Doing the Numbers

In working through any pedigree chart, we start from our current era and record each preceding generation as we progress backwards in time. When the chain of names, dates, and events is broken by an unprecedented move—such as emigration from one's hometown to a new frontier—it can have a disrupting effect. A situation like that leaves us without any toehold to grasp and pull us farther into the deep recesses of our family's history.

Such is the case with my current situation. I'm still trying every which way I can to flush out clues on just who the parents might have been of my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, Simon Rinehart from Greene County, Pennsylvania. Finding a relative in his new hometown of Perry County, Ohio, I've grabbed that clue as a possibility to lead me further backwards in the story of that Rinehart line. Yet, even there, this backwards direction is keeping me stumped for one specific reason: at first glance, the numbers don't seem to add up.

There is another direction that can be taken, however. Noticing that one Isaac Brown—the name which kept showing up in my mother-in-law's ancestors' wills—had married a woman from the extended Rinehart family in Perry County, we can follow that line backwards to see what can be found. After all, if the hint found in a Find A Grave memorial for Cassa Rinehart Brown is correct, we now know her parents were William Rinehart and Delilah Inghram. Perhaps tracing the connections with those two people can reveal a clue worth following.

Fortunately, William and Delilah have their names mentioned in some of the old biographical sketches and history books of the 1800s. Whether those recountings of pioneer families are entirely correct, I can't yet say, but we are about to take a look.

According to two different renderings of the family history in the Howard Leckey book, The Tenmile Country and Its Pioneer Families, Delilah Inghram was the daughter of Arthur Inghram and his wife, whose name was alternately spelled Olive or Allive Smith.

Fortunately, the Tenmile Country book spells out dates for Arthur Inghram and for the earliest of his children. Thus, we learn that Leckey identified Arthur's birth as some time in February of 1746, and his death, according to his headstone in the Inghram family cemetery, as October 28, 1834. We also can see that his oldest son, William, was born November 24, 1778, followed by daughter Margaret in 1780. After that, some of the subsequent children of are only mentioned by name, followed by a date of death, not birth.

By the time the Tenmile Country gets around to mentioning Arthur's eighth child—Delilah—Leckey only mentions her name and that of her husband, William Rinehart. All we can deduce is that Delilah must have been born after 1787, for that is when her next-oldest sister Cassandra arrived. Thankfully, we do have a cross-check on Delilah and William's marriage in the mention of her married name in her father's 1834 will.

Approaching this family tree from the opposite direction, we can glean a few numbers from the Tenmile Country accounting of the Rinehart family tree. William Rinehart was son of Thomas Rinehart and Hannah Inghram. If you begin to notice those same surnames swirling around in repeated manner, I warn you to get used to this: the Tenmile Rineharts and Inghrams intermarried on several counts throughout the generations.

William Rinehart's father Thomas was apparently a "junior." Leckey recounts that Thomas the son was born around 1746, and that he married Hannah—daughter of William Inghram, senior—around 1774. Thomas and Hannah's oldest, son John, was born in 1779, followed by son Thomas (the third) in 1783. By the time Leckey gets around to mentioning son number three—that would be our William—he runs out of dates. Leckey mentions only that William Rinehart married Delilah Inghram, daughter of "Arthur and Alive (Smith) Inghram."

Thus, our William Rinehart arrived in this world—somewhere in what was then Washington County, Pennsylvania, in its earliest, frontier years—after his brother's birth in 1783. Census records for the William Rinehart we found in Perry County, Ohio, for 1850 and 1860, estimate his birth in 1789 or 1785, respectively.

And then, we have Simon Rinehart. Where he fits in the Rinehart picture in Greene County, Pennsylvania, I still don't know. How he was related to the man he named as executor of his estate—Isaac Brown, William Rinehart's son-in-law—I also don't know. That Simon was born around 1774 is supported by the ages indicated in several census enumerations in both Greene County and Perry County, right up to the last one before his death.

From the proximity of their two properties in Perry County, or from the connection between William's son-in-law and Simon's relatives, you'd think it reasonable to assume that Simon and William might have been brothers. But if you were to rely on the genealogy published in the Leckey account of Tenmile Country, you'd be hard pressed to find a Simon Rinehart who fit the descriptions of those with the same name in Leckey's book.

Seems like we are just about to get up to head-banging time.

A Little Grumbling About Spelling

Finding that Isaac Brown's wife's maiden name was Rinehart certainly piqued my interest. After all, not only was I searching for a reason why his name might show up in the wills of both my mother-in-law's Gordon ancestors and her Rinehart roots as well, but I am still trying to figure out just how Isaac's wife might be related to the Simon Rinehart who was my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather.

Finding yet another Rinehart connection certainly couldn't hurt. But I'm not sure just how it will help, either. Still, I can't pass up the opportunity to follow the trail laid down by the Find A Grave volunteer who asserted that Cassa Rinehart Brown's parents were "William and Lila Ingram Rinehart."

But first, a little moment to do some grumbling. About spelling.

Now, everyone who knows anything about history—at least, in the early days of the United States—likely realizes that spelling was not always...shall we say, standardized. Not until 1806, when Noah Webster began his efforts to develop a consistent standard for spelling, did the English words our ancestors all took for granted in their everyday speech become formalized in their written format.

That standardization, of course, was for words—nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions. As for names, that may have been an entirely different matter, with one brother spelling his name Reinhardt while his sibling, moving to a different town in that new, English-speaking world, might eventually find his name spelled as Rinehart.

Despite that casualty in an era which was not yet accustomed to the rigorous demand for standardized spelling, there was one surname which somehow managed to maintain its spelling idiosyncracy: a surname prevalent in the Tenmile Country region which was consistently spelled Inghram.

Yes, there is an "h" in that "Ingram." If you doubt the spelling of that surname, witness the numbers of descendants of that original family of settlers who all maintained that same unusual form of spelling in this listing of obituaries transcribed from Greene County, Pennsylvania, newspapers of the 1800s. Scroll down to the entries spelled Inghram, and you'll see why I balked, yesterday, at spotting that Find A Grave note about Cassa Rinehart Brown's parents.

If you spend enough time wandering around the records of your ancestors in a given town or county, you eventually start seeing details you might otherwise have missed in a more cursory review. I call this "reading between the lines." In other words, extrapolating from the black and white details laid out on a page of records to discern what might have been going on behind the scenes.

In the case of Greene County, especially when researching my mother-in-law's Gordon and Rinehart ancestry, I couldn't help but notice how many times those extended families intermarried. I've seen Rineharts married to Inghrams, and Gordons married to Inghrams. Face it: if you are researching a family with many children who make it to adulthood—and those adults live in a limited community with a small, isolated population—you eventually notice multiple intermarriages among the same surnames. Enough, even, to make your head spin.

Now, couple that with the habit, among some people groups, of naming their precious babies after the oldest relatives for whom they still hold fond feelings. Of course, that is likely what is behind my difficulty in determining the right Simon Rinehart, a step vital to progressing toward that next one of ascertaining the identity of his parents. But it is also behind another prevalent name-after favorite: the given name of Delilah.

Yes, there was likely a Delilah Inghram. Worse, there were likely many Greene County belles with the name Delilah Inghram. In fact, in pulling out my latest family history acquisition, the Tenmile Country book by historian Howard Leckey, there was indeed (on page 310) a Delilah—not "Lila"—Inghram who married a William Rinehart. Cross-checking Leckey's notes on the corresponding Rinehart family, once again (on page 323) he mentions William Rinehart, conveniently listed as marrying someone named Delilah Inghram.

Lest you cut to the chase here and assume that our Cassa Rinehart who married Isaac Brown—the man who eventually became executor of Simon Rinehart's will—was, say, a sibling of that same Simon Rinehart, let warning bells and whistles go off in your head. There are problems with such a "solution," the least of which is the difficulty of conflicting dates in each person's timeline.

We may have to take a step back, cool our heels—after all, this search has been going on for years—and let a much more level head take charge. In which case I predict that, in our near future, we will begin building yet another test tree before we can form any hypothesis as to the connection between Isaac Brown, his wife Cassa, and the Simon Rinehart from Greene County who is still, sadly, parentless in his final resting place in Perry County, Ohio.