Sometimes Fast Means Slow

 

No matter how fast we can now read our way through the unindexed wills at FamilySearch, thanks to the AI assist at FamilySearch Labs latest Full Text search project, that faster approach can still slow things down. In other words, "fast" can sometimes mean "slow" when it comes to research progress.

Since today marks my biweekly progress report, I thought the count wouldn't look so inspiring. After all, the Full Text search capability means we can find potential documents more quickly, but that doesn't take into account the reading of the documents after they are found. Nor does it account for the fact checking I do via supporting documents for each will I've discovered through the Labs. In other words, it's been slow going, even after finding wills and deeds speedily.

Still, in the past two weeks, I've documented 132 individuals in my mother-in-law's matriline. In pursuit of just how those mitochondrial DNA matches connect to my in-laws' tree, it now includes records for 34,318 relatives. I guess that isn't too bad, considering I discovered an incorrect marriage reported in two genealogy books, and had to revise some entries—not to mention backpedaling on the next generation in that matriline. I'm now stumped as to who might have been my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, back in colonial Maryland, since William Ridgely's wife Elizabeth was evidently not the daughter of Lewis Duvall.

I guess the Full Text search at FamilySearch Labs helps discover those errors faster, too. 

Getting Un-Stuck

 

Getting stuck in the big middle of a family history mystery can be no fun. When the momentum drags to a halt, the first—and only—thing on my mind is how to get unstuck. While I'm not sure I'll soon see that shift in perspective, here is where I've ground to an abrupt stop.

I had been merrily chugging along on my mother-in-law's matriline, that generation-to-generation line of mothers only. From her third great-grandmother Sarah Ijams, I had slipped from central Ohio back to Maryland, home of Sarah's mother Elizabeth Howard. Then, thanks to mentions in family wills, it was an easy move to her mother, Rachel Ridgely, and then up another generation to her father William Ridgely, the one who died in 1755, mentioning in his will his wife Elizabeth.

Elizabeth, as I had discovered in last year's exploration of old genealogy books, was said to have been born into the Duvall family of colonial Maryland. According to those books, that Elizabeth was daughter of Lewis Duvall and his wife Martha, another Ridgely. 

When I followed that line from those old genealogy books and then tried to verify them with documentation, finding Lewis Duvall's will became my genealogical crash pad. Lewis Duvall had a wife named Martha, alright, but none of his four daughters was named Elizabeth. Where did Elizabeth come from?

The first reasonable guess would be that there was more than one Lewis Duvall in Anne Arundel County,  Maryland. There, we run into the other assertion found in some books: that when Elizabeth Duvall married William Ridgely, she was marrying her cousin. Where did that notion come from? Another genealogy book? I still can't find any details on that.

To complicate, there was indeed another Lewis Duvall in the area. He had a wife by another name, of course, and it would be worth our while to check out who this man was, and whether there was any mention of his descendants in his own will. In particular, did he happen to have a daughter named Elizabeth?

No matter who Elizabeth, wife of William Ridgely, turns out to be, that will provide the next stepping stone in our leap to the distant past through the cousin matches linked to my husband's mitochondrial DNA test results. Warning, though: this will not be easy.

Not the Only One in Town

If William Ridgely, my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandfather, needed to mention his father's name in his 1755 will to differentiate himself from others in town with that same name, we'll likely have to do the same with his wife Elizabeth. Though I consider it fortunate that we are dealing with residents in a rather small colonial province—Maryland—it still appears that there may be some disputes as to the true identity of William's wife Elizabeth. She, too, may not have been the only one in town with that name.

Using old genealogy books covering the legal documents of that era, I've run across claims that Elizabeth was daughter of Lewis Duvall and his wife, Martha Ridgely. I've also found statements in such books that when Elizabeth married William, she was marrying her cousin. However, when I look to the will of her supposed father Lewis, I find mention of three daughters: Martha, Susanna, and Anne. 

Notice: no mention of anyone named Elizabeth.

True, Lewis Duvall's 1724 testament also lacked mention of any wife. Perhaps, in addition to his wife predeceasing him, we could assume any daughter named Elizabeth might have done likewise. But when we realize William Ridgely's will indicated his wife Elizabeth was still very much alive in 1755, we realize the futility of trying to make that theory stick.

So who did Elizabeth, William Ridgely's wife, really belong to? 

Where the Mitochondrial DNA Trail Leads

 

Sometimes, the connections found between distant family members can be surprising. Not long after I began this month's research project, I discovered my mother-in-law's matriline connected her with women living in colonial Maryland, reaching as far back in time as the mid-1600s. Now, reversing the process, I'm searching for descendants of those ancestral women who are considered an "exact match" to my mother-in-law's mitochondrial DNA signature. The trail this hunt has led me on so far has yielded some surprises.

The trail began with my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Duvall who, with her husband William Ridgely, gave the mitochondrial world eleven daughters whose multiple female descendants could possibly number well into the hundreds by the time of our current generation.

I started this mitochondrial chase with Elizabeth's daughter Martha Ridgely, sister of our direct line ancestor, Rachel Ridgely. The reason for this choice was simple: when researching ancestors in the 1600s, it is not easy to find mention of the women we are seeking.

In Martha's case, however, I was fortunate. One mention in a book—Joshua Dorsey Warfield's The Founders of Anne Arundel and Howard Counties, Maryland—revealed that Martha had married Henry Gaither. Henry, in turn, eventually became known as a D.A.R. Patriot.

From Martha and Henry, it was onward to following their daughters. First on my list—again, because I could find records for this—was their daughter Mary Gaither who, through marriage with another well-known family in Maryland, became the wife of Orlando Griffith Dorsey. The next generation brought yet another Mary, by then moved from Maryland to Kentucky, where Mary Dorsey became wife of John Carr.

Fortunately, this line from Martha to Mary to daughter Mary produced a family which once again included daughters. The mitochondrial line was still going strong.

That was where we met Mary and John Carr's daughter Mary Elizabeth Carr, wife of John Fenley. She it was who met that tragic end in the Quincy horror which claimed so many lives from the Fenley family. Though that appalling story permanently removed any chance of Mary Elizabeth Carr's mtDNA passing to future generations, Mary Elizabeth did have sisters.

Of course, I traced those lines, as well. I wanted to see where the mtDNA would land in the current generation. Unfortunately, I didn't find much to keep me going. Since Mary Elizabeth herself was born in 1819, the chances of finding her along with any other sisters in their parents' household by the time of the 1850 census—the first enumeration providing names of each resident in the household—would be slim. After all, Mary Elizabeth herself had been married to John Fenley in 1838. Still, I found three sisters: Martha, Laura, and Harriet.

Of those three, Martha married James T. Edmunds of Louisville, Kentucky, and had only sons. Laura married Benjamin Honoré and, though having what sounded like a fascinating life in both Chicago and Sarasota, Florida, had no children at all. Third sister Harriet died young—and unmarried—leaving me with no further leads.

Except.

I kept finding these mentions of another Honoré man who was somehow associated with the Carr family. Somehow, there had to be another Carr daughter to connect with this man. It wasn't until I went looking for the mother's own obituary—Mary Dorsey Carr died in 1883—that I finally found some leads.

What was strange was that Mary Carr's death notice appeared in multiple newspapers across the country. Much like had happened almost a decade later when her daughter Mary Elizabeth and the many Fenley family members died in the Quincy trail derailment, the elder Mary's story was carried by newswire services. 

One eight-line insertion, ironically carried in a Baltimore newspaper, simply read:

Mrs. Mary Carr, one of the oldest citizens of Louisville, Ky., died in that city Wednesday, aged eighty-nine years. She was well-known in New York, Chicago and other places. Mrs. Henry Honoré, of Chicago, was a daughter of Mrs. Carr, while Mrs. Fred. Grant and Mrs. Potter Palmer, of Chicago, were her granddaughters.

Who was Henry Honoré? And Potter Palmer? Just in case I'd get lucky, I started my search for answers with a quick visit to Google. Turns out, Henry was not only brother-in-law to Laura, wife of his brother Benjamin, but both couples moved from Louisville, where Henry became better known as Chicago real estate developer Henry Harrison Honoré. Also joining in the move to Chicago was Henry's bride, Mary Carr's daughter Eliza Jane Carr.

Passing that old Duvall mtDNA down yet another generation, Eliza became mother to daughters Bertha and Ida Marie. Bertha—who eventually became an astute businesswoman in her own right—married millionaire Chicago businessman, Potter Palmer. Her sister Ida Marie became wife of Frederick Dent Grant, oldest son of General—and later, President—Ulysses S. Grant.

While Bertha was mother to two sons, Ida Marie did have one daughter, Julia. Once again, this subsequent generation presented an unexpected trip further down the Duvall matriline. While traveling in Europe with her aunt Bertha, Julia met—and eventually married—Prince Mikhail Mikhailovich Cantacuzène. At the time of their 1899 wedding, he was a Russian nobleman, general and diplomat under the imperial order of the tsar.

Once again, that mtDNA line survived another generation, with Julia and her husband escaping the turmoil of the Russian Revolution and returning to the United States with their family, which included two daughters, one of whom eventually had two daughters of her own.

Despite the count of passing generations, that mitochondrial DNA might still be preserved in that line, even possibly without mutation, from the point at which I first began the genealogical chase with Elizabeth Duvall in colonial Maryland. Somehow, though, I doubt I'll see any of those names among the exact matches to my mother-in-law's mtDNA.

Research From Mother to Daughter, Eighteenth Century Style

 

I'll jump straight to the punch line for this one: it's hard to find women in records of the 1700s. That, however, is where my research goal is taking me right now, as I celebrate DNA Day by looking for all eleven of the daughters of William and Elizabeth Duvall Ridgely of Anne Arundel County in colonial Maryland.

Elizabeth Duvall, incidentally, would be the sixth great-grandmother of my mother-in-law. The reason I thought she might be the best candidate for this jumping-off point is not just because she had eleven daughters, each of whom would pass along her mitochondrial DNA. She is actually my most reasonable choice for a starting place because I've already found accounts describing whom many of those daughters married. Besides, many of the women in subsequent generations in my mother-in-law's matriline had mostly sons, or daughters who married men who moved out of the area, or—worse—daughters who died young in childbirth or for other reasons did not leave daughters when their brief life was over.

So far, I've been able to gain a toe-hold on a line of descent from one daughter of Elizabeth Duvall. Following the paper trail from that daughter to her granddaughter, I've eventually traced the family to a great-granddaughter born in Kentucky, far from her ancestral home in Maryland.

That detail didn't surprise me quite so much as the fact of her death. Far from home, there she was, listed in a record of death reports for a city far to the north in Massachusetts, once again reminding me of cautions to tread carefully with this research, yet all the while pulling me down an irresistible rabbit trail.

I need to find out if this is really the great-granddaughter in a matriline which matches my mother-in-law's line, and if so, what brought her and several family members from Kentucky to Massachusetts? Bear with me tomorrow as I explore a miniscule matrilineal mystery.

Getting a Clearer Picture

 

It is always helpful to find a reliable history book which contains the names of our ancestors. In the case of researching my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandparents, that early colonial time period could use some helpful trailblazing, especially for the women in the family who would otherwise have remained nearly invisible. Now that we've scouted out the preliminary reports, though, it's time to get busy locating the actual documents.

But first, let's get a clearer picture of what we've discovered so far.

As I've been reading through books such as Harry Wright Newman's Anne Arundel Gentry and Joshua Dorsey Warfield's The Founders of Anne Arundel and Howard Counties, Maryland, I've been taking notes. From those notes, I've sketched out a possible tree from those authors' narratives. That way, we may more clearly see how all those names fit together.

 

From this diagram, which I gleaned from my mother-in-law's updated tree at Ancestry.com, I can now see how all the names fit together in relationship to her fourth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Howard. Since one goal with this month's research is to examine that family's matriline for use with mitochondrial DNA test results, I now can visually follow that matriline from Elizabeth, to her mother Rachel Ridgely, to her mother Elizabeth Duvall, and then to her mother Martha Ridgely and (not included in the insert above) her mother, also named Martha.

Of course, as I assemble these notes, the next step will be to research the female descendants of each woman on that matriline. Any one of the women on each mother's line of descent could be a match to my husband's mtDNA test.

I've been gleaning dates wherever possible, as well as names of descendants, but the going is far different than I'd like it to be. For one thing, in the 1600s and 1700s, women were essentially invisible other than during a very few occasions. Birth, marriage, or death, while events which we now note in so many records, were not always occasions for so much as the mention of a name—with the one exception of being the daughter or wife of a property owner. The speed of research slows markedly.

There is one other task to complete before the end of this month: compare notes with those others who have tested their mtDNA and turned out to be an exact match to my mother-in-law's line. Even there, though, we'll find hurdles to mount.

The Other Brother's Heritage, the Other Husband's History

 

If it weren't for a research goal I'm working on this month, I'd never have stumbled upon some interesting history. Near misses these are, as you'll see, and not exactly my mother-in-law's family. But you can glean some fascinating stories on the way to discovering the truth about your own family history.

One goal I have for this month is to examine my mother-in-law's matriline. It goes without saying—but I'll say it anyways—that mother's mother's mother's history is the same for my husband as it is for his mother. Thus, the test results for my husband's mitochondrial DNA are burning a hole in my genetic genealogy pocket, so to speak. I want to see how far back I can go on that matriline and verify it with a paper trail.

However, I'm stuck at one point: my mother-in-law's eighth great-grandmother. If you think that is too distant a relationship to be picked up by a DNA test, you'd be right—if we were talking about an autosomal DNA test. But a mitochondrial test is different. I want to see just how different it might be.

The only problem I have with that research scenario is that I'm not exactly sure what the name of that eighth great-grandmother might be. If I follow the trail back to that generation—which, by the way, I can do on two separate lines (this is colonial America in the 1600s, after all)—I can spot her husband's name. Not, however, do I have a solid clue as to this woman's own identity.

I have a couple rabbit trails I've followed, though. One leads to the Honorable Robert Ridgely, our mystery mother's husband, who was named as father of one Charles Ridgely, sometimes referred to as Charles the Planter. I know this only because of his son by the same name, called Charles the Merchant—or, more conveniently, Charles Ridgely II.

That particular Ridgely family of Robert's grandson, the younger Charles, just happened to be the scions of a property-holding line which once included Hampton Hall. That, however, was the other brother in the Ridgely line of my mother-in-law. She descends from the younger Charles' brother.

That property, by the way, is now known as the Hampton National Historic Site, part of the U. S. National Park Service.

Of course, that little rabbit trail did not lead me to the answer I was seeking: who was Robert Ridgely's wife? I had one other lead to chase after. Though Charles Ridgely's brother was part of the paternal branch of my mother-in-law's fifth great-grandmother Rachel Ridgely, Robert Ridgely was an ancestor on the maternal side of that family as well.

From that side of the family, I had found the note I had mentioned yesterday: that Lewis Duvall had married Martha Ridgely, only daughter of Robert Ridgely.

There he was again: Robert Ridgely. But who was his wife?

This requires us to be willing to go down yet another rabbit trail. And you know I'm good for that. It turns out that whoever Robert Ridgely's wife was, she—like so many other women of that time period—had been married more than once. In fact, she had been married three times.

It turns out that I had run into information on that third marriage before—but that was a detail which I had long forgotten. Back when I was exploring another potential connection for my mother-in-law—this time, involving some men around the beginning of our country's history, by the surname Carroll—I had checked the wives and children of three men named Charles Carroll.

It is to this eldest Charles Carroll that we need now to return. This particular Carroll was first married to a woman who had been a widow—twice. Her second husband had been a Maryland man by the name of Underwood. But her first husband? That was the name which made a difference. It was Robert Ridgely—the same Robert Ridgely who had been father of Charles the Planter and grandfather of Charles the Merchant.

Though that wife's maiden name is apparently under dispute, with at least two different names being proposed, at least we now have her given name. That name was Martha—maybe a Smith, maybe a Hawks (though I find no substantiation for that). Whatever her maiden name might have been, at least I now have a partial identity to list for this eighth great-grandmother. And a speck of the minutiae of American history to discover in the process.   

 

Finding Another Founding Immigrant Ancestor

 

As I push back through the generations of each ancestor, it always calls forth wonder in my mind—wonder at just how long I will continue on this research path in my own country before I find the terminal position, the founding immigrant ancestor.

For the most part, my assumption is that that discovery will happen by about the mid-1800s. That, at least, was what my mother-in-law expected regarding her forebears. Sometimes, I find a really extended line which persists in this country up until the last few years of the colonial period, like those of my family's ancestors who qualified us as potential members of the Daughters of the American Revolution. And, of course, there is that one tantalizing line which, if finally proven through adequate documentation, would gain us entry in the Mayflower Society.

This line I'm working on today, though, seemed like it might keep going beyond the date of the Mayflower's arrival near Cape Cod late in 1620. After all, the region I'm researching with this month's plan lies far to the south of what is now the state of Massachusetts. The adventurers who landed in such an area as this first arrived as early as 1607 for the Jamestown settlement. What if...?

In pursuing the ancestors of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Howard, we've already seen that Elizabeth's mother was listed as Rachel Ridgely, wife of Joseph Howard of Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Rachel, in turn, was daughter of William and Elizabeth (Duval) Ridgely.

With that discovery—and the handy detail that my mother-in-law's son has already taken a mitochondrial DNA test—I realized that I can pursue her matriline, all the way from my mother-in-law to the farthest extent to which it reaches, unmutated. If you have never conducted such a study, let me tell you: the power of the mtDNA test can reach back far further than the autosomal test that many of us have taken. Even though I'm now talking at the level of sixth great-grandmother for my mother-in-law—and seventh for my husband, the test taker—it could be possible that I will locate exact matches with descendants of some of the women living in this earlier era.

And yet, we push back even farther. While I have found some information for Rachel, what about her mother? Finding records for women in that era of colonial history can be challenging. What can be found on Elizabeth Duval, wife of William Ridgely and mother of Rachel?

Returning to the records we checked yesterday, it's time to read between the lines. In the passage we read yesterday from the 1905 book by Joshua Dorsey Warfield, which listed those ten sisters and three brothers of Rachel Ridgely Howard, there were some other helpful details. One was that Rachel's father had married his cousin Elizabeth Duval. Furthermore, the author gave this Elizabeth's father's name: Lewis Duval.

With that information, and while reading the book in its digitized format online at Internet Archive, I searched for all entries listing that specific surname, Duval. One entry that came up for a Lewis Duval through this search process mentioned that "Lewis Duvall married Martha Ridgely, only daughter of Hon. Robert Ridgely, of St. Inigoes, in 1699."

That sentence was embedded within a paragraph listing all the siblings of this Lewis Duval—or, more specifically in this English-speaking colony, Duvall—and led to the answer to my next question. Who were the parents of Lewis Duvall?

While from his vantage point at the publication of his book, Joshua Dorsey Warfield was unable to state the name of Lewis Duvall's mother, he did explain that Lewis' father was parent of twelve children, five of whom married before their father's death in 1694. Thankfully, Lewis was among those who were already married. My next task will be to locate his father's will to see how the family was actually listed there.

As it turned out, the Duvall children were born to a Huguenot refugee fleeing persecution in his native France. Born Marin Duval in 1625, he arrived in Maryland in the company of one hundred fifty "adventurers" in 1650. In records from his new home in Anne Arundel County, he was recorded as Mareen Duvall.

Thus, following the men affiliated with my mother-in-law's matriline, I've at least found the founding immigrant father for this one set of her eighth great-grandparents.

Mareen Duvall—or Marin Duval—has been the inspiration for the forming of a family history association, known as The Society of Mareen Duvall Descendants. Established in December of 1926, the organization is nearing its hundredth anniversary. While many of their four hundred-plus current members descend from Mareen's son, Mareen the Younger, and membership files are organized by name of the specific child of Mareen from whom a member descends, there are yet two of the Duvall children for whom no one has claimed membership. I wonder if one of those two children might be Lewis. I might need to test this application system to see whether any members belong to his line.

  

Of White Wine and Claret

 

Sometimes, in order to identify the right ancestor, we need to explore deeper into the family constellation. Since our task today is to locate the right William Ridgely of Anne Arundel County in colonial Maryland, we'll first need to take a detour to a place called White Wine and Claret.

We want to make sure we locate the right William Ridgely because Anne Arundel County had more than one man by that name, and because we don't yet have firm dates on this man's life.

The impetus for our quest is his daughter, Rachel, who sports yet another name with many duplicates in colonial Anne Arundel County. Rachel happened to be wife of Joseph Howard, another name with duplicates. Together, Rachel and Joseph were parents of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Howard.

So, which William is the right Ridgely? From our original source, Harry Wright Newman's 1933 book, Anne Arundel Gentry, we see his name cited as husband of a woman named Elizabeth Duval. Discovering another book which researched many of the same names from colonial Maryland's history, I found mention of eleven daughters of William and Elizabeth. Rachel's husband Joseph Howard had many sisters-in-law.

Talk about potential for multiple descendants all claiming the same matriline! Researching those eleven daughters of William Ridgely will keep me busy for far more than the remainder of this month.

There was one additional—and tantalizing—clue about who this William Ridgely was: the name that was given to his inheritance. This was an inheritance of property gained not from William's own parents, but from his maternal grandfather, the Honorable John Dorsey. 

The property was patented in 1712, for the specific intent of providing for the sons of John Dorsey's daughter Deborah, wife of Charles Ridgely. Thus, Dorsey's land was willed to his Ridgely grandsons, Charles and William. Since the younger Charles chose to live on one of his other properties, the land—dubbed by John Dorsey as "White Wine and Claret"—went by default to the other grandson, William.

The land, hemmed in by the "crooked outlines" of the surveyor's work, Dorsey attributed to the gift he had bestowed upon the surveyors as he sent them off on their duties: white wine and claret. The land, originally encompassing 2,500 acres, is now located in Clarksville, part of Howard County.

That land became the site where William Ridgely and his wife, Elizabeth Duval, raised their three sons and eleven daughters. A book published almost three decades before Harry Wright Newman's work—called The Founders of Anne Arundel and Howard Counties, Maryland—actually names each one of them, including the identity of the married daughters' husbands.

More pertinent to our current goal—to pursue Elizabeth Howard's matriline—this second book spells out a few details on William Ridgely's wife, Elizabeth Duval. This is precisely the line we will need to follow next. While we'll have our work cut out for us at this stop on the generational train trip with those ten sisters of Rachel Ridgely, it will also be important to see what we can learn about Rachel's mother, Elizabeth Duval. We'll zero in on that, next.