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.