When we Last Left Lydia

 

It was May 31 just one year ago when I had to close the books on my search for Lydia Miller's parents. Lydia had been May's focus for my Twelve Most Wanted last year, simply because she had evaded detection for more years than I care to recall. But what was more difficult than simply calling off the chase for yet another year was the fact that, only days prior, I had discovered that Lydia hadn't died a young mother, after all. In fact, as a young widow, she had remarried—not only that, but she had moved to a new county on the far end of the state to become mother to eight more children.

That unexpected discovery made me wish I had found out at the beginning of the month, not the end. Behind the scenes—while I was supposed to be researching yet another brick wall ancestor—I kept building out the tree for Lydia Miller and her new family in Mercer County, Ohio.

Eventually, though, I had to set the task aside and focus on the work at hand for June, then July, then...well, you get the idea. This is one month I wished I could have kept at the research trail, but I had made myself the promise that I would keep rotating through research challenges as a principle to help keep from burning out on one information dead end.

When I had started that research goal last May, all I had was the detail that "Lidia" Miller had married William H. Gordon in 1838 in Perry County, Ohio. In a very short amount of time, she gave birth to two sons, the eldest of whom became my mother-in-law's great-grandfather, Adam Gordon.

The other major detail about Lidia—one I thought I knew, given the appearances—was that she, along with her husband and second son, had died by 1840, or at least before 1850, when her eldest son was being raised in his paternal grandmother's home.

How wrong I was. It turns out that Lydia, as a widow, had married a young widower who was then the father of one son, himself. By the time I discovered documentation verifying that turn of events, we were fast approaching the end of the month.

Despite working feverishly to trace that new family's line of descent, the month closed out long before I had done this new task justice. This month will become our chance to revisit Lydia—once Miller, then Gordon, then Palmer—and see what else we can learn about this entirely new family. Hopefully, by the end of this month, we may also look to the opposite direction to close in on the story of just whose daughter Lydia Miller was, herself.  

Returning to Unfinished Business

 

I said I wasn't going to do this to myself for another year, but then I got an email from a fellow researcher and changed my mind. It just so happens this DNA cousin has been wondering about the same brick wall ancestor as I've been, and sent me a note theorizing why this mystery ancestor—my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother Lydia Miller—might have been a challenge to trace.

I've tackled Lydia Miller before, but despite that recent attempt, the chase to find her roots has remained unfinished business. In fact, last May was my most recent opportunity to ponder the roots of this woman who became wife to William H. Gordon and then, after his premature death, to Benedict Palmer. And yet, we'll so soon again be taking up the question of just who Lydia's parents might have been.

This time, we'll let DNA testing play a larger part in the chase to find Lydia's roots, and also complete a review of her descendants from her second marriage with Benedict Palmer of Mercer County, Ohio. Hopefully, some Palmer descendants will surface from among multiple DNA matches to help guide this quest.

In one way, it's frustrating to think that so little is known about a family relationship so relatively close—after all, Lydia, dying in 1895 in Ohio, is only a second great-grandmother to my mother-in-law. A life history like hers should be so reachable...and yet it's not. Hers may have been a story with twists and turns, with details buried from plain sight. This may take some sleuth work to uncover—if any progress can be made at all.

For this coming month of May as I turn to dig deeper into my mother-in-law's roots, Lydia Miller, her parents and descendants will become our focus as the fifth of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2026. As with my research challenge for January, hopefully this May's ancestral discoveries will come through the teamwork of comparing notes with other researchers who have connected with me over the years—specifically with those DNA cousins who share this ancestral line with my husband. As research tools evolve, our ability to push back farther in time accelerates—something for which I am ecstatically grateful.

Unexpected

 

This month began with hopes to find information on the parents of Lydia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother. Lydia was my fifth choice among my Twelve Most Wanted for 2025, a goal I have had for not just this year, but a brick wall that has plagued me for decades. While I can't say I accomplished that goal in the past month, I certainly can vouch for a month of unexpected results.

The prime unexpected result was discovering that, after the death of her husband and second-born son, Lydia went on to raise eight children from a second marriage. Since that discovery came late in the month, I am only now working my way through the lines of descent for each of those surviving children from her marriage to Benedict Palmer. My goal with this most recent task is to seek out any possible DNA matches among her Palmer descendants—but so far, no results for that goal. I suspect the time frame has been too short to see results yet.

A second result has been the unexpected disappearance of DNA matches which had formerly been linked to my account at Ancestry.com. Apparently, nobody else knows the identity of Lydia Miller's parents, either, yet at Ancestry, ThruLines had offered up a guess—an entry labeled "Jacob???? Miller." Yes, that's Jacob with four question marks.

Through some unexpected digital sleight of hand, Jacob???? Miller has now disappeared from my ThruLines listing for this family. No one else has replaced him, either. That, however, means that the DNA matches which ThruLines had previously proposed—and that I had already confirmed through documentation—have suddenly, poof!, disappeared. So much for the theory that Jonathan Miller might have been a brother of Lydia, or at least a first cousin. Checking on the ThruLines results today showed Lydia with absolutely zero DNA matches linked to her own line.

Where to go from here is my next question. The end of this month means it's a wrap for Lydia—at least for this year's research projects. I will need to revisit her case again in a future year. When that time comes, I will once again rely on DNA connections, if any materialize. In the meantime, my task will be to complete her line of descent from all surviving children, down to the current generation, as I have done for all other lines I've worked on in my mother-in-law's family. With eight Palmer children born from the mid 1840s through the early 1860s, that will be a lot of work to confirm each line with appropriate documentation.

Another task that needs completion is the cluster research approach I've taken to examine the Miller households in Perry County, Lydia's original home where she had married, first, William Gordon, and second, widower Benedict Palmer. Since I've decided to continue my subscription to Ancestry's ProTools, where I can access the beta Networks tool, this will facilitate continuing that rather broad survey of parental possibilities. Again, much repetitive work that may well become necessary if I hope to find any answer to my research question.

Granted, this isn't the first time I've come to the end of a month without an answer in hand to my research question regarding one of my Twelve Most Wanted. But at least I've come close to discovering more useful information about that targeted ancestor. That is the value of at least trying to attain research goals.

Next month, for the last of my Twelve Most Wanted for my mother-in-law's line, I'm afraid we'll be again staring down a decades-long research goal. Whether we accomplish what has been hoped for or not, I'm confident the effort will bring some useful but unexpected results, as well. Though not the target I hope to hit, at least those unexpected bonuses add helpful details to the picture of these long-ago ancestors' stories.  

Piling on the Palmers — And Just in Time

 

Quick! To the chase—at least, before the end of the month beats us to the finish line.

Right now, to my mother-in-law's family tree I'm feverishly adding the children of Lydia Palmer—formerly the Lidia we had listed as widow of William Gordon of Perry County, Ohio. The reason for this rush to add the children of Lydia's second marriage is my hope that connecting them to my tree today will give us enough time for the algorithms at Ancestry.com DNA to pick up this additional line of descent. After all, no matter how people spelled her name—Lidia Gordon or Lydia Palmer—she was ancestor of not only those descending from her first son, Adam Gordon, but from her many Palmer children, too. There may be a lot more DNA matches out there to discover.

According to an article about ThruLines posted by Ancestry.com's support team on their website, changes in family trees at Ancestry are usually reflected in ThruLines within forty eight hours. That means, if I hurry, all these new discoveries about Lydia's second family may generate ThruLines results by May 31. Talk about a deadline!

Of course, I'll likely continue the chase into June, despite my promise to myself to move on to the next month's feature from my Twelve Most Wanted for this year. I'm curious to see whether any matches show up who share DNA specifically based on the Miller line—Lydia's as-yet unknown parents' line—rather than the Gordon line of her first husband.

In the meantime, here are a few details to wrap up the month.

First was the question about what became of Benedict Palmer's first wife. We found the 1839 marriage record for Benedict and Catherine Hovermill in Fairfield County, but her ominous absence just a few years after that marriage demanded a search for her burial information.

In what seemed to be a fluke from Find A Grave, I did indeed find Catherine's burial—but it came to my attention as a hint at Ancestry pointing to a Find A Grave memorial supposedly for her husband, not for herself. 

Once I clicked on the link provided by that hint, I could see that the headstone itself was for Catherine, not her bereaved husband.

We could already see that there was a monument marking Benedict Palmer's actual burial location in Mercer County, where he and his second wife Lydia had settled, but because the stone was engraved with the man's name spelled as "Benadict," it did not surface as a hint for his final resting place. I had to go in and manually change the search to the other spelling to get the memorial linked to the right person.

As for Catherine's son Jerome, he, too, was buried in the same cemetery in Mercer County, Ohio, where his father had moved the family. I suspect his Find A Grave entry contains some errors, though, as the memorial states that he was born in Mercer County, when we can see from the Palmer family's entry in the 1850 census that they had not yet moved from Fairfield County until after that point.

If Jerome Palmer, born about 1840, had lived a longer life, his death record might have confirmed his mother's name for us. As it turned out, though, Jerome died before his fortieth birthday, leaving a wife and two young daughters, long before the advent of such helpful documents.

Locating information on those two details from Benedict Palmer's first marriage, I can now get back to work, building out this newly-discovered branch of my mother-in-law's family tree. From Lydia Miller's additional eight children in the Palmer line, there surely will be multiple candidates for DNA matches to connect us to her unknown Miller parents. And while I impatiently wait out those forty eight hours, I have some wrap-up work to do on Lydia's possible brothers' families, back in Perry County, Ohio.

About That Other Lydia

 

Whenever we encounter conflicting assertions about a branch of our family tree, there is no route that possibly can be taken—at least, if we want a tree that reflects documented, correct information—other than to inspect all that can be found, according to each version of the "truth." In the case of that "other" Lydia, wife of Benedict Palmer of Mercer County, Ohio, that is exactly the task we need to attend to today.

Here's the assertion that got me started on this chase: a Find A Grave memorial for someone named Lydia Palmer, who was buried in Ellis Cemetery in Montezuma, Ohio, a tiny village in Mercer County that even today claims a population under two hundred people.

Nestled up against the state border with Indiana, Mercer County is on a road leading from Columbus, Ohio, to Fort Wayne, Indiana. From Perry County, where Lidia Miller lived, to Mercer County would be a trip of almost two hundred miles. If Lidia Miller, the widow of William Gordon, were indeed one and the same as Lydia Palmer, it would help to assemble records documenting the transactions that made that assertion a reality.

Let's check first to see what we can find on Lydia Palmer before her death in 1895. As early as 1860, I could find a census record for Lydia and her husband Benedict Palmer in Montezuma. The household included two daughters and five sons, with the oldest being named Jerome and the youngest, at one year of age, designated as his father's namesake, Benedict. The senior Benedict was noted to have been born in Delaware, while Lydia claimed to be an Ohio native.

The difficulty with the ages indicated for these children—Jerome listed as being twenty years of age in that census, meaning a birth year in 1840—was that "our" Lidia had given birth to her one surviving child, Adam Gordon, only a year prior to that. Not to mention, Lidia's husband, William Gordon, died at the end of 1840, certainly not in enough time for her to have remarried and brought another son to full term in the interim.

Looking for marriage information on Benedict Palmer, I did find a marriage record dated in February of 1839—the same time as our Lidia's son Adam was born—not from Mercer County where I had found the Palmers in 1860, but from Fairfield County, not far from Perry County. Benedict's wife's name, however, was listed as Catherine Hovermill.

Thinking this might have been a different Benedict, I went looking for someone by that name in Fairfield County. When I located him in the 1850 census, Benedict Palmer was indeed living in Fairfield County—but his wife's name wasn't Catherine at all. Despite the scrawl of the enumerator's handwriting—and his propensity to use abbreviations for names—the resultant entry for "Benidic" Palmer's wife looked far more like Lydia than Catherine.

It was time to branch out to more recent records—hopefully, those of the type which would include names of parents, such as death certificates. Remember that youngest son from the 1860 census, the one named after his father? I found what might—or might not—have been his death record. However, this Benedict Palmer died in Iowa, not Ohio. The informant, his wife, stated that her husband was born in Iowa, not Ohio. To complicate matters, she also reported that his father was born in Ohio—not Delaware, as we had seen from census records. 

The biggest problem, however, was that while this Benedict's death record noted his mother's name to have been Lydia, her maiden name, according to her daughter-in-law, was Barker.

Wrong Lydia? Don't be too sure. I kept looking—thankfully. Among the marriage records turning up in searches was one for a wedding performed in, of all places, Perry County, back where we had left our own Lidia Miller Gordon. On May 1, 1842, Benedict Palmer and Lydia "Gorden" stood before a Justice of the Peace, who solemnized their marriage.

To complete the tale, I'll need to look for any record of what became of Benedict's first wife, Catherine, who was evidently the mother of the oldest son, Jerome, whose burial was also noted with a Find A Grave memorial in Montezuma.

And that youngest son Benedict? Though he died in Iowa, he was indeed buried back in Montezuma—and, despite her provision of incorrect information on her husband's death certificate, so was his wife Rachel.

Thanks to an unexplained entry at Find A Grave—one which, without that documentation, seemed to make no sense at all—we now have the rest of the story, as far as Lidia Miller's life went. The birth dates for the sons of each husband, while seeming to contradict assertions about this marriage, made much more sense, once we followed through to find documentation to tell the full story.

Now, I'm left with far more to do on this month's research project. Besides documenting these discoveries for the family tree, I'll need to add the line of descent for children of Lidia's second marriage. Then, because those descendants may mean additional discoveries among perplexing DNA matches, I'll need to pursue that angle, as well—all before the close of this month, if all goes well.