Before the Journey Began

 

One way to trace the route of immigrant ancestors is to look to their children. Not just the locations where those children were born, but the year of their arrival can give us a sketch of their parents' meanderings.

Before the journey began for John Kelly, he had married Johanna Falvey and the couple had at least four children before leaving their homeland in County Kerry, Ireland. The baptismal records help pinpoint the family's whereabouts before their final decision to set sail for America.

John and Johanna were married in 1859, and by the next year, they had welcomed in their oldest son. They named their boy Timothy, and as practicing Catholics, the Kellys surely had him baptized, but where is the question. I've yet to locate that record, as well as that of the second-born child, a daughter they named Catherine, who eventually became my father-in-law's ill-fated paternal grandmother. 

For their third child, however, John and Johanna chose to have that daughter baptized at the Catholic parish in Killeentierna in County Kerry. The September 25, 1864, record noted that the Kelly family was residing in the village of Currow at that time. The only other bit of information was the note concerning the godparents, James and Margaret Fleming, surely one or the other of which would be a sibling to either parents.

From that discovery, we now have a Kelly couple named John and Johanna who have been said to reside in either Currow, as we saw for this one baptismal record, or the townland of Knockauncore, as we saw yesterday for Johanna's entry in her marriage record. At any rate, these two locations help us zero in on the vicinity where John Kelly and his wife once lived—or remind us that there could be more than one couple with a husband claiming a name as common as John Kelly, urging us to look further for more information on the family's whereabouts for the baptisms of their other children before they left Ireland.

John Kelly's Wife

 

To find an ancestor from Ireland with such a name as John Kelly means relying on a "F.A.N. Club" full of helpful hints about the man's whereabouts. That's why I was elated when I first discovered that John Kelly had married someone with the name Johanna Falvey. With a name like that, I reasoned, John Kelly's wife possessed a surname uncommon enough for it to stand out in the crowd.

Initially discovering John Kelly was not difficult at all. I relied on the oral reports of older relatives who had kept notes on such details. After all, John Kelly was my father-in-law's great-grandfather, a relationship close enough to have been held in the memory of relatives my father-in-law knew personally. And even though my father-in-law is long gone, his brothers—and then their children—have carefully kept those records.

But discovering where John Kelly came from is another matter. We already knew he died in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1892—and that was the problem. John Kelly's passing fell just a few years short of when government records expanded their reach to include pertinent details such as parents' names or place of birth.

John Kelly's wife, on the other hand, lived long enough to provide details which, preserved on paper, could be passed down through the generations. Johanna Falvey's passing in 1903 provided not only a death certificate but two different obituaries full of details. A more straightforward newspaper entry provided a place of birth as County Kerry, Ireland, and the news that "several sisters" still lived in Ireland, as well as one in New Zealand, while notes from another obituary mentioned that Johanna came from the Lakes of Killarney.

More to the point was the information that Johanna came with her children to America, inferring a marriage before that point in Ireland. Sure enough, there was a March 2, 1859, entry in the Catholic parish records of Kilcummin in County Kerry noting the marriage of one John Kelly and Johanna Falvey, noted to be from "Knocanscore"—likely the townland of Knockauncore.

Now that I've returned several times over the years to learn more about Johanna and her supposedly uncommon surname, the experience has taught me that Falvey is not an uncommon name at all—at least for that region of County Kerry. That, too, may complicate this month's search for more information on her husband's early years in Ireland.

There are, however, other possibilities for approaching this research question. Tomorrow, let's look first to the children born to the couple before they left Ireland. 

Looking for THAT John Kelly

 

Choosing to search for an Irish ancestor named John Kelly may end up being a hopeless genealogical battle, I'll admit. But here it is, nearly the beginning of July, and I'm ready to move on to the seventh of my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2026.

Yes, the Irish did love to give their sons saints' names like John, and sure, the family name Kelly has historically played the number two spot, behind Murphy, in Ireland's surname lineup. But this month, yep, I'll be looking for John Kelly. But not any John Kelly; I have a special one in mind. I'll be looking for my father-in-law's paternal grandmother's father. That John Kelly.

That John Kelly was an Irish immigrant to America. But not like the hordes of emaciated Irish, escaping the doom of starvation in their beautiful homeland in 1848. That John Kelly actually arrived late on our shores, possibly right before the 1870 census. And unlike the majority of Irish immigrants, that John Kelly came not to New York or to Boston, but to Fort Wayne, Indiana, where possibly a relative or former neighbor had sent a tip back home about available jobs in the railroads.

Following our John Kelly was his wife Johanna and their three surviving children: Timothy, Catherine, and Mary. To the rest they had bid a final goodbye beneath the Irish sod before their long journey westward.

Most of what I already know about that John Kelly I learned from researching his wife. She, the former Johanna Falvey, not only presented a surname which I thought might be unusual enough to provide helpful leads, but lived a life which stretched just long enough to attain the more modern record-keeping conveniences that enable descendants to better trace their roots.

To get started, tomorrow, on our search for our John Kelly, we'll take a look at what's already been discovered about his wife, Johanna Falvey. After that, we'll take a blind leap into the void and hope we can somehow find our way to that one specific ancestor named John Kelly. 

Genealogy as Endurance Sport

 

The other day, a question came to mind: is genealogy an endurance sport? Setting aside the objection that genealogy could not possibly be considered a sports activity—after all, we spend most of our time hunkered over our laptops in a sedentary position—let's consider the "endurance" part of that question.

My first reaction was to dismiss the thought immediately. Having lately been analyzing the state of local genealogy society membership, I realized that perhaps it is a quixotic quest for society boards to attempt maintaining consistent membership levels.

Why? The answer is simple. Interest in family history ebbs and flows. People expecting their first baby—or even grandbaby—might wonder what could be said about that child's heritage, or where those good looks or blue eyes came from. Or a great-grandparent dies, the keeper of the family stuff, and now the family is wondering how to figure out all those unlabeled photos left behind.

Inspirations like that come and go. Sure, there are some who roll up their sleeves and dig in, faithfully attending beginners' classes and starting the long trek to find family history answers. They may even work on that fledgling tree for a year or so, maybe even a decade. But then, something else comes up, and they're off to pursue a new project: an eldest daughter's wedding preparations, or that cruise they always wanted to take. Or maybe life just got in the way.

Those are the scenarios which make me wonder whether we have adopted an organizational format which better fit our grandparents' generation—the kind of community barn-raising spirit that got things done by forming "societies" for specific long-term purposes, to address needs that would otherwise never go away. 

That generation was then; now there is the once-and-done generation, with just-in-time delivery, automated and computer-generated. Yet, we still try to fit our "society" mold around the answer-seeking mode of newer, fresher cohorts. Perhaps genealogy for them never was a marathon; maybe it was a family history sprint. Or a relay race between teams collectively chasing the same answers.

Every generation has its own approach to problem-solving. Genealogy is simply another question to be answered in life. And yet, despite some people arriving on the scene and staying only until they've found their answer, there are others for whom pursuing the answer to "where did my family come from?" does turn into an endurance sport.

There are some of us who came to this party early, and stayed late. Perhaps these were the kids whose grade school project turned into a lifelong pursuit. Or young people with questions about the missing parts of their family story. They—we—are on a quest, and the answer, once found, only provides fuel to power us through the next question. For such as these, genealogy is an endurance sport. We've been at it for ages, and we know we're built to keep going, long after others move on.

Perhaps the real question is about how to accept the reality of such a situation when tasked with forming an organization to address the needs of both the sprinters and the marathoners in this "sport" of genealogy. No matter how adept our program directors might be at finding great speakers for the next society meeting, an hour-long lecture might not be the answer to everyone's family history question.

Summering

 

Our local genealogical society recently wrapped up what I suppose we could call our spring semester. Each year, we host monthly membership meetings through June, then take a break over the summer, before resuming our schedule in September. 

This, apparently, is not how every local family history organization operates. When I first started looking at what other groups were doing, I noticed several that continued meeting straight through the summer. Sure, there were events like a July "ice cream social" to round out the year's activities, but those groups kept at it, month after month. For some, the idea of summering is apparently quaint and so nineteenth century.

On the other hand, genealogy to me was always a summertime-only event. If I was lucky, I might be able to squeeze in a few frantic research trips during the winter break, but otherwise, the teaching workload demanded full attention the rest of the year. I've had readers of A Family Tapestry contact me and mention that was the case for them, as well. It made sense to learn that our local society called it quits, come mid-June.

Around here, apparently, the idea of summering is still in force. Perhaps that's because we are a university town, populated by enough residents who expect to escape for the entire summer. Come to think of it, at our June meeting, two board members were already absent—one heading to Mexico, the other one traveling in Europe. And that is only the start of the season.

A second group of summer absentees is comprised of those for whom family vacations came with built-in side trips to visit family cemeteries along the route, or to pick up documents at nearby governmental offices while on the way to visit relatives. I wasn't sure whether that was still part of today's summertime existence, but the other day, a former genealogy class member emailed me to joyfully note she was actually on her way to pick up a grandparent's paperwork from a county nearly a hundred miles from here. There is no time like the present, true, but I imagine a trip like that would be more enjoyable in summer weather than wintertime storms.

Still, I'm hardly convinced that today's researchers reserve summer months for their genealogical pursuits any more. Or is it a sense of "keeping up with the Joneses" that pushes me to think that in our times a genealogical society should keep operations going full steam ahead, even through those summer months? 

Looking Ahead

 

While I'm working on extricating myself from the current tree-building mess I'm in, I thought I'd take a moment, despite being early, to introduce next month's research project. After all, tree-building, while a lot of work, only rarely provides the kind of fascinating discoveries worth writing about.

As the Twelve Most Wanted project has done for the past several years, come July, I shift my focus away from the three selected ancestors from my mother-in-law's line and move on to my father-in-law's tree. With a step like that, we leap from colonial America to land in the turmoil of mid-1800s Ireland, a very different part of the dominion of the United Kingdom.

In the next three months, we'll focus on three Irish ancestors from my father-in-law's family. The process will begin with the selection for July: John Kelly.

Regardless of who he was in my father-in-law's family tree—we'll get to that next Monday—we first need to consider how convoluted a search like that can be. 

Just by considering his name—John Kelly—we already realize what a challenge we face in the coming month. A given name like John, bestowed upon an Irish-born son of the mid-1800s, would put him in ample good company. While I don't have statistics for popular names in the exact year of his birth, just taking a glance at name popularity statistics for a time period just after his death, we can see that the name John was a popular choice for Irish parents. One source indicated that, by 1911, John was the most common man's name in Ireland.

Add to that predicament the fact that the surname Kelly won't make the situation any easier. Based on data available in the mid-1800s, the surname Kelly wasn't exactly the number one surname on the island but it came in close—the second most common surname in all of Ireland, after Murphy.

And there you have it: the task lying ahead of us for next month's selection for my Twelve Most Wanted. Truth be told, I've needed to jump into this messy research project for years but being aware of the challenge just seemed to help point my attention in other directions. Now that I'm running out of low hanging fruit in my hunt for ancestral history, it's finally time to face up to the challenge when July gets here next week.   

Each Step Makes the Next One Easier

 

As I work through the finishing touches of last month's research project, adding DNA matches to my mother-in-law's Jackson ancestors, I realized one encouraging detail. For every DNA match whose place I secured in her family tree, it made the next step easier to complete.

There are requisite tools to have at hand in order to make such a statement. I'm working now on those Jackson DNA matches by way of Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool, along with their ProTools capability of listing shared matches. Each identified match fills a known place in the family tree, thus becoming a beacon of relationship for all the others in this line, no matter how small the match may be.

The last time I checked, that Jackson progenitor, Lyman, had seventy three matches listed in his ThruLines results. But for each of those seventy three, there are multiple others who show up if I click on the Shared Matches tab under ProTools. Many of those share very little genetic material with my husband, the proxy test taker for this project. Yet, bit by bit, identifying each one's place in the Jackson family presents a second helpful clue by showing me how even more mystery matches fit into the tree.

It's amazing to see how many DNA matches turn out to have siblings, parents or children, or close cousins who have also tested. Identifying one's place in the tree brings the others into the picture more clearly, multiplying my effort. All I need to do is keep at it, adding more and more matches until I run out of options. Then, usually after a short waiting period, even more DNA matches show up—perhaps thanks to a Father's Day sale or other promotion—and the relationship clues help zero in on where the newer ones belong, as well.

I'm still quite a long way from completing those seventy three ThruLines matches—plus those other affiliated cousins—but it has helped find some otherwise invisible Jackson descendants. Of course, only six of the original thirteen children of Lyman Jackson have appeared in those DNA results, represented by their descendants, but I'm hoping this process will coax some of the other Jackson lines out of their hiding places and onto my mother-in-law's family tree. 

Dime a Dip

 

Yesterday's summer cleaning adventures—both of the real-life and genealogical kind—brought to mind some unexpected memories. On the real life front, cleaning projects unearthed an unused gift certificate for one hundred dollars—an impressive gift when it was received years ago, though just enough to purchase a decent restaurant dinner for two nowadays.

A day's worth of such discoveries, going through old files in the summer heat, was enough to prompt our family to head to our favorite ice cream shop after dinner. That, in turn, put me in mind of the dime-a-dip ice cream parlors of bygone years. Perhaps it was owing to the many projects unfolding during the day in our family—our daughter was helping a friend explore potential real estate projects, comparing prices today with original purchase prices on eighty year old homes—that put me in mind of an entire world of dime a dip life.

Meanwhile, on the genealogical front, I was delving into my mother-in-law's Jackson roots, a reach so far removed from today's generation that I barely can find matches who reach a mere ten centiMorgans of shared genetic material. As rarified as that "dime" of genetic material may seem in today's inflated economy, just like the dime-a-dip of the ice cream world, it can yield some useful results. 

This was my day to chase those "shared matches" of Jackson descendants to help build out that family tree. Simply by using the ThruLines results for Lyman Jackson, my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, I used as a next step the "Shared matches" option from Ancestry's ProTools to find close relatives to each Jackson DNA match.

One after another, those mystery matches who shared such dime-sized genetic results helped guide me to build out that Jackson branch on my in-laws' tree. Yes, of course I used documentation to verify connections; it's just that without that chain of discoveries, I would otherwise not have known to even look in those directions.

Such small DNA matches are often lost in the myriad results at the bottom of the pile. They otherwise would have totally stumped me—if I even bothered to try connecting them to the family tree. But with the right tools, and a huge helping of patience added to the mix, it is possible to let each match find a place in the family tree, no matter how small. 

A DNA Housecleaning

 

Face it: when confronted with twenty thousand DNA matches, it's hard to place those distant relatives in their place on the family tree. Far easier to concentrate on the other, smaller category—fourth cousins or closer—for whom we have much better chances of confirming connections.

But—and there always is a caveat—since I've decided to pursue DNA cousins who share descent from my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandparents Lyman and Deidama Jackson, her proxy test volunteer (her son, my husband) must find connections with matches who are at least sixth cousins. That's where we start dipping into that larger pool of twenty thousand contestants. Facing a number like that, it's time for a DNA housecleaning.

That larger pool of possible cousins is further restricted by genetic limitations. After about the level of third cousin,  some distant relatives will share no identifying genetic material at all with a percentage of their cousins. That is not to say, of course, that there is no DNA shared at all. There is a high percentage of genetic material that all human beings have in common—it's just that the selected SNPs that genealogy companies use to identify closer family connections may not include the array of items passed down from specific distant ancestors.

However, combining use of both a paper trail of documented family connections and data about distant DNA matches may still confirm a distant cousin's place in the family tree, despite sharing only a small number of centiMorgans. In such cases, what I've done is build out the lines of descent from the distant ancestor—the Jackson line in this case—then move from already-confirmed known cousins to "shared matches" identified by tools such as Ancestry's ProTools.

Of Lyman Jackson's thirteen children, there are six whose descendants are itemized in the ThruLines listing at Ancestry.com. Of course, the bulk of those matches come from John Jackson's own line, which is the line of descent leading to my mother-in-law. However, through this process I've managed to connect the majority of other ThruLines Jackson cousins to her family tree.

From that point, my next step is to take each one of those verified Jackson cousin matches and open the "Shared Matches" tab on their own entry. I then look to see how many of those connected cousins I can trace through the family tree. Sometimes, that task presents problems, but in many cases, that two-step sweep leads to discovering other Jackson descendants among those twenty thousand distant matches. And each match confirmed makes the next ones easier to place, as we place more pieces of the puzzle where they belong in the tree.

From there, it's basically "rinse and repeat" as far as I can go with that same process. Bit by bit, it opens up possibilities for where DNA matches fit in the bigger picture of a much-extended family tree. 

More Month Than Projected

 

I remember a phrase from my starving student years, something about always having more month than money. I've always hated running out, no matter what supply was dwindling too fast for comfort. Thankfully, I'm far from those student years, but I still struggle with any sense of not having enough.

How strange it is, then, to find myself with more month than research project. With each month's Twelve Most Wanted candidate, I usually run out of material to secure my research goal before I get to the close of each month. What a shift it has been to find myself ten days away from the start of a new month, yet finished with the goal for that time period.

What to do next? Granted, I could just jump ahead and move on to July's project. With the shift in this upcoming quarter from my mother-in-law's family to that of my father-in-law, that might work, but it would take a leap from colonial American research to the brick wall woes of tracing Irish immigrants back to their beloved homeland. That may become a project never completed, no matter how many months are allotted to the effort.

However, there are so many odds and ends scattered in my wake as I plow through those family history questions each month. What comes to mind most are the DNA connections hinted at, but never quite confirmed, from the collection of literally thousands of matches. 

I'm thinking mostly of the thirteen children of Lyman and Deidama Jackson, whose lives spanned the era in which a nation was birthed. When we last left that endeavor to document the Jackson family, all thirteen children had been identified—barely. There is so much more yet to do.

There are now seventy three DNA cousins among my husband's Jackson matches, according to Ancestry's ThruLines tool, cousins who descend from that couple we had followed for April's version of this year's Twelve Most Wanted. It's time to wrap up those dangling strands and tie them into this family tapestry. Sounds like a "summer cleaning" project to me.

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. 

Messy or Not, it's Time to Move on

 

Despite a messy research detour while puzzling over Lydia Miller's roots, at the end of the month, it's time to move on. My mother-in-law's second great-grandmother will have to remain a mystery for another year.

Still, there are several observations gleaned from this month's meandering research trajectory. Most helpful was the realization that my husband, the designated DNA tester for this line, had matches reaching back to ancestors bearing that same Miller surname. My goal this month was to isolate those DNA matches who, while related through a Miller line, were not connected through any of the other intermarried lines from my mother-in-law's "endogamy lite" family.

This process yielded DNA matches whose founding ancestor—at least as far as we can tell at this point—was either Jonathan Miller (of unknown parentage) or Solomon Miller, son of George. 

While I wore myself to the bone searching for ancestral connections preceding those Miller men, in retrospect, it occurred to me that perhaps seeking Miller roots might have been the wrong approach. There might have been a second way these Millers were related: through their wives. Jonathan Miller, for instance, had married Catharine Dupler. Solomon Miller, while marrying a woman whose maiden name has seen various spelling permutations—Auspaugh or Anspaugh—may actually have been the son-in-law of David Anspach of Perry County, Ohio.

If that were the case, David's sister Anna Elizabeth Anspach would actually be mother of Jonathan Miller's wife, Catharine Dupler. In other words, Catharine Dupler Miller and Malinda Anspaugh Miller would have been first cousins. The grandfather they shared in common would be Johann Adam Anspach.

Whether that means my mother-in-law shared that Anspach ancestor, I can't yet say, though it is now obvious that these two Miller wives whose descendants ever so slightly match my husband's DNA must be in the picture for future research. Finding Lydia Miller's roots will need to be an ongoing project for next year, but finding that connection through their wives, not the Miller husbands, is at least an encouraging discovery to reference the next time we return to this research puzzle.