More About Maryland

 

My May 2024 self is looking at my December 2023 self and saying, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"

At the close of the previous year, when I was outlining my research projects for the new year, I had selected William Ijams as one of my Twelve Most Wanted to be tackled this year—this very month, in fact. Now that I re-read my post announcing that plan, and see how excited I was then about "more Maryland material" being added to online resources, I realize that was only the beginning. After that addition I referred to on December 30, regarding the Maryland Archives bonanza thanks to Reclaim the Records, we've since had another research gift in the form of FamilySearch Labs' Full Text search.

As it turns out, that might be exactly the boost I'll need to pick up on my ongoing struggle with William Ijams. As unusual as that surname might seem to be, back in Maryland, where William was born in 1748, there were plenty of aunts and uncles, cousins, and other kin bearing that same Ijams name. It will take some persistence to ensure that we're following the right William Ijams from Maryland this month.

Since I've worked on this Ijams line before—William's wife Elizabeth and daughter Sarah were included in my Twelve Most Wanted last year—I've already got a running start. Since William was my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, a minimal amount of his DNA shows up in my husband's ThruLines results at Ancestry.com, providing an extra research boost.

Researching William Ijams does present some problems, though. He and his wife—the same Elizabeth Howard whom we focused on last month—were born in Maryland but chose to move "west" to Ohio at the very end of the 1700s, before Ohio attained statehood. Records for that time period were scarce.

On the plus side, William apparently fought in the War of 1812, a detail which should generate some records for us. On the down side, William and his family belonged to a religious group which may not have kept records—at least, not the ones we usually like to consult for family history details.

William Ijams' half-sunken headstone in Fairfield County, Ohio, was one of the first tokens I had found on the way to learning more about his story. Like the condition of his headstone, the shape of the rest of his partially-hidden past may make the research path this month a bit rocky. The goal will be to confirm William's parentage and then see how far back in time we can push this family's story. Hopefully, between the Maryland Archives and FamilySearch Labs' Full Text search capabilities, we'll discover far more about William, his siblings, and his parents—and then some.

Looking Back Before Leaping Forward

 

We're on a bluff overlooking a whole new month, and it's time to make our leap into a new research project. But before we move forward, it's good practice to take a look backwards, review what we've accomplished over the past month, and make plans for the next time we visit this specific research adventure.

My goal for April had been to examine my mother-in-law's matriline, starting with one particular ancestor: her fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth Howard, eventual wife of William Ijams. This fourth of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024 I had hoped held the key to determining just how my husband's mtDNA matches connected to his mother's matriline.

Step one in that process was to push the trail back as many more generations as possible, but in that one month, we only gained two generations before discovering that William Ridgely's wife Elizabeth, if she was indeed a Duvall, was not daughter of the Lewis Duvall to whom genealogists of past centuries had attributed her parentage.

From that point, we did an about-face, keeping in mind there were several daughters whose lines could be followed in that multi-generational process bringing us back to the present. After all, William and Elizabeth Ridgely, no matter who she might have been, were said to have been parents of at least eleven daughters.

Only problem: that was back in the mid-1700s, when women may have been seen, but seldom documented. A better approach was to start with what I already knew, and work the same plan from there. Hence, the start with Elizabeth Howard, herself, and the careful work to document each of her own daughters.

At that point—partially thanks to autosomal DNA matches linking back to Elizabeth Howard—the unexpected happened. There was another daughter in the matriline, someone I had entirely missed. I now needed to carefully construct her life story. That was the discovery of Rosanna, granddaughter of Elizabeth Howard and daughter of my mother-in-law's direct line ancestor, Sarah Ijams, wife of John Jay Jackson. 

It is easy to see how I could have missed Rosanna. Sarah, her mother, died at a relatively young age in 1829 in a place then still considered a frontier. Rosanna had married, and with her husband and children, eventually left the family's home in Perry County, Ohio, for new farmland in Iowa. Perhaps there was not much community built around that new home to remember Rosanna at her own early passing.

Rosanna, however, had daughters. And those daughters still need to be researched. With that on my to-do list, I need to set up plans for when I revisit this research question. Among the items I want to assemble would be records regarding Rosanna's husband, Walter Mitchell—his will, in particular. For each of their daughters, a next step would be to trace their own generations, at least for those who married and had children. Checking for any other autosomal DNA matches will be helpful, but my main focus in moving to the next generations would be to identify Rosanna's daughters, then their daughters, and onward to the present with those same female descendants. Remember the research goal: identify possible mtDNA matches by building out that aspect of Rosanna's tree.

Granted, there still is that other puzzle on the distant end of the generations: the other Elizabeth, wife of William Ridgely, who as my mother-in-law's sixth great-grandmother, was also on her matriline. She, too, had female descendants to trace, women who also may have carried that same mitochondrial DNA signature. Putting all this on my research to-do list for a future year sounds more like the makings of at least two projects, rather than one month's goal. 

That, however, is a task to puzzle over in another year. Tomorrow, we'll start fresh with another of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2024. This time, we'll turn to the Maryland ancestors of William Ijams, husband of this month's focus, Elizabeth Howard.

A New Branch

 

This has been one of those weeks when I have to ask myself, "Now, how did you miss that?!" Despite the number of years I've been working on my mother-in-law's third great-grandmother Sarah Ijams, I never realized she had another daughter—not, that is, until I discovered a DNA match whose connection to Sarah was through a branch of the family I hadn't previously found in my own research.

To be fair to my bewildered self, I was working with a woman's story line which had her born at the very end of the 1700s and abruptly cut short in her early thirties—long before women's names made any regular appearance in census records. To add to the complications, hers was apparently a family with the preference of deeding property to their children, rather than drawing up one of those documents which bequeathed everything to their beloved relatives. I could have found such a deed to a son-in-law and blithely flipped right past it, having no knowledge of how that person connected to the family line.

So, in a spate of document discoveries, I've tentatively added yet another daughter to Sarah and John Jay Jackson's family, and have begun that long slide back to the present, following each of that daughter's descendants. After all, any daughter of Sarah becomes granddaughter of Elizabeth Howard, and thus part of my mother-in-law's matriline. Hopefully, this will produce useful information for continuing that search for mtDNA matches.

In the meantime, though, that discovery of a new branch also bolsters my count, just in time for another biweekly report. Sure enough, when I checked, the past two weeks has brought 165 new names to my in-laws' family tree, despite the struggle to locate documentation on the women in the family during those early years of female invisibility. My in-laws' tree now includes 34,483 documented individuals—and this new discovery will keep me busy for another couple weeks to come.

In just a few days, we'll move on from my April research goal as the month comes to a close. I'm not sure I've found everything I had hoped to find for my mother-in-law's matriline—there are so many women in her ancestry for whom I still have not been able to find documentation, even with the research boost of the FamilySearch Labs' Full Text search. We'll take the next couple days to recap what we've accomplished this month, and lay out plans for next steps when I return to tackle this same family line in a future year. 

Until You Know That You Know

 

Sometimes, in shuffling through the myriad stacks of records necessary for tracking those elusive ancestors, we run across documents which we know are significant finds—but somehow the fact doesn't fully register in our minds concerning the importance of what we've found. It isn't until our mind once again comes around full circle and realizes that now we know that we knew that fact that we can proceed to actually put that discovery to use.

That's the case with this month's work on my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth Howard, wife of William Ijams. I had been working my way through Elizabeth's daughters, with the purpose of outlining all those who linked to Elizabeth's matriline for mtDNA purposes. I had already examined the lines of daughters Rebecca, Rachel, Mary, and Comfort. The only one remaining was Sarah. 

Sarah was likely the youngest daughter of William Ijams and his wife Elizabeth Howard, but she was also my mother-in-law's direct ancestor, so I had already thoroughly researched the women descending from Sarah—except, apparently, for one detail. That detail was clearly represented in a document which I had seen and known about for years; after all, it was called to my attention by one of those convenient "hints" at Ancestry.com. How could I have missed that?

The document was housed at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records. If I had ever thought to access that website and conduct a search on Sarah Ijams' own name, the document could easily have been found. But who would go looking for a land record under a woman's name back in 1817? And under her maiden name, too!

Yesterday, in a research tailspin over lack of progress on this month's research goal—finding more connections to Elizabeth Howard's matriline—I decided to celebrate DNA Day by reviewing all my husband's autosomal DNA matches using Ancestry's ThruLines tool. At this point, he has forty eight matches there directly linked to Elizabeth Howard through her daughter Sarah Ijams' descendants. Most of them are linked to our tree, but there are about eight new matches which I hadn't yet added. Hoping for that small chance that an autosomal match might also have connected via that same matrilineal path, I didn't want to miss any details.

Nothing significant materialized. In that dull moment of grasping for "what's next," up popped that persistent hint about the land record with Sarah Ijams' name on it. The property description didn't seem to match the location I had remembered from other court records for her family—I had assumed in the past that her name was on the document due to some land she had inherited—and was stymied by what the hidden story might have been.

Mulling over what that untold backstory might have been, rather than just staring at the document as it was presented on Ancestry, I decided to look at the version from the source. Though the record had stated "Sarah Ijams of Fairfield County," looking up such a document at the BLM website produced nothing. However, if I searched for Sarah's name in Ohio in general, but didn't enter any county name, up popped the record in neighboring Perry County. 

Clicking on the tab labeled "Related Documents," showed clearly that the land was in Perry County, not Fairfield County, Sarah's family home. Interestingly, another document also showed in the list from that second search, regarding an adjoining property. That property belonged to Sarah's brother-in-law, Walter Teal, whom I had also had trouble tracing during this month's research project. Now realizing that Walter's property was likewise in Perry County, that would be a helpful detail to know when searching for any deeds or other documents to trace possibility of daughters for Walter's line, since his wife was also on Elizabeth Howard's matriline.

But what I had failed to remember—this is the part I should have already known—was that Perry County was not established until March 1 of 1818. And since the Ijams family had lived in Richland Township in Fairfield County—which history I had read only a week or so ago—I should have remembered that tiny detail about Richland Township losing two of its sections to form part of Perry County. 

I'm pretty sure I know that I know that—now. That detail has finally sunk into the "working knowledge" side of my brain. That also explains why I had seen some other deeds recorded in both counties, despite being a single transaction. But as to why the land was listed in 1817 under the name of an unmarried woman, that is a puzzle whose answer I have yet to know.

Providence's Progeny

 

On the trail of all the female descendants of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth Howard didn't seem to be that challenging of an assignment. At least that's how it seemed at the beginning. But after running into several daughters whose female offspring birthed only sons—if any children at all—I was beginning to despair of reaching my matriline-mapping goal with that handy mitochondrial DNA test.

Then, I found Providence. And among Providence's progeny, there were three daughters: Elizabeth, Sarah, and Mary Eugenia—not one, but three chances to make progress with my research goal.

Don't assume things will go well for us here, though. Providence, daughter of Elizabeth Howard's daughter Mary Ijams, was married to Thomas Dain, an Indiana man whose death in 1865 came with no documentation that I can find (so far), other than his monument in the Crown Hill Cemetery in Indianapolis.

With Thomas' passing, he left Providence with their youngest daughter—Mary Eugenia—still at home. Born after the 1850 census, which listed her two older sisters, Mary Eugenia did not marry until her 1874 wedding with Jacob Smith.

It's fortunate to have found that record, for the 1900 census revealed exactly what I've been looking for: more daughters among the descendants of Elizabeth Howard. In fact, Mary Eugenia and Jacob had two daughters: Bernice and Myla. Bernice, however, never married. And Myla, soon wife of Frank Merrill Talbot, followed the family pattern by producing three sons for the next generation. No daughters.

Don't think looking to Mary Eugenia's older sisters will help us out in our quest. Her oldest sister Elizabeth's marriage produced one son. Period. And the middle sister, Sarah, has eluded me ever since her disappearance after the 1850 census.

With that, we'll retrace our steps back through the generations until we arrive at the generation of Elizabeth Howard's other daughters. Tomorrow, we'll see if we have better results in following Mary Ijams' sister Rachel, wife of James Turner, back in Fairfield County, Ohio.

Finding Females Before the Fifties

 

Since I realize that caving to the allure of alliteration may leave me wide open to misinterpreted hits from spammers, let me clarify that title: I'm now looking for the females in Walter Teal's family from before the fifties—the 1850s, that is, not their fifties. 

I'm still on the trail of my mother-in-law's matriline, looking for any mtDNA matches, specifically any women descending from her fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth Howard. Elizabeth's daughter Mary Ijams had married Walter Teal in Fairfield County, Ohio, in 1805, but somehow may have disappeared before her husband showed up in the 1840 census in Wabash County, Indiana.

It's hard to tell on those enumerations prior to 1850. While tally marks within age brackets can give us somewhat of a picture of a family's composition, they certainly can't tell us the names of any of those women in the household. But at least the document reveals that there was one possible daughter of Walter and Mary still remaining in the 1840 household: someone between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. Who could it have been?

Stepping back another ten years, Walter's household in the 1830 census had shown two other possible daughters: at that time, both were between the ages of fifteen and nineteen. If they were still alive by the time of the 1850 census, that would mean Mary had at least three daughters we need to find—assuming all three had lived to adulthood.

Fortunately, one of the daughters showed up in a transcription of a record in the Teal family's new home in Indiana. That transcription, a marriage index for Indiana weddings, clearly showed the parents' names as Walter and Mary Teal, but as for the bride's name, it was rendered as either Prudence or Providence. Likewise, the married surname display had problems, but appeared to be Jessup.

That's a start. Another marriage index supplied a bit more of the story. The groom was Jacob N. Shallenberger—or possibly Shallenborg. The bride was listed as Jessup. Apparently, if this was our Walter and Mary's daughter, she was married more than twice.

Sure enough, other documents began to fill in the blanks. Moving to earlier records than Shallenberger, Providence was once married to someone named Jessup. And before that, was married to someone named Thomas Dain. The good news in all of this? I could find that earliest couple in both the 1850 and the 1860 census—complete with the names of all their children.

Especially the daughters.

Matchable

 

We've just come to the end of a long but pleasant week in our region's corner of the genealogical world: our regional council just hosted a week-long Family History Week, with the culminating day's sessions held at our state archives up at the capital. Driving home after the last session, satisfied with the outcome but still exhausted, it occurred to me it might be nice to just do some light family history research to round out the evening—and today's post.

With that, I turned to Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool to see what DNA matches my husband might have to Elizabeth Howard, my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother. Even though Elizabeth is on my mother-in-law's matriline—and my husband stands in for her on that mitochondrial DNA test—any of her descendants in this generation could still be matchable using the regular autosomal DNA test as well. She's still within reach based on that more widely-used test.

While it is unfortunate that we never had the opportunity to capture a snapshot of my mother-in-law's DNA—she passed about five years before I started testing family member—Elizabeth Howard is still my husband's fifth great-grandmother. And that is certainly reachable.

Turning to ThruLines, I noticed that Ancestry identified fifty eight of their customers who seem to be descendants of Elizabeth Howard and match my husband's DNA results. That's a promising number, considering that he is just at the outside reaches of possible autosomal matches. But when I look closer at those fifty eight matches, I notice one thing: most of the names proposed seem to descend from supposed children of Elizabeth whose names I never found in documentation. In fact, I noticed a few of those "matches" did have familiar surnames in their tree—from an entirely different family line.

While it is incredible to think that I can find current-day descendants of this woman born in the mid-1700s who still share genetic material with my husband, I am not so awed by the thought as to lose my sensibilities about double-checking the rudimentary tools we use to determine just how we relate to another person. ThruLines is so helpful, agreed, but it warrants a thorough fact-checking every time we put it through its paces.

The bigger challenge, of course, will be to push my mother-in-law's matriline back far enough to then switch direction and conduct descendancy research on the collateral lines of that earliest mother on the matriline. That will come soon enough.

A Will to be Remembered

 

Finding a sister's married name in a will may seem a handy way to pinpoint the right family—until making the discovery that the surnames in question are more common than I thought in that ancestral hometown. Still, the will of the likely father of Joseph Howard's wife Rachel seemed to be a document drawn up by someone intent on being individually remembered, no matter how many people shared the same name.

Rachel Howard—by the time of her 1807 will, known as Rachel Beall—had mentioned her sister specifically as Deborah Dorsey. I had a hunch that, at the end of her life, Rachel was noting her sister's married name, not a maiden name. But, as it turns out, Dorsey was a fairly common name around Anne Arundel County, Maryland, which Rachel and her siblings had called their childhood home. Finding the right Deborah Dorsey would have been challenging.

Fortunately, Rachel's father had outlined in his will not only the names of his four married daughters, but paired them up with their spouses, as if for our benefit. Thus, Rachel's sister Martha was noted to be the wife of Henry Gaither. Her sister Margaret was wife of Samuel Farmer. Younger sister Elizabeth was wife of Aquila Duvall. Thankfully, yes, there was also a sister named Deborah—and her husband was a Dorsey. Better yet, Deborah's husband sported a given name not likely to be confused with any others: Lancelot.

In addition, William Ridgely identifed three specific sons—Samuel, William, and Charles—then added another note about "my nine children," names which could barely be read from the fading text of that 1755 document, but which thankfully included the name Rachel. Rounding out the naming of family members, William added a brief mention concerning his wife, Elizabeth.

As if to ensure that this document was not to be confused with that of any other by the same name, William closed the document with his signature as "William Ridgely, son of Charles."

Apparently, this William was not the only Ridgely by that name in town.

Moving Step by Step

 

If, in genealogical pursuits, we start at the end and move step by step backwards into our family's history, how are we to know the next steps to take for our female ancestors? After all, theirs was an experience involving name changes throughout life. It almost seems as if pursuing our male ancestors would be the far easier course to take. 

Fortunately, now that genealogy resources are developing "full text" search capabilities, searching for a mother under her married name could still feasibly lead us to her maiden name. In the case of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth, that is indeed one helpful tactic.

Elizabeth, whom our family had recorded by her married name, Elizabeth Ijams, had name changes on either end of her life. After her husband, William Ijams, died about 1816, she remarried and ended life under the name Elizabeth Whistler. Though I have yet to find any documentation of either of Elizabeth's marriages, thanks to full text searches, I know that her maiden name was Howard.

Elizabeth's father, Joseph Howard, was a lifelong resident of colonial Maryland who died in 1777. From his will, we learn that he lived in Queen Caroline parish in Anne Arundel County. His will was presented in court that year by his brother Brice Howard on March 25. Among the children named in his last testament—along with his wife Rachel and her namesake daughter, plus sons Cornelius, William, and Joseph—was "my beloved Daughter Elizabeth Ijams."

Just as it would be challenging to find records of Elizabeth in her later years due to her second marriage, we face the same issue in looking for Elizabeth's mother. However—though unusual for that time period—we are fortunate that her mother possessed property which needed to be properly passed to her heirs. Once again, thanks to a full text search, Elizabeth Ijams' name appears in the 1806 will of someone named Rachel Beall.

Rachel's will, proved in court in Frederick County, Maryland, on January 26, 1807, provided a double-check of the names from her former husband's will thirty years earlier. Missing were the names of sons William and Cornelius Howard, who had predeceased her, though children Joseph, Rachel, and "my Daughter Elizabeth Ijams" were clearly mentioned. Along with that entry was one for an additional daughter, Sarah—likely the unnamed daughter referred to in Joseph Howard's will when he made provision for his as-yet-unborn child.

In addition, Rachel Beall's will included an item naming Deborah Dorsey, specifically explaining that she was "my sister." This almost allows us another point of reference for moving backwards in time to the next generation in my mother-in-law's matriline—with one complication. Finding the name Dorsey in 1700s Maryland means first being able to identify the right Dorsey family among many.  

Begin at the End

 

Usually, genealogy's tale is told from the end to the beginning. We begin by documenting those events at the close of life, then move cautiously backwards in time, collecting records of key life events until we reach the point of our ancestor's birth. Thus, when we consider a woman's life history, we confront our first problem early on: how are we to learn anything from her most recent life documents if we don't know the name she claimed as she exited life's stage?

Fortunately, in the case of my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth, I already have found that final married name—though I have yet to produce any written sign of the marriage ceremony that sanctified it. Elizabeth, widow of William Ijams of Maryland, had settled with their family in central Ohio. She and William lived in Fairfield County until her husband's death early in 1816. After that—at some unknown date—Elizabeth married John Whistler somewhere in Missouri.

There are signs of this second marriage, of course. Especially considering how well known Major John Whistler was, it was no surprise to see reports of his second wife's death in far-ranging locations—like the Boston, Massachusetts, May 10, 1826, edition of the Columbian Centinel.

In Missouri, at Cantonement Belle Fontaine, Mrs. Whistler, consort of Maj. John W. U.S. Military store keeper.

Closer to home—at least the place Elizabeth's children still called home—there were legal signs of her updated name, as well. In deeds recorded in Fairfield County, Ohio, "J. & Elizabeth Whistler" were listed as grantors of property acquired by Edward Stephenson in 1820. The relationship? Edward was husband of Elizabeth and William Ijams' daughter Comfort.

But what about Elizabeth's earlier years? Again, I have yet to find an actual document confirming Elizabeth's first marriage. I did, however, locate mention of her in two other significant documents. One was the will of her father, Joseph Howard, presented in court in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, in March of 1777. The other will, also mentioning her specifically as Elizabeth Ijams, followed in 1807. Both documents, which we'll look at more closely tomorrow, will allow us to piece together the story of Elizabeth's earlier years—and reveal the name used by Elizabeth's mother at the close of her own life as well.

Image above: Excerpt from the May 10, 1826, edition of the Columbian Centinel, published in Boston, Massachusetts; image courtesy of GenealogyBank. 

Start With What You Know

 

Perhaps you've already heard that sound genealogical advice: start with what you know, and move step by step, backwards in time from that point. Granted, I've long since started outlining my mother-in-law's tree. Plodding along, one generation at a time, I'm finally approaching the level of her fourth great-grandparents.

This month, we'll be spending some serious research time with one such woman, someone who was born in the mid-1700s in colonial Maryland. This woman married a fellow Marylander around the time of the birth of our nation, then made the pioneering move west with him to raise at least ten children in the years just preceding Ohio statehood. But that was not all. After her husband's death, this same woman accompanied one of her youngest daughters even further westward to a fort on the frontier where her son had been stationed—only to see her daughter married off to a soldier there, and herself becoming the second wife of Major John Whistler.

Not bad for a life story, eh? That, at least, was what I was able to find on Elizabeth Howard, my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother, the last time we had studied her life. There is far more yet to discover, however, and that is our task for this month's focus from our Twelve Most Wanted for 2024. After all, the point of starting research with what we know is gaining a firm footing to enable us to make that leap into the unknown—the next generation.

As with many of our elusive ancestors, Elizabeth Howard's story leaves many gaps. Documentation, for one, is difficult to find. Living on the edges of civilization didn't help her case. Her supposed destination, as widow of William Ijams, had been to Jefferson Barracks, a military post on the Mississippi River just south of what is now Saint Louis—yet record of her marriage, or that of her daughter, is lacking.

With her many children, surely some of them may include documented connections to Elizabeth and her first husband—but that is what we need to find this month. With the improved search capabilities at FamilySearch.org—I'm thinking primarily of the Full Text search at FamilySearch Labs—we'll be putting that tool through its paces as we look for wills which include Elizabeth's name among the documents her family members left behind.

Of course, the hope is to extend that search capability beyond Elizabeth's own lifespan to that of her parents and siblings. While there are many details already discovered about Elizabeth, those early years of the family need to be put in clearer focus in the way that only documentation can.

Revisiting Elizabeth

 

With each new month comes a new research goal. As we move into April, though, not only is it time to introduce a new ancestor from my Twelve Most Wanted, but this month marks a shift from researching my mother's ancestors to a focus on those of my mother-in-law. This month, we'll be revisiting an ancestor we've met before, my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth Howard.

With the start of this April's project, we'll see those numbers I track in my biweekly counts shift, as well. For the past three months, I've made a lot of progress on my own mother's tree—adding 110 documented names to her tree in the last two weeks alone. But unless some unexpected discovery comes our way before next year, that tree will stand where I left it at the end of March: with 38,306 names of ancestors and their collateral lines and descendants.

That tree of my in-laws, which has remained stagnant at 34,186 names for almost half a year, will finally gain a few new additions. Granted, it was be more challenging to make progress at this point, for Elizabeth Howard was born in the mid-1700s—not a time particularly helpful for those of us looking for information on our female ancestors. Hers was a family living in colonial Maryland, and other than finding notes on the Howard family in various genealogical books of the past century, I have not found actual documents to allow much research progress.

Of course, that was last year. Now we have the FamilySearch Labs' new Full Text search capabilities, which I'm eager to put through its paces on behalf of the Howard family. That will help us move backwards in time, hopefully. As for the later years of Elizabeth's life, we had already gleaned a basic idea—but before we get started on this month's project, it might be helpful to review what we've already discovered from that work last year. We'll re-introduce Elizabeth tomorrow.

Ancestor #5: More Maryland Material

 

One problem with researching conveniently accessible ancestral records is that it speeds up the rate at which I run out of potential next projects. This is where I find myself, as I plan out the upcoming year's research on the branches of my mother-in-law's tree—where to go next?

As I had mentioned yesterday, the addition of more Maryland material to online resources may mean that I can revisit those Maryland ancestors I had worked on last year with better chances for successful outcomes. I certainly had not exhausted the resources available last year, and now there are new additions. Thus, for Ancestor #5 of my Twelve Most Wanted, it might be wise to revisit yet another Maryland branch of my mother-in-law's tree, the ancestors of her fourth great-grandfather, William Ijams, husband of the Elizabeth Howard we had discussed yesterday.

Examining the extended Ijams family of colonial Maryland could be helpful for many reasons. In addition to extending that branch of my mother-in-law's tree another generation or two, the effort will afford me the opportunity to broaden my understanding of the social history of the time in which her ancestors lived. While it is true I won't have access to the paperwork we are accustomed to utilizing for more recent generations—such as census records every ten years, or timely and detailed birth records, or even newspaper articles about their everyday life occurrences—gaining a broadened understanding of the times in which these ancestors lived might still help gain a picture of the events which might have filled their days.

This month's quest, like that for the previous month, will also require me to assemble finding aids by exploring some less-frequented research paths. Ferreting out reliable public-domain genealogy and history books will be the tasks going hand in hand with the more typical research techniques. Not only does the lack of key life details on these ancestors paint them a drab gray, but missing details from the overarching local and colonial history of their lifetime means their gray shadow is painted upon an equally fuzzy background. This will be my attempt to fill in some of the blanks and get clarity on these colonial ancestors.

Ancestor #4: Jumping Tracks Entirely

 

When it comes to number four of my Twelve Most Wanted, we jump tracks entirely by moving from researching my mother's ancestors to those of my mother-in-law. The challenge there is that, despite my mother-in-law's confidence that surely her grandparents were "just off the boat" only a few years before her parents' birth, it turned out that they were American residents for many generations prior to her grandparents' time. While it has been fairly easy to trace my mother-in-law's family tree owing to that detail, I've sped merrily along those family tracks until slamming into the colonial-records walls that had plagued travel-limited researchers up through the past few years. 

Then came the muscle-flexing researchers of this decade, who told governmental archivists, "Oh no you don't, either!" And voila! We now have online access to digitized versions of century-old records.

That, at least, is what I am hoping, now that the news about the Maryland State Archives has made recent headlines. Though many of the digitized records reach back only to the late 1800s, it's time to check out what I can find in that collection. More importantly, it's time to revisit my research on my mother-in-law's Maryland roots to see if any other resources have digitally materialized, as well. In this Internet age, more data become available with every passing month.

More to the point, for this month's Ancestor #4, I'll be revisiting my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandmother, Elizabeth Howard, to see what new discoveries I can make on her Maryland forebears. While any documents in which she'd appear would predate the recent release of Maryland records, thanks to Reclaim the Records, it would help to review the resources which might help paint a clearer picture of Elizabeth's life and times—and that of her Howard and Ridgely ancestors. 

Getting Back on Track

 

Research goals can help keep us on track when we grapple with those all-too-frequent detours from the anticipated pedigree chart. Despite how helpful an unplanned-for rabbit trail may turn out to be, though, we occasionally need reminders when we get off that planned research path. For this month's project, today is one of those days.

While I've set up an annual cycle of family history projects to tackle on a month to month basis—what I call my Twelve Most Wanted—the process contains one caveat: when I don't complete one month's project, I sometimes roll it over to subsequent months. For instance, when I researched my mother-in-law's matriline last month, back to her fourth great-grandmother Elizabeth Howard in colonial Maryland, I needed to find the ancestral nexus with the three exact mtDNA matches I've discovered for that matriline. Sometimes, answers to questions like that don't come easy.

Again, this month, my original goal was to locate the paperwork to connect my mother-in-law to her Revolutionary War ancestor, John Jay Jackson's father Lyman. While D.A.R. does already have members who descend from that line of Lyman Jackson, it particularly irks me that I can find no actual marriage record for Lyman's son John and his first wife, Elizabeth Howard Ijams' daughter Sarah.

This month's wandering through the court records of Elizabeth's husband's will and probate, however, was not a waste of time. What I noticed, in paging through all the documents acknowledging the named daughters' receipts of the moneys owed them following sale of their father's property, was that one receipt was from Sarah Ijams—the unmarried daughter—while a subsequent one was from Sarah, at that later date the wife of John Jay Jackson. Thus, while there is still no direct evidence in the form of a marriage license, I can produce indirect evidence through this series of dated and signed receipts. Sometimes, these small victories are worth the research detours.

Moving forward through the remainder of this month's research goal, I'll be assembling a supplemental application for my daughter's D.A.R. membership record, and then offering the same research and verification to my sisters-in-law, who will now also be eligible for D.A.R. membership.

I'll still be continuing the quest to complete all these new matrilineal lines of descent from Elizabeth—and thus, Sarah's newfound sisters. This will be challenging due to the invisibility of women during that time frame of the early 1800s in what was then frontier territory in Ohio. But the main part of getting back on track with my research goals for the rest of this month will be to attend to discovery of the details in the life of Lyman Jackson, my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather.

Collecting Our (Collateral) Wits

 

Call me a genealogy mercenary, but the one thought I can't help but think when Mother's Day approaches is: who will spring for the Mother's Day sale on mitochondrial DNA tests and turn out to be my exact match?

Especially with last month's Twelve Most Wanted research goal, working on my mother-in-law's matriline, I've been stumped with the three exact mtDNA matches whose matrilines lead to Elizabeth Howard's maternal line—and likely even farther back. Let's just say I've been spending a lot of time collecting details on all those female collateral lines—the family lines of the siblings of direct ancestors.

In fact, the last two weeks have garnered me so many new additions to my mother-in-law's tree that I can hardly believe the count, myself. But I double checked it and, yep, I've managed to add 472 new individuals to my mother-in-law's lines. Of course, not all of them are strictly on the matriline; I prefer to complete these collateral lines in an orderly fashion so I don't inadvertently omit anyone. 

So now, I have a tree which contains a total of 32,020 individuals, and yet, I still don't have the answer to just how this family line connects my husband—my mother-in-law's descendant who has completed the mtDNA test on her behalf—and these distant relatives who are exact matches on the matriline.

Considering I haven't done a stitch of work on my own tree—it stands stock still at 33,500, same as two weeks ago—I was hoping for more encouraging results. But you know how it goes. Sometimes, you work like crazy toward a research goal, and don't have much to show for progress.

Yet.

While I certainly didn't find my answer in time for Mother's Day, I will still enjoy to day—likely with some non-genealogical festivities. I hope you will be able to do the same. Sometimes, we just need to spend time with the people who relate to us the most closely and set aside that never-ending quest to find those distant ancestors.  

Of Royal Relatives

 

Depending on who your friends are, your social media accounts may have been a-buzz this weekend over the coronation of King Charles III. While I don't exactly count myself in such a crowd, I was grateful for one side benefit of the gala affair: it generated a couple articles I found not only interesting, but possibly useful.

One, from the BBC, asked, "Are you related to a king?" The article's writer, David Cox, traced the story of confirming the identity of skeletal remains of another king, Richard III, through DNA—including a photo of professor Turi King guiding the ancient king's current-day descendant through the process of swabbing to collect samples for a mitochondrial DNA test. From there, inserting some calculations by professor Graham Coop of UC Davis, the author discussed the not-so-remote possibility that a large number of subjects of the British crown could also be descendants of the nation's previous kings.

Long live the king, who just may be our distant cousin.

While I was musing over such a thought, a second post thanks to social media drew my attention to another genealogy-inspired take on the weekend's coronation festivities. Blogger Roberta Estes used the event to mention use of WikiTree to gain a quick take on whether you are related to the king—or to anyone else, for that matter. 

I had discovered that very feature last month as I was puzzling over my mother-in-law's matrilineal connection to the Howards of colonial Maryland. Because of WikiTree's dedicated research community and their incorporation of DNA test results, it became obvious to me that those mtDNA test results linking my mother-in-law to that Howard line might be helpful for other collaborating researchers to know. I've actually been considering becoming part of the WikiTree community. From what I've seen so far, I'm impressed with the care taken there to have document-supported entries on their community tree.

All told, I'm sure the celebrations in England have been spectacular and I wish the new king and his subjects all the best. But what I'm really glad about is the coincidental information which came my way over this weekend, thanks to some genealogy buffs on social media. 

If This, Then That

 

When it comes to sorting out research challenges like connecting John Jay Jackson's descendants with his Patriot father, Lyman Jackson, we can try to deconstruct the documentation tangle using one simple device: the concept, "If this, then that."

If, for instance, John Jay Jackson's future wife—William and Elizabeth Howard Ijams' daughter Sarah—were living with her parents in Fairfield County, Ohio, then one would think that her wedding would be held somewhere near her Ohio home.

If, on the other hand, John Jay Jackson were still serving in the military subsequent to his enlistment during the War of 1812, we might assume he wouldn't be free to travel long distances from the post to which he had been assigned. If that post were not in Ohio, then we can assume there would be some challenges to getting bride and groom in the same place at the same time.

If, however, that potential groom happened to be stationed at the same fort as the bride's brother, then we could perhaps expect some match-making action taking place.

And yet, if the bride's father died unexpectedly in the midst of that same time period, then there might be some change in plans.

All those details may have fallen into place to create the unlikely scenario that seems to have happened: that bride and her mother traveled through the wilderness—perhaps down the Ohio River, then up the Mississippi—for over five hundred miles. And upon their arrival at Fort Belle Fontaine, both widowed mother and daughter were married to military men stationed there.

If that is the supposed story, then even after all these years, I still have not found documentation to support that. Somehow, before I connect our family's current generation of DAR hopefuls to their Patriot ancestor, an explanation will have to be reconstructed with solid documentation.

Right Time, Right Place

 

This month's research task is to discover documentation showing whether a specific man was in the right place at the right time to have been an American Patriot. That specific man would be my mother-in-law's fourth great-grandfather, Lyman Jackson.

Right away, in beginning to research the details of Lyman Jackson's life through my subscription at Ancestry.com, I received hints demonstrating that Patriot possibility. An entry in a DAR lineage book provided one such example of a descendant of Lyman and his wife, Deidama—or, as it was spelled in that edition, Diadama.

Sure enough, going straight to the source at the website of the Daughters of the American Revolution, I found a listing for Lyman Jackson. From that material, I gleaned the basics of his birth, death, and service. Born in Simsbury, Connecticut, on February 29 in 1756, Lyman served in both Massachusetts and New York, attaining the rank of sergeant before his terms of service were completed. He eventually moved from New York to Albion in Erie County, Pennsylvania, where he died in 1835.

A Find a Grave entry verifies that Lyman was buried in Albion Cemetery following his March 20, 1835, passing, agreeing with the records at DAR. With that, it might seem an easy task to put together the documentation for a supplemental DAR application linking my daughter with her sixth great-grandfather.

That, however, is not as easy as it sounds. There are sticky details standing in the way between now and then. And that is what brings me back to this Jackson research problem over and over again. To resolve those details, we'll first need to go back to Lyman's son John Jay Jackson, son-in-law of William Ijams and Elizabeth Howard, the woman whom we spent the last month researching. In particular, we'll need to retrace our research steps on Elizabeth's daughter Sarah, the one who married John Jackson. Tomorrow, we'll lay out the particulars and pinpoint the problems with that story.

A New Month, a New Research Project

 

We've spent a long, exhausting month examining what could be found on Elizabeth Howard, a child of colonial Maryland whose marriage to William Ijams transformed her into a pioneer resident of central Ohio in the early 1800s. With this new month, we'll switch tracks slightly to examine another family tangentially related to Elizabeth's own line: that of her son-in-law, John Jay Jackson.

John and his wife, Elizabeth's daughter Sarah, eventually became my mother-in-law's third great-grandparents. Because of Sarah's untimely death following the 1828 birth of her fourth child, Robert Jackson, I have struggled in the past to find information on Sarah and, by extension, her husband John Jackson. But with this month—especially given the success of last month's research project on Elizabeth's own ancestry—I'm hoping to tap into new resources to find out more about the roots of her son-in-law, the widower John Jay Jackson.

Since John spent the majority of his adult life living where he settled after marrying Sarah—in Perry County, Ohio, home of my mother-in-law—there is much to be found on his later years. After Sarah's death, John married Virginia immigrant Mary Cecelia Grate on August 28, 1829, and raised a second family of at least three more children: daughters Caroline and Clarissa, and another son whom they named Lyman J. Jackson.

Lyman, it turns out, may have been namesake for his paternal grandfather, the very person we need to seek next in examining the family history of John Jay Jackson. The elder Lyman Jackson, while never living in Ohio where his son settled, may have lived in New York and several New England locations before spending his last days in Pennsylvania.

At this point, however, that is all conjecture on my part. What we need to do this month is trace Lyman Jackson's history and construct a family tree including the collateral lines associated with John Jay Jackson's generation. That will be this month's first step in learning more about a man who lived his life during the tumultuous years of the American revolution.