earliest ancestor I've ever researched.

Fortunately, there are resources reaching back to that date, preserved and accessible thanks to the archival collections of what is now the state of Maryland. This month will be my workout on how to access records from this repository as I pursue this distant relative of my mother-in-law.

In the meantime, I won't entirely give up on last month's chase after Lydia Miller's roots. Behind the scenes, I'll continue building the descendancy charts for each of the Miller patriarchs whose modern-day family members have turned out to be my husband's DNA matches. In addition, not forgetting the realization of the Anspach connection for those DNA matches, I'll be examining that line more closely, too. Perhaps, if anything significant surfaces, I'll share that on a weekend post.

Meanwhile, it's time to begin our June research project. Tomorrow, we'll meet Elizabeth Plummer and see what work we have laid out for us this month.