Situation: Stuck

 

Stuck on one clue for that brick wall ancestor? When I run into such situations, I try my best to find the answer—and when I fail, I move on. Research problems can always be revisited at a later date, especially when more resources would be required to resolve research questions.

Finding that memorial marker erected at the final resting place of Robert Smith, just as his daughter's last wishes had dictated, seemed to rip right through all the research progress I had made on tracing just that one daughter of Simon Rinehart. Simon's daughter Mary, at least according to court records after his death, had married someone named Robert Smith. But when I finally caught up with the memorial marker for the specified Robert Smith in Hocking County, Ohio, it contained the name of his two wives. And it appeared that Mary had a different last name than what I was expecting.

The name, although blurred in the photograph at Find A Grave, seemed to be Mary Ankrum or Amkrum. No matter which way it was spelled, it didn't spell R-i-n-e-h-a-r-t. Now what?

I tried looking for marriage records for Robert Smith and Mary Ankrum, including all the spelling permutations I could imagine—with a wildcard symbol thrown in for good luck. Thinking that our Mary might have been married before she married Robert, I tried looking for other marriage records for Mary Rinehart, both in her home, neighboring Perry County, and Robert's residence in Hocking County. Still nothing.

Since Maria Smith, the one whose will stipulated the erection of the memorial for her father, was the firstborn daughter of Mary and Robert, one would presume that she would know her mother's maiden name. I'd say I've stumbled upon the wrong Robert Smith and family—except I've been wrong about being wrong before. So I'm putting that search on hold for now and moving on to the rest of Simon Rinehart's children.

That strategy, however, is not working much better than my quest to find the right Robert Smith, husband of Mary Rinehart. There were two other siblings mentioned in that 1854 court record concerning the validity of Simon's will: Samuel Rinehart and Thomas Rinehart, the one who had initiated the court case disputing the will.

It turns out both of them appear to be as difficult to find as if they were surnamed Smith. But I did find one curious legal notice inserted in a newspaper about seven years before the paperwork for the 1854 lawsuit was filed. While it may turn out to be merely a coincidence that the names appeared to be related, tomorrow we need to at least take a look at who was named in that other court case. 

Looking for the REAL Robert Smith

 

When it comes to researching the family history of people possessing really common surnames, I'll admit it: I have a bias. I really don't like chasing after documents for folks named Smith or Jones. Even finding documents for the "right" Smith with the right given name in the right place can mean absolutely nothing. There may be another person by that same name, just around the corner.

That's the way it's been, looking for Robert Smith in 1850s Hocking County, Ohio. I got a promising start by discovering a statement in a court record asserting the fact that Mary Rinehart, daughter of Simon, was wife of Robert Smith of Hocking County. How explicit can this get? But finding the real Robert Smith? Now, that's another story.

Just when I had discarded one Robert Smith in that county, by virtue of his birth and family life in England, I discovered another Robert Smith in the same county. Added bonus: this Robert's wife was named Mary. I thought I had found what I was searching for, and began adding information on their children from census records, right into the Rinehart branch in my mother-in-law's family tree. 

I added Robert's wife Mary, and their seven children from the 1850 census, and was ready to follow the family lines down through the generations, when I spotted one detail that stopped me in my tracks: Robert Smith was named in an ancestral line in an application to the Sons of the American Revolution. When I followed the line of descent to the next generation, Robert's son, I saw something that didn't add up: Robert's wife's name was given as Maria Pitcher, not Mary Rinehart.

Out went all the details I had just entered in my mother-in-law's family tree. I pulled up that old delete button and slashed away, removing each of the children I had just added to Robert's family.

But after all the genealogical carnage, I had second thoughts. I went back to the 1850 census record. Sure enough, there was a gap in ages between the oldest child listed in the household—George, aged twenty five—and the next child, fourteen year old daughter Maria. Since the court records back in Perry County—the ones regarding two sets of children from different wives in Simon Rinehart's will—stated that Robert's wife was Simon Rinehart's daughter Mary, was it possible that Robert Smith was married twice, too?

I looked. Sure enough, there was an 1822 marriage record for Robert Smith and Maria Pitcher in Hocking County. And for the date of Maria's death, an old headstone in the Old Logan Cemetery reported that Maria Smith, consort of Robert D. Smith, died in 1832.

Back into the family tree went those children of Robert and Mary. As I worked my way through the children of Robert's second marriage, I ran across a will left by his daughter Mariah, an unmarried woman who died in 1873. Mariah appointed her brother Culver to be executor of her will, which contained a stipulation that, for the property he was to receive, he was to take two hundred dollars for "the erection of suitable tombstones at the graves of my father, Robert D. Smith, and his first wife."

Right next to the memorial for Robert's first wife, Maria, stood that "suitable tombstone," as Culver Smith was instructed to provide. Seeing that picture, however, made me want to start that family tree all over again, yanking the names I had just plugged back in, and looking once again for the real Robert Smith in Hocking County.

Why? Because on that same memorial stone to her father was listed not only the name of Robert's first wife, but his second wife, as well. And her name was listed as Mary Ankrum, not Rinehart.

When Searching for Smith

 

Any time I face having to research a family member named Smith, I proceed cautiously. Well, that's not entirely true; first I fervently hope I never have to run into a predicament like that in the first place...but marriages do happen, and sometimes they involve suitors named Smith.

In the case of Simon Rinehart's will, contested by the children of his first wife, I had the helpful listing of all Simon's living children, as of the 1854 date in which they had filed the lawsuit in Perry County, Ohio. Even though I was overjoyed to receive a full listing of all Simon's children—I had missed the majority of them in previous work on this family line—I noted (with dismay) that one of Simon's daughters had married a man by the name of Smith.

Groan.

To make matters worse, this daughter's given name was Mary. I guess I am fortunate that her husband's name was not John Smith.

Setting aside those complaints, I did realize that the court records specified just where Mary and her husband—named Robert Smith—had settled by the time the complaint was filed in court. Though Mary likely was born back in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where Simon Rinehart had originated, the court record identified the couple as residents of Hocking County, Ohio.

Hocking County has a history much like that of Perry County, and in fact was a neighboring county, lying to the southwest of Perry County. Just as Perry County was formed in 1818 from neighboring counties, Hocking County was likewise organized. Both gained land from Fairfield County, as well as from other nearby counties, upon their establishment.

Finding Robert Smith in Hocking County was a search that, for the first attempt, did not turn out well. I began by searching through the census record for the decade after the 1854 court case. For that search, estimating Mary's age based on the year of birth for her sister Martha, I presumed that Mary would have married a man born during the early 1800s. I made the search parameter as wide as possible on Ancestry.com, setting the target year as 1810 and expanding the range ten years in each direction.

Bingo! I found Robert Smith! But he was a man without a wife, though several older children in the household hinted at a deceased wife by 1860. Second drawback: this Robert Smith was born in England, not Pennsylvania. Though admittedly that could have been possible—after all, some immigrants from England did historically pass through Pennsylvania—I noticed that his children were also listed as having been born in England. This gave us a profile which didn't fit what I was looking for.

With a second attempt, I pulled the possible date range for our Robert Smith's year of birth to an earlier setting—but not too much earlier. I wanted a range that overlapped the first attempt, just in case I had missed something.

Sure enough, there was a second Robert Smith, also resident in Hocking County. Added bonus: in the 1850 census, he claimed to have a wife whose name was Mary. And both Robert and Mary were reported to have been born in Pennsylvania.

The children's names did not seem to echo any family names from previous generations in the Rinehart clan. From oldest household member George Smith at age twenty five down to the youngest, five year old Wesley Smith, all were born in Ohio, not Pennsylvania, giving us a date marker to estimate their arrival from Pennsylvania. This date estimate puts the Smiths' arrival in Ohio much earlier than Simon Rinehart's arrival, as Simon was still showing in Greene County, Pennsylvania, in the 1830 census.

Does this mean I've found Simon's daughter Mary and her husband Robert Smith? Not necessarily so. After all, this Robert wasn't the only Robert Smith in Hocking County. There could be more.

As I'm doing for Mary's sister Martha Rinehart Fordyce, I'll start building a proposed family tree of descendants, not just in my search for more documentation, but to scope out any possible DNA matches linking my husband's family with this Smith family.

Postscript on Marilyn's Family Photos

 

It was a "giving back" project which started me on a path of finding "orphan" photos and putting family history research skills to work to return them to long-lost family. Genealogists have long had a tradition of volunteering to help other researchers—especially those just starting out—because we, too, were once beginners. We call it "giving back" in gratitude for what others once did to help us, or "paying it forward," knowing that one day, we too will need a hand with our brick wall research problems.

Never did I think, however, that one day I'd find myself rescuing my own family's pictures, but that is exactly what happened when I got the message that someone had found Marilyn Sowle Bean's photo collection in a local antique store.

Finding Marilyn's photos prompted me to dive deeper into a project which I had started but long ago set aside: to find any sign in her now-deceased son's family tree of the genetic origin of the disease which eventually cost him his life. I already knew there were several cousins in the family related to Marilyn's mother-in-law, Maude Woodworth Bean, who had inherited some form of Marfan Syndrome, but that there weren't any signs of the malady in the other branches of the family.

In this past month—after a research lull following my inability to find details on the month's goal for my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors—we spent the month exploring the family related to Marilyn's mother-in-law, Maude. We made it through each of Maude's four grandparents' lines—Woodworth, Williams, Farrend, and Smith—but I can't say that I located any conclusive evidence to pinpoint that deadly heritage upon any of those four lines.

Granted, seeking early deaths in a family timeline stretching back into the nineteenth century can be a tricky business. Recorded causes of death are not as accessible in those old files as they might be in a modern death certificate. Besides, given that Marfan Syndrome wasn't observed as a separate entity until it was first described by a pediatrician—by the name of Antoine Marfan, as you may have guessed—in 1896, or even used as a descriptor of that set of symptoms until 1931, there would be no mechanism for pinpointing such a cause of death in Maude's ancestors of the 1800s.

But, of course, we could still guess. Any male descendant in Maude's grandparents' lines who died as a young adult caught my eye. However, many early deaths could be ruled out by the usual explanations of that century: injuries from battle in wars, contagion from widespread diseases among them.

But there were others whose demise still left me puzzled—such as Joel Smith, the twenty year old brother of Maude's paternal grandmother. His death in 1852 was noted only by a cenotaph erected where his parents lived in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. Looking closely at the monument, a now-barely legible line after his name and date of death states "Buried in Greenwood Cemetery NY." As you might have guessed, there is more than one cemetery in New York by that name, and no, none of them produces a record of that name when searched on Find A Grave—let alone any obituary published in a New York newspaper.

Along the way in this pursuit of Marfan Syndrome in Maude Woodworth Bean's family, we did make some worthwhile discoveries. I've built out a family tree for Marilyn—yes, her side was included in this effort—and ventured beyond just the names, places, and dates to discover the stories behind the statistics.

But there is a melancholy down side to all the discoveries: there is no one left in the family with whom to share these stories. They are all gone: Marilyn, her two children, her parents and in-laws, even those cousins whose telltale height trumpeted their inheritance of Marfan Syndrome.

On the bright side, I also learned that what once might have been a very elongated death knell—after all, we all have been handed a terminal diagnosis, it's just that some of us get down to the business of it quicker than others—may now be far from such a somber diagnosis. While still a serious consideration, Marfan Syndrome is apparently now one which has been said to allow for "something approaching a normal lifespan." That is a remarkable victory.

All told, I'll still keep working on Marilyn's family photographs. As for the research goal of pinpointing family in previous generations afflicted with Marfan Syndrome, I will keep building out Maude's family tree and learning her relatives' life stories.

But this is a new month, and with the flip of a calendar page comes yet another research goal to conquer. Though I've made the unfortunate choice of piggy-backing December's goal with that of my failed November goal, we'll still review what, if anything, can be found, before moving on to more discussion on "giving back" projects and, finally, wrapping up the month with a look ahead to the new year's Twelve Most Wanted. 

Without a Will

 

...there may still be a way.

Yesterday, we were puzzling over why Maude Woodworth Bean's paternal grandmother, Eliza Smith, would have shown up in two places in the 1850 census. One instance was in her father Abraham's household, while the other was in the household of her husband Lafayette Woodworth's father, along with their two oldest children. Was one entry for someone else by the same name?

While it is true that Smith is a common surname in this country—and Eliza a popular given name of that time period—it wasn't necessary to mount an exhaustive search to demonstrate that there were no others by that name in Eliza's hometown in Kenosha County, Wisconsin. Noticing that Eliza's father, Abraham Smith, had died just five years after that same 1850 census was taken, I thought it might be possible that he left property behind at his passing. And where there's property to be inherited, there is usually a will.

Unfortunately, in Abraham Smith's case, his November 1855 passing was not preceded by any indications which might have prompted him to record his last wishes, for the man died intestate.

Fortunately for us, far removed from the time of that sad loss to family, it turns out that the county in which Abraham Smith died has been diligent about allowing digitization of their records, including probate records for that time period in the 1850s. From the comfort of my own home, I was able to read through the entire packet of material in Abraham Smith's file, and note key entries which will serve our research purposes.

Prime among those documents were a few pages tying family details together. First was the court record that named Abraham's oldest remaining son Amos as the administrator of his estate. As we'd already seen from the one 1850 census—the one including an entry for a single Eliza Smith, their oldest child—Abraham and his wife Amanda were parents of nine children, of which Amos was the third born. As the oldest son remaining in 1855, it fell Amos' lot to perform the duties of administrator.

The second document in the probate file for Abraham Smith was Amos Smith's acknowledgement of a petition in the probate process, a document in which is listing the names of his father's widow and children as heirs. Topping the list was the oldest child, named specifically as "Eliza F. Woodworth aged 27 years," followed by her brother Amos.

Why Eliza showed up twice in the 1850 census, I still can't say, but finding this document helps establish the fact that that Eliza listed in the household of Abraham Smith did indeed represent the same woman listed again in the census as the wife of Lafayette Woodworth.

Best yet was the third document in the probate file: a receipt signed by Eliza Woodworth acknowledging that she received her equal portion of the proceeds of her deceased father's estate.

With that collection of digitized documents easily found online, I am more confident that I've got Maude's grandmother Eliza attached to the right Smith family—a consideration which easily could have led us in a wrong research direction. But with that discovery comes another question: whatever became of the eldest Smith son, Joel? The absence of any mention of his name in his father's probate record is owing to the fact that Joel predeceased his dad by just a few years. At Joel's premature passing, he was only twenty years of age. Could this be an echo of the Marfan Syndrome which struck a devastating blow to so many of the descendants of Maude's generation in the Woodworth family?

 

Above: digitized copy of Eliza Woodworth's signature from a receipt in the probate file of her father, Abraham Smith; image courtesy Ancestry.com.

An Ordinary Name Like Smith

 

Surnames can have a "Goldilocks" syndrome of their own. When they are too rare, it's hard to find enough records to facilitate a family history search. When they are too common, they bring on enough of an avalanche of resources that the researcher gets flooded with more results than can be handled. It's those surnames in the middle—not too rare, not too common—that become the sweet spot we love to find.

Today, however, is not one of those instances. This is the task I've been procrastinating until the very last moment: looking for someone with the surname Smith.

As we wrap up a month of pondering the family represented by a rescued stash of photographs—the collection once owned by Marilyn Sowle Bean—we now turn to consider a woman by the name of Eliza Smith. Remember that we are seeking any sign of who in the family might have carried the Marfan Syndrome which cost Marilyn her husband, her son, and several in-laws' children. It seemed apparent that the syndrome might have come from Marilyn's mother-in-law's side of the family, one of the lines leading to Maude Woodworth Bean.

So far, we've examined the lines of three of Maude's four grandparents: Woodworth, Williams, and Farrand. Now we need to touch on the fourth grandparent, a woman by the name of Eliza Smith.

Tracing that family line backwards in time, I nearly groaned when I learned that Maude's paternal grandmother had Smith for a maiden name. Fortunately, from that backwards-in-time vantage point, it was not Smith which I had to begin my research with, but Woodworth.

Eliza Smith Woodworth's most recent appearance in a U.S. Census record was at the turn of the century—that other century. There, in her residence in Los Angeles County, California, the mother of eight children now lived with only one other person: her husband of fifty four years, Lafayette. 

At the time of the 1900 census, Eliza stated that she had been born in New York in August of 1828. She indicated that, while her mother had also been born in New York, her father had come from Connecticut.

It is probably a good thing we were able to find Eliza in the 1900 census, for if she had died any earlier, we would have had to settle with finding her back in the 1880 census, at a point which provided us with even less information on this Smith descendant. By the time of Eliza's passing in 1905, thankfully a telegram home to family back in Wisconsin prompted an article in the hometown newspaper of the region where the Woodworths once lived before immigrating to California.

It's a good thing the Kenosha Evening News chose to be so informative about this woman who left town with her family back in 1886. The article gave her name as "Mrs. Eliza Smith Woodworth," and noted that this "pioneer resident" had been a daughter of a local man named Abraham Smith. Furthermore, the obituary listed the names of all eight of Eliza's children, three of whom still remained in the Kenosha County area in Wisconsin.

This detail will be helpful in my goal of examining whether any other branch of Maude's extended family might have exhibited signs of that same Marfan Syndrome which was so devastating to her own immediate family. I'm still working my way through the descendants of each of Eliza's children. However, what I'm curious about is Eliza's collateral lines: who were her siblings?

Thankfully, it was fairly easy to locate an Abraham Smith in Kenosha County, Wisconsin, just as Eliza's obituary had indicated. Though I lamented the newspaper's lack of mention of any siblings which might have survived her—especially those who might still be living in her hometown—I did find Abraham and his apparently large family in the 1850 census. Thankfully, I might add, as Abraham died only five years later.

Abraham Smith's household did indeed include a twenty two year old woman named Eliza Smith. The only problem with that discovery was that I already knew something about Eliza in the 1850 census: that by then, Eliza was married to Lafayette Woodworth, and was already listed elsewhere in the 1850 census as the mother of two children. Why would she be listed in two places?

 

The Legacy of Life's Hard Lessons

One of the benefits of knowing one's own family history is gleaning the treasures reaped by ancestors who went through tough times in life. Yes, surprise, life has been tough for untold generations before the Wuhan flu arrived on American shores. Not all of them lived to tell of their harrowing experiences, of course, but the memory of these ancestors' lives bestows us with a priceless legacy.

As I make my way down the branches of my family tree from any given ancestor to each of their descendants, I run across an incredible variety of stories. One of those stories emerged as I worked on the siblings of my second great-grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Warren Rainey. Mary, herself, was not an easy study; she made herself hard to find by being orphaned just before the 1870 census, then married just after that census to become mother of three daughters and, upon the final arrival of the long-awaited son, dying, along with her son, just after childbirth. And before the 1880 census.

With that leaving me with nothing more than oral reports from family remembering her to be an orphan, I had no way to trace her line further back. The only mention worth following was that someone recalled her maiden name being something like Ramey or Rainey.

Eventually, I did find a plausible explanation for who she was—and thus, who her parents were—along with a serendipitous DNA match with the woman's brother's descendant, which I've written about before. However, everyone knows a genealogist is never satisfied—which means, once having conquered that brick wall, I needed to press forward, er, backwards in time to the next generation.

My first ploy in that attempt was to research all of Mary Elizabeth's siblings. Believe me, there were many of them. My second great-grandmother was apparently the baby of the family, and the family was huge. And yet, do you think I could find any clues? Not much online, at least not back five years ago when I first began the process.

Fast forward to this Wuhan flu season, and "sheltering-in-place." What's a diligent genealogist to do with all this down time? Clean up that family tree, of course! That led me back to the Rainey family line, where I began checking records for each of the siblings of my second great-grandmother.

It was halfway down the span of the ten known children of Thomas Firth and Mary Elizabeth Taliaferro Rainey (my Mary's mother) that I began work on Sarah—or Sallie—Rainey. Born about 1835 in Georgia, Sarah "Raney" was married to Isaac Hardeman Smith in Coweta County, Georgia, in 1852.

Four children later, Isaac was gone by 1867. What was a young mother to do? Remarry, naturally—which Sarah Rainey Smith did within a discreet three years of her widowhood. The February, 1870, nuptials took place in Fayette County, Georgia, uniting widow Sarah Smith with a gentleman listed as H. C. Fisher.

Mr. Fischer—as his name turned out to be spelled for the remainder of his life's records—actually had a given name: Hartford. Just as had Sarah's previous husband, Hartford and she had four children. And yet, at the end of Sarah's life, there was something strangely missing from her will: any mention of her husband. Though all her children from both marriages were mentioned by name in her 1912 will, there was not one word about Hartford Fischer.

Do not presume he had already passed away, though. His death was not to occur until 1930. We find the explanation for his absence in the 1910 census: he and Sarah had divorced sometime after 1900, explaining why, in her will, Sarah was so careful to emphasize that her son Hugh Rainey Fischer had "supplied my every want of eleven or twelve years."

With a lifetime of hardship and disappointments, it might be reasonable to assume that all Sarah's children had also gotten a rough start to life. For this, you would be correct—and yet, that doesn't take into account the energy each child brings to his own life's story. As I followed the "fortunes" of each of Sarah's children, I did see some down-and-out stories, but I also noticed, right from the start, the mention of a "Dr. L. C. Fischer" within Sarah's last testament.

While it is true that anyone who was a doctor at that time was considered to be of elevated status, if not financial standing, it also takes considerable financial backing to acquire the education to advance oneself to that level—something a widow and subsequent divorcee in that era might not be able to provide.

Perhaps it was the path that brought this forsaken son from a broken home to a healing profession that provided the foundation for what was yet to come in his own life—along with a heartbreak, as well—with a home of his own. 

On the Far End of a Short Life

Now that we've found a baby Kate Allen in the 1880 Louisville household of one Charles Allen—and discovered his wife's name, at least at that time, was Elizabeth—I wanted to rush to the other end of Kate's life to see whether our Kate, the one now married to William Bernard Hopkins, was the same Kate who claimed these parents. Perhaps I've attended one too many lectures on exhaustive searches, but somehow the research paranoia has become ingrained in me.

It wasn't too far into Kate's future that it took to find my document goal. Kate apparently suffered from hypertensive heart disease and had suffered two bouts of cerebral hemorrhage. The second attack took her life.

She was laid to rest in an unidentified cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, shortly after her passing on March 28, 1928. She was forty eight years of age.

Fortunately for our search, Kate's death certificate was easily located on Ancestry.com, showing that the informant was her husband, William B. Hopkins. Even so, I've found that the closest of relatives can often make the greatest of mistakes in completing the information to be used in a death certificate—hence, my drive to find additional confirmation of any detail noted in such a record. While I am certainly willing to concede that family members are often under the greatest of emotional stress at the time—and understandably can make mistakes—I still prefer to find supporting records for each assertion built into my tree.

As it turns out, the report on Kate's death certificate provided the mother's maiden name we are seeking—and it wasn't Addie's, as we suspected, but Elizabeth's name. While Kate's mother's maiden name may explain the source of Kate's own hyphenated (or at least appended) maiden name of Smith-Allen, the odd thing was that the certificate provided an unusual spelling: Smidth.

Now I know spelling was not the big deal it is today, and that prior centuries certainly took their liberties with spelling creativity. But Smidth? Really? I mean, after all, what more common surname could you come up with than Smith?!

That may have tipped my concern when I looked up to the previous line and realized that Kate's father wasn't Charles L. Allen, as we had been told in other records, but Charles A. Allen. Frustrating. My future research path was now sealed: I had to look for another confirmation of Kate's parents—just in case I had the wrong Kate or Charles Allen.

Above: Excerpt from Kate Smith-Allen Hopkins' Pike County, Kentucky, 1928 death certificate showing the curious spelling of her mother's maiden name, and the small discrepancy of her father's middle initial; image courtesy Ancestry.com.