Leaving Barely a Trace

There was yet one more Wilson descendant to trace for clues on what became of the children of Peachy and Mary Whitcomb Wilson: a son listed in a genealogy for Mary's family. The boy's name was given as Eddie, and according to the Genealogy of the Descendants of John White of Wenham and Lancaster, Massachusetts, unlike his older siblings, he was actually born in America. Where, of course, would be the main question.

The White genealogy gave this son's date of birth as 1873. Although it provided the clue that he was "now residing in the West," it failed to mention just where upon those fruited plains the child might have been born.

I tried narrowing the search parameters. For one thing, since the family arrived home from India on April 4, 1873, without any mention of an Eddie in the Wilson party, that gave me the earliest possibility for his date of birth. Likewise, on the other end of the date range, his unfortunate mother passed away on May 23, 1874, giving the other end of the possible dates for Eddie's arrival.

Since one memorial for Mary Whitcomb Wilson mentioned she had died in Springfield, Illinois, that state may have been the possible place of birth for this last Wilson child. No matter where I searched, or what terms I used, though, all the Edward Wilson possibilities were discarded. Granted, I have yet to search through all the rest of Peachy's brothers, any one of whom might have taken in this baby nephew. Based on our experience with the other Wilson children, though, there is a strong possibility that this youngest child could have found himself in a situation much like his sister Mary or his brother Harvey: placement with non-relatives, in whose household, the Wilson child's census entry might not even show the proper surname. Worse, in Eddie's case, there would be no telltale birthplace of India—just an innocuous American state like everyone else. Maybe even a state other than Illinois.

Then, too, there is always the possibility that the White genealogy was in error in reporting another child. Considering how unhealthy both the Wilson parents were when they left the mission field in India, it seems inconceivable that Mary would have been able to support a pregnancy. What if that entire entry were in error?

I had hoped that somewhere in all the material on the children of Peachy and Mary Wilson, there would have been an obituary or another report to give some clue as to what happened to the rest of the family. And yet, when I got to Harvey—the one who turned out to be the same person as the one we knew as Mansel—I couldn't even find a record of his death. Trying to push one generation beyond, I looked for Harvey's son, Wilbur, but got no farther than a perfunctory Social Security Death Index report. Apparently, Wilbur died exactly one day shy of the hundred year anniversary of his father's birth.

Thinking over the strange journey it's been, trying to replicate the family history of this missionary to India, I realize it is sometimes necessary in the face of such roadblocks to regroup and recall the original goal launching this chase. Yes, the plaintive cry for help in finding a missing son in Montana was heartbreaking. Discovering the placements in other families who opened their homes to take in a "missionary kid" was a challenge. And yes, I may even be walking away from the possibility of discovering whether there even was another son in the family.

But while it was enriching to uncover this family drama, and enlightening to learn about finding reports of their work in India—not to mention, discovering the link between Peachy's name and that of a character in a world-renowned author's book—I have to remember it was all on account of a routine exercise to lay out the matrilineal links between me and the two adoptees who are my only exact matches in my mitochondrial DNA test results.

And yet, that nagging curiosity may turn out to drag me back into the chase at some point. After all, there is one more mystery that presented itself in this chase to find the next generation: the location of oldest child Mary Wilson Gill's grave. Not in India where she labored following the footsteps of her missionary father, not in Illinois where her father grew up, nor in Massachusetts where her mother's family once lived, but "out west," just like those brothers of hers were said to have gone, was where I found her headstone.

I have no doubt this was the right Mary Wilson Gill, for the only other words inscribed on the stone, besides her name and the correct dates—1865 and 1941—was the designation, "Missionary—India."

The last stop in Mary Wilson Gill's earthly journey was in San Gabriel, California. Who knows—maybe that's where her baby brother Eddie ended up.  

One and the Same

Perhaps it was last night's genealogical society meeting which inspired me with the presentation showcasing just what it means to do an "exhaustive search." I returned home, determined to search every possibility for confirmation of Clendening twins. Was it Harvey and Mansel? Or one and the same with both names?

Admittedly, if the two were combined in the person of one, it would make for an awkwardly long name. After all, I've already posited that Harvey Wilson Clendening was really the son of missionary Peachy T. Wilson, placed in the Chicago-area home of clergyman Thomas Clendening when the widowed missionary decided to return to India. I have yet to find any documentation indicating that Harvey was legally adopted, but it seems Harvey did adopt his surrogate father's surname—at least, if this was the same Harvey.

So, to add Mansel to the Harvey Wilson name that got appended to the new Clendening family identity would make a long name, indeed.

I had to go take a look.

Thankfully, discovering that H. Wilson Clendening had had a son whom he named Wilbur made the search somewhat easier. But the man's knack of switching given names, depending on document—or, perhaps, mood—was a frustrating factor. And really, who knows if "H" Wilson would be the same person as Harvey Wilson?

Yet, it didn't take long to discover Wilbur Clendening in the 1940 census. However, it wasn't in the town where he had been residing for the past decade—Sedgwick in Harvey County, Kansas—but in a location far from there.

Granted, on this enumeration day on April 8, 1940, it was most likely that Wilbur and his traveling companion were on their way to catch that ship to Honolulu, as we noticed yesterday. After all, they departed San Francisco on April 19. Still, the hotel they were staying at when they were captured on the census record seemed a little off the beaten track for a trip from Kansas to California: a town called Browning in Glacier County, Montana. Could they have made a slight northern detour to stop in and see about the elder man's missing brother, William Wilson?

The other interesting detail about this census snapshot was the name given to the census enumerator by Wilbur's father. We've already seen him give his name in census records as either Wilson Clendening or H. Wilson Clendening. Then, too, one passenger list showed him as Harvey Clendening. This census record, however, did the same switch we've already witnessed yesterday in the passenger list for the return trip from Honolulu. The census had him as "Mensel," likely an enumerator's attempt at capturing an uncommon name.

So, was Mansel one and the same as Harvey? I found one more record to clinch it: a city directory from back in 1900, listing a printer—and our Clendening man had listed his occupation that way in some census records—by the name of Harvey M. W. Clendening.

I'll buy an M for Mansel and a W for Wilson.

Even so, that only tells me Harvey Clendening is the same person as Mansel Clendening. It still doesn't assure me that either Clendening name was once that of a Wilson.

Above: Entry from the 1940 US Census for Mansel and Wilbur Clendening in Glacier County, Montana; courtesy FamilySearch.org.

In One Way, Out Another

One by one, the children of Peachy Taliaferro and Mary Whitcomb Wilson in their own way seemed to elude discovery as I tried my hand at reconstructing the Wilson family tree. Only by stumbling upon eldest child Mary's married name did I find out what had become of her. Likewise, it was thanks to a newspaper report from a location quite off the beaten path—Helena, Montana—that I spotted the Wilsons' oldest son. We've just located a possible identity for the third-born Wilson child, Harvey. There is yet more of the puzzle to go, though, because at this point, I encounter varying reports of how many children the Wilsons had, and just where they might be found.

According to the original passenger list when, in 1873, the ailing missionaries Peachy and Mary returned to America, they were accompanied by three children: Mary, Willie and Harvey. In a memorial, published after Peachy's passing in 1898, it was stated that at his wife's earlier death in 1874, she had left four children.

A published genealogy of the White family—of which Mary Whitcomb was a descendant—affirmed that count of four children, but then went on to complicate matters by indicating there had originally been five, but one had died in India.

Well, the memorial never said she had four children—only that she left four children. Technicalities.

According to that genealogy, the children were listed as:

• Mary Wilson, born in India, returned there as missionary in her adult years
• Willie Wilson, born in India, later living in the western U.S.
• Peachy Wilson, born in India and dying there in childhood
• Harvey Wilson, born in India and living in the western U.S.
• Eddie Wilson, born in the U.S. in 1873, living in the western U.S.

If you think that fifth arrival was a curve ball in this genealogical pitch, I join you in sharing that opinion. This, however, was not the only unexpected detail, when it came to the listing of the descendants of Peachy and Mary.

While I was struggling to find anything—anything!—on Harvey Wilson, I ran across an interesting tidbit of information. The trail started with the Social Security Applications and Claims Index entry I had mentioned yesterday—the one which clued me in to the possibility of a name change to the surname Clendening. The entry provided a date of October, 1941, which will help track the Wilson descendants' timeline, and indicated the record was for the original application. Thankfully, it also mentioned the parents' names as Peachy Wilson and Mary Whitcomb, despite the man's stated surname as Clendening.

The only trouble was: there was another entry for a Clendening man with parents Peachy Wilson and Mary Whitcomb. This man gave his name, in February 1939, as Mansel Wilson Clendening. Strangely, he gave the same date of birth as had Harvey: July 16, 1871. Although also born in India, this applicant gave more detail: he was born in "Dauri Nwp, India"—likely Pauri, where Peachy had been stationed in northwest India for part of his missionary service, and where, incidentally, he had worked with another missionary by the name of Mansel.

Twins? That seemed to be the only explanation for two sons with the same date of birth. And yet, there was one more document served up on Ancestry.com that presented either a further puzzle, or the answer to our mystery.

On April 19, 1940, leaving from the port of San Francisco on the SS Matsonia, bound for Honolulu, was a sixty nine year old man named Mansel Clendening. Wondering if this might be our man Clendening, I pulled up the digitized listing of passengers to see who else might be traveling with him.

There was one other person with that same surname on the page of listed passengers: someone named Wilbur Clendening. As we've already seen from census records for the Wilbur we've found, our candidate was born about 1901, which handily aligned with the age given of this passenger by the same name: thirty nine.

The only trouble was: we've already found Wilbur Clendening in the household of H. Wilson Clendening in 1910. At least, I think it was H. Wilson. Could it have really been M. Wilson? I had to go back and look.

But there was another passenger record which included Wilbur Clendening. This one was, however, was listed as a man aged thirty eight, returning in that same year from Honolulu to Los Angeles on the SS Matsonia.

Besides that, there was one other difference: his traveling companion for this leg of the journey was named Harvey Clendening.

Could Mansel be Harvey? Or was this some sort of grown-up twin-swapping trick—leave with one man, come back with his twin brother?  

What Doesn't Get Indexed

Over at The Ancestry Insider, there has been a discussion unfolding in which a reader questioned just what is and what isn't included in the indexing process that helps subscribers find information on possible ancestors. Of course, in that case, the question was specific to public family trees posted at Ancestry.com, not the situation we've been dealing with here at A Family Tapestry, in which I'm seeking whatever became of the near-orphaned children of missionary Peachy Taliaferro Wilson.

It is the indexing process that has revolutionized the whole genealogical research process, in that now, instead of poring over page after page of records in hopes of finding mention of the precise ancestor being sought, a computer-aided search can pinpoint the exact location on a specific page of the very person you wish to find. Embedded within that process, however, is one detail that presents us with today's quandary: what gets indexed, and what doesn't?

Fortunately for us, the question being examined in the Ancestry Insider posts was specific to names in publicly submitted family trees at Ancestry. In the case I'm looking at today—and one I've run up against in the past—the search is on in a different venue: government documents.

In the process of converting the scanned and digitized pictures of such documents, in order to make the material searchable via computer, someone had to set up a project that decided which keywords would be captured and which details would be bypassed in the process. Thus, for instance, the recently-added files at Ancestry on the U.S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index at first had the individual's own name included in the index at Ancestry.com—but not the parents' names, though they were often provided in the file as well. Later, Ancestry chose to add those valuable bits of data to the list of words which were indexed in that collection. (Likewise, they then could also be attached to the records of each parent in a person's tree.)

While the process of indexing makes for a very efficient research mechanism, it is not the be-all, end-all of genealogical research. There are still reasons why we need to look at the actual image of the document. The one example I'm concerned with today falls within that category. You see, if it weren't for the ability to look at the document and see what wasn't included in that indexing protocol, I might have missed a vital detail helping me connect yet another son of P. T. Wilson back into his rightful family tree.

It was, in fact, that very collection—the Social Security Applications and Claims Index—that provided me with a first tip in the case of the Wilsons' second-born son. If you remember, when missionaries Peachy and Mary Whitcomb Wilson returned to the United States from India, along with their daughter Mary and son William, they were traveling with another son, Harvey.

According to the passenger list when the Algeria landed in New York City on April 4, 1873, Harvey's age was given as one year and six months. That would put his birth—if that were an accurate report—somewhere around October, 1871.

By the time the Wilson children had lost their mother in 1874—and subsequently were placed in homes so their father could return to his work in India, confident that his children would be safe and well cared for in their homeland—it seemed they had all but vanished. It was a chore to discover where oldest child Mary's new home was, since she was taken in by someone to whom the family was not related. Even son William's location was partially concealed by his uncle's use of initials, rather than his name, for the 1880 census—the only such record in which I've been able to locate the young man—showed us the family had moved from their customary location in Illinois to an entirely different state.

That didn't make the search for Harvey a promising venture. He might be with family—but with whom remained the question, as finding Peachy's brothers was a chore, as well. If with well-meaning friends, as we just found had happened with his sister Mary, his surname might be entirely omitted from the census record.

In fact, that was exactly what did happen. I'm sure I never would have found this out, had it not been for two serendipitous revelations, neither of which could have been located without a computer-aided search, combined with the exercise of carefully examining the originating document.

The first discovery was in that very Social Security Applications and Claims Index I mentioned earlier. But don't think it was an easy one. Thankfully, the Ancestry.com search engine served it up, despite a jumbled-up name: instead of Harvey Wilson, the result read "Harvey Clendening," but included the names of "household members" as Peachy T. Wilson and Mary E. Whitcomb.

Well, that was a promising start. But what about that Clendening name? Just in case there was something to it, I decided to test out the hypothesis that Harvey had been placed in the home of someone named Clendening.

Sure enough—just as the 1880 census seemed to be the only window of opportunity to capture any record of these missionary kids back home in the land of their citizenship—there was an entry for a Clendening family with a Wilson boy. The caveat: "Wilson" was represented as the child's first name.

You see, in the 1880 census record for the Hyde Park, Illinois, household of Thomas Clendening, clergyman, and his wife Amelia, there was only one child: an eight year old son named Wilson. While that may seem unusual, it wasn't the first time a son had been given a "family name"—a surname from the family's ancestry, to be brought forward as the given name of a child.

Clendening, however, didn't figure easily in my Wilson genealogy, nor from the Gilmers—the ones in Peachy's maternal line whom he could thank for the gift of his unusual first name. What would be the blood connection?

Taking a closer look at the census record provided a clue. Just as the record for Peachy's daughter, Mary, had shown her born in "Hindustan," that was exactly the listing for this boy, Wilson. The report for his parents' origins, however, followed suit from the listings of Thomas and Amelia—Ohio and Massachusetts—not our Harvey Wilson's mother and father, which would have referred us to Kentucky and Massachusetts.

Call that one inconclusive. But what about seeking out later census reports for this Wilson Clendening? Thankfully, unlike our experience with Harvey's older brother William, this was somewhat easier.

The 1910 census, this time moving us into the city of Chicago, provided a glimpse at that same Wilson Clendening. This time, he was a man of thirty eight years of age, married, with a son of his own. One interesting alteration was the listing of his name: now, not merely "Wilson Clendening," he had added just one initial, to render the name "H. Wilson Clendening."

Harvey?

Of course, the first thing I did was zoom straight to the column revealing Wilson's place of birth. It didn't seem to do much good, though, for whatever entry was originally there had been overwritten. I knew what my heart hoped I'd find, but didn't want that impetus to overrule what was actually there to see.

It looked like Wilson's birth location was a state that began with a capital "I," but other words obscured the entry's full identity. Providing some hope, though, Wilson's father had been listed with a birthplace as Kentucky, and a mother's birthplace in Massachusetts. This was beginning to look promising, even though his own birthplace was unclear.

Still, since Wilson had a son, that questionable entry could be double-checked by the son's own entry for his father's birthplace—and sure enough, there it clearly stated, "India."

That's where those blessed marginal notes—the ones that don't follow protocol, and certainly never seem to make the cut when project managers decide which entries to include in the indexing effort—make all the difference for a researcher like me.

It was when I looked closer at the entry—blew it up to the largest proportions I could for legibility—that I noticed a marginal note explaining what had been written over Wilson's place of birth. It was the phrase, "son of missionary," which not only explained the attempted "Am Cit" over the original entry "India" but provided me the assurance I needed that H. Wilson Clendening was likely once known simply as Harvey Wilson.

Above: Excerpts from the 1910 United States Census, in Chicago, Illinois,  for the household of H. Wilson Clendening. The second excerpt shows the birthplaces, respectively, of H. Wilson Clendening on the top line, his wife Bertha in the middle line, and below, their son Wilbur. Both records courtesy Ancestry.com.

Tormented by the Thought: What If?

Reading the 1894 newspaper report from Montana, that June when the Reverend Peachy T. Wilson was supposed to meet up with his son William in Helena, it did seem as if William had likely died, lost in the wilderness during the harsh winter conditions there. Nobody had reported seeing him, or even knowing anything about his whereabouts.

Still, that didn't keep his father from looking for him. Nor did it keep us, either. We couldn't escape that nagging "What If?" which keeps genealogists pressing on. Perhaps he had been stalled, due to bad weather. After all, as reader Far Side had mentioned, maybe he had fallen ill and was unable to head back into town. While the area in Chouteau County—where William had been working after the winter months had passed—was considered to have cold, dry winters, temperatures even in April averaged a low of thirty two degrees. Once things warmed up—and what little snow there might have been started melting—the rivers of the area could have overflowed their banks, causing flooding which would make travel difficult.

Of course, the sad realization is that any of these hazards which could have prevented William's return to Helena to meet his father in June could also have caused his own death.

That didn't stop me from searching for him, though. I tried looking through census records—though results of an Ancestry.com search didn't bring up anything promising, even for the closest subsequent enumeration.

Searching for William Wilson among the obituaries of the time in Montana didn't yield much, either—tempting not only me but also Intense Guy to look in later issues for the possibilities that William had lived to see another day after his 1894 disappearance. One possibility—a William Wilson born in approximately the same year of 1868, who died in 1950—turned out not to be our man, when his obituary revealed he had been born in Pennsylvania. (Indiana I can explain away, but I'd be hard pressed to excuse a detail like that.)

Desperate for any clues, I even pursued the newspapers for information on C. Wallace Taylor, William Wilson's most recent employer. Though I found nothing that would add to William's story, I did find out a few interesting things about Mr. Taylor. As the original newspaper article on William's father had mentioned in 1894, C. Wallace Taylor was indeed a businessman dealing in livestock, but he wasn't only operating in Choteau County. Several newspaper mentions of the man surfaced.

• In October, 1888, he was "paying his friends in Helena a visit"
• In February, 1894—the same year as the article on the missing William—it was "one of the commisioners of Teton County" who was in town again
• At the end of March, 1898, The Helena Independent mentioned he was in town from Teton County to receive "a shipment of 150 Rambaulett [Rambouillet?] French rams from Ohio"
• In May of 1898, he was "attending to some business in Great Falls"
• According to "Choteau Notes" in the Anaconda Standard, in March, 1899, he had just bought a pack of "eight well bred hounds" to be used in "clearing the pests from the range" of the Sands Cattle Company.

By 1900, it was interesting to see C. Wallace Taylor was now mentioned as manager of the Sands-Taylor Cattle Company. But even more interesting than that was stumbling upon a mention of Sheriff C. Wallace Taylor, in town to investigate an "alleged robbery."

The mention of sheriff was for the man identified as C. Wallace Taylor of Teton County, while several other articles mentioned him as being from Choteau County. Either this was a case of father and son—or possibly even unrelated men coincidentally bearing the exact same name—or C. Wallace Taylor had considerable land holdings, since the two counties were adjacent to each other.

No matter who he was or how successful he had been—even discounting his investigative skills as sheriff—nothing about the man seemed to lead me to any mention of his former employee, William H. Wilson, the young man who had disappeared only a few months before his scheduled reunion with his long-absent father. Perhaps someday, there will be another way to unearth the records which could give us clues as to William's demise, but for now, it looks like it will have to be one of those genealogical puzzles we reluctantly give up on and set aside.

Those Drat Initials Again

So many times, I've been stopped in my tracks while hot in pursuit of the name of the man who married a female ancestor—or worse, the true identity of a Mrs. who, besides the married surname, sported only her husband's initials. What I didn't count on benefiting me, in a future genealogical search, was recalling that I could use that initial intelligence in the reverse direction.

In trying to determine which uncle might have been the one in whose household Peachy Taliaferro Wilson's eldest son had been placed, I was getting nowhere, searching for each of the Wilson brothers. Wilson is a name common enough to cause a researcher frustration. Spread the search out over several states, and it only compounds the problem. Add to that the quest for son William, and the dead ends leap to geometric proportions.

I had already seen William's older sister placed, after their mother's death in 1874, with non-relatives in Illinois. There was no sign that his sister Mary was living with any of the other Wilson siblings. I had already presumed that second-born William would have faced the same fate—making the search quite difficult—until I ran across that heart-rending story of the missing William in a Helena, Montana, newspaper from 1894. That was what clued me in to the possibility that William was actually living with a relative.

"An uncle" was the only detail the newspaper provided. Of Peachy's own six brothers, I had already managed to rule out only one, leaving a long search ahead of me, for I had already tried my hand at building out the Wilson family tree on general principles. I was beginning to feel as if they were not out there to be found.

That's when I remembered that men from that era sometimes preferred to go by their initials. Why not try my hand at locating a Mr. Initial-Initial Wilson?

Perhaps this is me being snarky, but it occurred to me that the increased likelihood of initial usage correlated with the escalating self-assessment that one's given name was unbearable. Hence, it wasn't surprising to find the Reverend Peachy Taliaferro Wilson using that very tactic, himself. After all, wasn't it in this very form that we were first introduced to the man?

The chase was on to discover which of P. T. Wilson's brothers would be most likely to disguise his own given names. It was quite easy to rule out four brothers immediately, for the names William, Henry, Daniel and John were certainly common names causing no personal embarrassment. That left me with two weak possibilities for initials to hide behind: Thornton G. Wilson and Alexander C. Wilson.

While neither of these names seemed unusual to me, I ran both searches through their paces, and my best candidate—keeping in mind I had to look specifically to the 1880 census, William's only window of time in which he would be found in a federal enumeration—turned out to be the household of one A. C. Wilson.

This household, however, presented its own problems. For one thing, it was not in Illinois, the state I would have expected, given the Wilson family's old homestead there and daughter Mary's residence there in that same census year. Mr. A. C. Wilson lived in the Whitewater Township of Winona County, Minnesota, along with his wife Mary Ann and a thirteen year old nephew born in "Indiana" by name of William H. Wilson.

Having seen several census entries for people born in Indiana whose listing actually was written as "India," I wasn't too concerned by the reverse instance appearing for the William H. Wilson in this 1880 census record. Besides, my Alexander C. Wilson—having been born in Illinois in 1835, according to the 1850 census—certainly aligned with this A. C. Wilson, who also arrived in Illinois at about that same time.

Furthermore, this A. C. Wilson had a father from Kentucky and a mother born in Georgia—exactly as had Alexander and his brother Peachy.

I'd say we've found the exact same William H. Wilson, Peachy T.'s boy.

Above: From the 1880 U.S. Census for Whitewater Township, Winona County, Minnesota, for the household of one A. C. Wilson; courtesy Ancestry.com.

Seeking William

What little clues we sometimes have to go on in reconstructing the lives of family from past centuries. Add to that complicated lives, and it gives you a puzzle worthy of late night frustration, despite the wonders of instant online access to genealogical records.

The only hint that could be found for William, eldest son of missionary Peachy T. Wilson, was thanks to a newspaper article tucked away in obscure Helena, Montana. This was certainly far from the Illinois home left behind when the widowed Reverend Wilson decided to return to India, the land of his calling. All we had been aware of, before that hint, was that this father had "arranged homes" in which to place his children so that they could be raised in their homeland—and, presumably, with a surrogate mother's touch.

Despite the bonus of that hint, we discovered it in the midst of an article explaining how the Reverend was in town, hoping to visit his son before the end of his furlough, when he would again return to India. The difficult realization came when The Daily Independent revealed the distress of the visit: Peachy was indeed at the very place he and his son had planned to meet, but William was nowhere to be found.

The newspaper had, thankfully, given a timeline of William's life—his twenty seven years up to that point of disappearance—and had provided one additional clue for our own search: that he had been raised by an uncle.

Considering that Peachy Wilson had six brothers—almost none of whom I've been able to find documentation for, past their appearance in their widowed mother's household in the 1850 census—the search to find the right uncle who served as William's caretaker would be a challenge. But I was willing to give it a try. Still, remembering the difficulty in locating William's older sister, Mary—who, as we've seen, was listed in the 1880 census as part of a family which was no relation to her, and in which household her own surname never even appeared—I had my doubts of any success in the search for William.

Sometimes, when I'm stuck on a search, it helps to construct a timeline. Granted, the Daily Independent gave me a rough sketch of William's later years, and the passenger listing when the family had returned home from India provided a few other key dates. Putting both of these resources together, here's the snapshot that emerged of William's short life, up to the 1894 date at which he disappeared:

• born, approximately 1867, in India
• arrived with his family in New York City, April 4, 1873
• death of his mother, May 23, 1874, in Springfield, Illinois
• placement with his uncle, approximately 1874
• about 1888, left for Custer County, Montana
• about 1890, moved to Choteau County, Montana to work for C. Wallace Taylor
• winter of 1892-1893, moved to Helena
• March 1894, letter from his father returned, not delivered

In that brief window of time at his uncle's household, the only possible census in which he might be located would be the 1880 census. It was already clear that this would be an uncle on his paternal side, for his mother had only sisters and, as we've already noted, neither of those two would have been possible candidates to accept placement of a child in 1874.

Whether it was Thornton, William, Alexander, Henry, Daniel or John, the chase was now on to figure out just where Peachy's six brothers were in 1880. Although I made little headway—other than to determine that Daniel was listed by his middle name, "Harvey," and living as a single adult still in his mother's household—that all changed when I remembered one thing.

In that era, it was customary for gentlemen to go by their initials rather than by their given names.

Armed with that tactic, I was off, seeking the household of a Wilson sans first name, living with a nephew from India. 

Peachy's Boy

Googling for genealogy may bring with it a certain measure of success, especially if the name in question happens to be an unusual one, like Peachy Taliaferro Wilson. But Google alone cannot open every digital door to researchers. Some treasures lie behind firewalls or require special subscriptions to access.

It occurred to me yesterday that I hadn't tried my hand at that very process—not at Google, but at some of the subscription newspaper services I use. So I headed over to NewspaperArchive.com and entered for my search term, "Peachy Wilson." I decided to leave all the search parameters wide open—not limiting the dates nor locations of publications—and see what might happen.

My only results were four hits from a newspaper in Helena, Montana. An unlikely place to begin my search for Peachy's children, The Daily Independent ran at least four issues in June, 1894, which included the Reverend Wilson's name.

The first mention, on June 17, was an announcement of upcoming activity at the local Methodist Episcopal church:

Rev. Dr. Peachy T. Wilson and wife, medical missionary of the North India conference, Budaum, India, [likely Budaun district, part of the Bareilly division of Uttar Pradesh] who is visiting in Helena, will talk at St. Paul's M. E. Sunday school to-day at 12:15, also at the children's day exercises in the evening. The doctor has been engaged in missionary work in India under the direction of the Methodist church for nearly twenty-five years.

Lest you think educational presentations were the sole reason for Dr. Wilson's arrival in Montana, there was apparently another purpose for his visit to the area. The clue slipped out in various "personals" placements among the pages of The Daily Independent during the week the Wilsons were in town. Inserted among the newspaper's ads, the notice read,

Wm. H. Wilson

Your father is at 727 Breckenridge street, Helena, and wishes to see you at once. Any information of my son will be thankfully received.

The insert was signed off by "Peachy T. Wilson, Missionary to India" and dated from Helena on June 19, 1894.

Perhaps this unusual published request caught the eyes of the editorial staff at the Independent, for it wasn't long until an article explaining the Wilsons' predicament ran in the paper. With the plaintive subheading, "Does Any One in this City or State Know the Address of Wm. H. Wilson?" the half-page-long column provided the back story.

Mentioning the personal ad having been run by Reverend Wilson, the newspaper called for a nineteenth century version of crowdsourcing when it guaranteed

There is a story in connection with that card that will enlist for Mr. Wilson the sympathy and aid of every man in the state, and of every woman also.

The article explained how the senior Wilson had served as a missionary in India for twenty seven years, and how, shortly after he arrived in India, his son William was born there. As we've already seen, the Independent recounted how, at six years of age, the Wilson son had traveled from India to the United States with the rest of his family, and how the children were left behind when "the parents" sailed, once again, for India.

Thankfully, the article included further details on William's life—at least the most recent part.

Six years ago the boy came to Montana. He found work on a horse ranch in Custer county, and every month his parents received a letter from him. After remaining in Custer county for a couple of years he went up into Choteau county and was employed by C. Wallace Taylor as a sheep herder. The winter of 1892-93 he spent in Helena, and also two months of the past winter and his parents heard from him regularly.

That is the point at which the litany of locations got fuzzy. Of course, it was also when his father wrote to let him know of his return to the States. Naturally, Peachy wanted to see "their boy"—which the newspaper was quick to mention was "now a man of 27 years of age"—but William advised them not to make the trip in the winter. It would be too abrupt a contrast in temperatures for the couple, now accustomed to the heat of India. They set their plans for a visit that June.

Despite letters being exchanged regularly every month, the Wilsons noted that the last they had heard from William was on March 4, 1894, in a letter postmarked Helena. William explained that he was headed out "in the country"—likely returning to his usual line of work. Peachy sent a reply stating the Wilsons would stick to their plan to visit in June.

That letter was returned to them, undelivered.

The report in the Independent noted how "sorely disappointed" the Wilsons were to not see "their boy" during this visit, since they hadn't seen him for years. Worse, they were soon to depart for India once again. They hardly wanted to leave without having the chance to visit with William, especially considering, as the newspaper put it, they "are well advanced in years."

The writer closed with a recap of the headlined plea to help the Wilsons find William, requesting newspapers throughout the state to also run a story on William, in case "he may see one of the country papers." Nearly begging the people of Helena—anyone associated with any boarding home where William might have stayed the past winter—to contact Peachy Wilson at his lodging in town, the newspaper concluded with their rallying cry, "That boy must be located for the old folks."

I never found any follow up report giving hope that the family was reunited. I tend to think Peachy and his wife left town without knowing what became of William.

Whatever the outcome of that drama in Helena, I do know one thing: in that long editorial call to action was inserted one clue that will further my search for William. According to the Independent, when the widowed Peachy Wilson left his children behind in America for his first return to India, he left William in care of "an uncle."    

A Home for Mary

A genealogist may seek out details on a couple's descendants in order to trace the line through further generations for specific reasons. In the case of the missionaries to India, Peachy T. and Mary Whitcomb Wilson, I needed to research descendants from two generations for one reason: I needed to find where the motherless Wilson children were raised.

Upon Mary Whitcomb Wilson's death, back in the United States in 1874, the Reverend Wilson had seen fit to return to India. There was only one complication: what to do with the children. With his wife gone, someone else would need to care for these young ones. Perhaps India was not, after all, the best place to raise them. According to reports, their father decided to find homes for them in America before returning, alone, to India.

The most logical place to find these children—at least, that's what I thought—would be with family members. That's why I was elated to find listings of Mary Whitcomb's siblings in the White genealogy I mentioned the other day. On the same page as her own entry, there were sections for each of Mary Whitcomb's two surviving sisters. I checked them carefully for possibilities that they might have taken in the Wilson children.

No such luck. As it turned out, one of the two married sisters—Nancy—had died within the very month in which she had married James M. Robbins. No chance she would turn out to be the doting aunt, having passed in 1866, long before the Wilson children had even returned home.

The other sister, Ellen, didn't marry until she was in her late forties. Besides, the year of her marriage—1889—was much too late to make a suitable household arrangement for the Wilson children, either.

I was gearing up to do a thorough search among Peachy's six brothers, to see who might have taken his children in, when I stumbled upon that hint of his daughter's subsequent marriage to someone named Gill. It wasn't long after I began googling for a Mary Wilson Gill that I came across one detail that seemed sure to be just the hint I was seeking.

The document was Mary's 1917 application for a passport. Just like her father after the death of his spouse, the widowed Mrs. Mary Gill was intent upon returning to India, and was set to sail in November or December of that same year.

I knew I had the right passport application, for she identified herself as daughter of Peachy T. Wilson, who was born in Christian County, Kentucky—which he was. She then further identified herself as widow of Joseph H. Gill, and explained the timeline of his emigration from County Tyrone in Ireland to school in Evanston, Illinois, via New York City—including date and location of his naturalization formalities.

In addition, she identified her "permanent residence" in the United States: a town in Illinois called Pekin (which in later missionary reports was rendered as "Peking," causing some confusion). Even better, additional pages of the application provided statements in support of her birth information by people who knew her since childhood—a type of delayed birth report, as evidently she had no documentation from the time of her birth in India.

One statement, by a man named Walter T. Smith—oh, Smith...did it have to be Smith?!—affirmed that he knew "the above named Mary Wilson Gill personally for forty years." I did a little quick math on that one, arriving at a date in 1877, only three years after Mary's mother had died. Conceding that might be close enough, I noticed that Mr. Smith's residence also happened to be in Pekin, Illinois.

Even better than that was the statement given on the subsequent page, by a Caroline Pieper Smith,

This is to certify that Mary Wilson Gill lived with me from June 1874 to February 1891 and that her father Rev. Peachy T. Wilson informed me that Mary Wilson Gill was born on July 10th 1865 at Rae Bareilly U.P. India.

What more could I ask? This must have been the couple who took in the Wilson children! How plain it all seemed, now. All I had to do was search for the 1880 census—the only possible year in which Mary would show in the enumeration in that household—and I would have the proof to back up this statement.

Well...it wasn't so easy. For one thing, there wasn't any Mary Wilson in Pekin, Illinois, in 1880—at least, not one who was born in 1865 in India. As for husband and wife, Walter and Caroline Smith, there wasn't one of those couples, either.

What I did find, however, will suffice me—I hope. Sure enough, in Pekin, there was a Smith household in the 1880 census which contained a Walter and a Caroline, but Walter turned out to be the fifteen year old son of Caroline and her husband, D. C. (don't you hate those initials?) Smith.

The significant detail about that particular Smith household was not only the lack of anyone with a surname Wilson, but the listing of the rest of the children. After their oldest son Walter, the rest of the children were named, in order: daughter Mary, son Earnest, daughter Mary, son Dedrick, daughter Carry, son Austin.

Yes, you read that right: two daughters named Mary.

What was interesting about that older Mary—whose age was given as fourteen in this enumeration—was that, unlike all her "siblings" whose place of birth was in Illinois, hers was listed as something that looked like "Hindostin." And unlike the pattern of parents' birthplace listings for all the other children—father from Hanover, mother from Illinois—this Mary's father was from "Ketucky" and there was no entry for mother's place of birth.

I don't know about you, but I'd buy that as evidence of Mary's childhood home.

With no sign of her brothers, though, we'll have to look elsewhere for clues as to what became of them. Since it seems Mary's surrogate parents were not close relatives, the possibilities on this next search could be endless.


Above: Images from the 1880 United States census for Tazewell County, Illinois, courtesy Ancestry.com.

Mary Gets Married

It was just a one-syllable surname appended to May Wilson's own that gave me my first clue that there was yet another search term to add to the collection—another way to trace what became of the children of missionary couple Peachy Taliaferro and Mary Whitcomb Wilson. Yet, maddeningly, that new surname matched up with the one which came following that irritating device of providing only the two initials of the man whom she married.

The name was Gill, a common name in India—especially in the north, where the Wilson family had served in the mid 1860s. But even though I couldn't tell it at the time, those two socially-acceptable initials—J. H.—didn't belong to any of the Jats or Sikhs who customarily bore the name of that clan. It was, instead, the surname of a man from Ireland.

If I had been paying attention, the realization might have come to me much sooner that the very man from whose report I had drawn the sketch of May Wilson's missionary outpost was the man who became her husband.

But we seldom discover these things in chronological order. It was only much later, when I circled back to all the references I had uncovered to sort things out, that I discovered just who J. H. Gill might have been.

Evidently, Joseph Hamilton Gill took as many opportunities as possible to write about his missionary work. Even last year, a reprint surfaced of a book—A Winter in India and Malaysia Among the Methodist Missions—on which he had been credited with collaborating, back in 1891, with the author, Martin van Buren Knox. His reports appeared regularly in various missionary journals, concerning the work in the district in India to which he had been assigned.

A Northwestern University alumnus, the Reverend Joseph H. Gill apparently had attended the same seminary as had May Wilson's father, Peachy T. Wilson—Garrett Biblical Institute, today known as Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.

Owing to one of the Reverend's reports, I discovered that, though this was the first marriage for the now-forty-something May Wilson, it was the second for Joseph Gill. For years, he had been capably assisted by his first wife, Mary Ensign, the young Michigan woman he had married the same year he graduated from Garrett. Together, they immediately had left for the mission field in India, where, in addition to all the work accomplished under his charge, the couple raised five sons.

As often seemed to happen to such missionaries in foreign outposts, the conditions eventually led to deteriorating health. Such was the case with the first Mrs. Gill who, realizing her choices, decided to stay with her family, rather than quit the work to which they had been called. In the Reverend's report for Bijnor District in 1908, he described the last few months of his wife's life.

On July 15, 1910—as Intense Guy pointed out yesterday—the Reverend Gill took as his wife Mary Wilson, and together they continued the missions work in northern India.

That, however, was an arrangement not to last much longer, for a note in The Christian Advocate soon after indicated that the Reverend, himself, had passed away on January 17, 1912. At sixty seven years of age, the County Tyrone native had succumbed following a surgery in the ironically-named city of Lucknow, India.

At some point following her eighteen month long marriage, the bereaved Mary Wilson Gill returned to the United States, where she stayed until 1917. At that point, for whatever reason, she decided to return to India once again.

It was the necessary documentation which all travelers eventually need to obtain that gifted me with the details of how to proceed with research on this next generation of the missionary Wilson family. On account of a detail embedded within this document, I found the clue as to where to find at least one of the Wilson children, back at the death of their mother in 1874 when their father "arranged homes" for the children stateside before returning, alone, to India.

If, after all these years, Mary Wilson Gill wanted to return to India, she had to apply for a passport.    

May Be Mary

Sometimes, the best way to handle a genealogical puzzle is to avoid the temptation to explore every avenue. Just settle on one and wrestle with it until the answer can be pinned down.

So it was when tackling the question of what became of all the children of missionaries Peachy Taliaferro and Mary Whitcomb Wilson. Though there may have been four of them in America once the missionaries returned home on furlough, the only solid lead came from their eldest daughter. Only problem: depending on which resource mentioned this daughter, she was called by two different names: May, and Mary.

The answer: search by both names.

It is almost like searching for two entirely different people. Even so, zeroing in on this one quest meant setting aside all possible distractions for the other children—whatever their official names turned out to be, and regardless of where they grew up. After all, it is much better to focus on one person than be scattered between four wild chases.

Back to the Google search engine it was, looking for any mention of either May or Mary, combined with that relatively common surname, Wilson. I tried the whole exercise in tandem with other search phrases, like "missionary to India," or alongside her parents' names (especially her father's singular identity).

As unlikely as it seemed, there were a few telling passages in field reports from India, featured in journals for the church which originally supported the Reverend Wilson's missionary service. This, in addition to the basic material I had found in the White family genealogy which included Mrs. Wilson's entry. According to the genealogy, the Wilsons' daughter

came to America with her parents when a child and was educated and has returned to India as a missionary.

Time to do some math. If May—or Mary, the daughter—had come to America in 1873 at the age of seven, which the passenger list on her trip from Liverpool to New York had indicated, that would give us a year of birth somewhere between 1865 and 1867. A generous margin, of course, but a prudent one. If finishing one's education and then obtaining funding and appointment to the mission field would put Miss Wilson—at the most conservative estimate—back on the field by the time she was twenty years of age, that would mean she wouldn't show up on records until at least 1885, likely later.

Sure enough, at about that time, records began to include reports of the Reverend Wilson's daughter, returned to the field. There wasn't, however, just one location mentioned in the reports. The best I could tell, it appeared May—or Mary—had been born at one of her father's first assigned posts, a place known as Bareilly. This was the name of both a city and a district in the northern Indian state known as Uttar Pradesh.

Looking at a map of the main cities in that state today, one can notice a few interesting details. For one thing, we have already stumbled upon the name of one city there: Allahabad, location of the home in India of the traveling professor, Alec Hill and his wife, the former Edmonia Taylor of Pennsylvania, who had provided the unusual name of Peachy Taliaferro Wilson to local journalist and writer, Rudyard Kipling. Though you may not think you recognize the name of another city in Uttar Pradesh—Agra—you will, once you realize one of its prime pieces of real estate has become a quite well known landmark to Western eyes.

It was in this same northern region of India, pushing up against the border with Nepal in the Himalayas, that the Wilsons' daughter spend her preschool years. It is likely the same region to which she returned, in her twenties, to take up the work which her parents had left behind.

In some church publications, however, there was indication that the younger missionary Wilson had moved beyond that region to another one, more of an outpost, and one referred to as "lonely" and isolated. That mission, in the church reports, was called Pauri in the district referred to then as Gurhwal—now spelled Garhwal. Farther north and further into the Himalayas, the mission included a school, at which the younger Mary Wilson served.

With only brief mentions of her name in conference reports during a few years, it was difficult to piece together any history of her service in India. There was another complicating factor, however: in addition to having to search for her by two different given names—May or Mary—another surname had been appended after the Wilson. Yet, I could find no mention of any marriage.

Still, I couldn't pass up the hint. So now, I was searching for both May Wilson and Mary Wilson, but adding the additional variable of another surname, as well. Thankfully, it was this tiny clue that led to a few research breakthroughs which I earnestly believe I never otherwise would have found.

Above: Sketch of the mission premises at Pauri, Garhwal, India, from Manual of the Methodist Episcopal Church, volume 2, Phillips & Hunt, 1882; in the public domain.
    

Peachy: The Next Generation

Now that I've explored the story of missionary Peachy Taliaferro Wilson, I need to recall the whole reason I stumbled upon his existence in the first place: trawling through my entire matrilineal line in search of possible matches with my mystery DNA-matching cousin.

Yes, I know Peachy, as a male descendant, would not fit in that matrilineal profile. I just can't help myself, though: besides being a sucker for rabbit trails in family histories, the compulsion to keep everything neat and tidy as I pass through genealogical layers is unavoidable. Thus, the story of Peachy.

But it can't stop there. Now that I'm aware of my great grandmother's third cousin, the missionary to India, I want to know about his descendants. After all, he had at least four children that I'm aware of—and possibly a fifth, according to a genealogy I've recently discovered.

Thanks to some very slim hints in the Reverend Wilson's own story, it was apparent that he had a daughter who, years later, herself returned to the missions field in north India. Some reports called her May Wilson, but it's become apparent that she was actually named after her mother, Mary. Keeping a close eye on timelines, I've tried my hand at some more searches via Google, and determined that Mary—a.k.a. May—later was known by a married name.

Armed with all those versions of her name—plus spelling variations for her father's name and entries for her mother—I set out to see if I could uncover anything about the subsequent generation in this missionary family's history.

The easiest conquest came, thanks to knowing Reverend Wilson's wife's maiden name and year and place of birth. The former Mary Whitcomb, as it turns out, was a descendant of an early arrival in Massachusetts colony by name of John White.

I know, I know: how impossible to think of ascertaining which John White would be the right John White. We can tip our hat, once again, to Google for finding this gem: a four volume set on the descendants of that particular immigrant from England who landed in Salem in 1639. Among thousands of others, Mary Whitcomb Wilson found her place on page 782 of the second volume of Genealogy of the Descendants of John White of Wenham and Lancaster, Massachusetts.

Don't think I read all 924 pages of that volume, though. It was thanks to the search engine that I was brought specifically to Mary Whitcomb's entry, where it provided me a brief bio along with the listing of her children. While I certainly don't believe everything I read in print (any more than I'd copy, wholesale, a family tree posted online), according to the Almira Larkin White genealogy, Mary and Peachy actually had five children: Mary, Willie, Peachy, Harvey, and Eddie.

Hmmm. Those weren't exactly the names I'd been able to locate in other documents. But I'll take it as a hint.

Mary, I could be fairly certain of, since I was finding other confirmation of her relationship to Peachy and his wife. Willie, of course, would be the William I had already found accounted for in a passenger list for a voyage from Liverpool to New York City in 1873. Likewise, Harvey. The author had "Peachy" listed as a child who had died in India; perhaps this was one and the same as the Mansel Clendening I couldn't seem to find in the passenger listing—or could that be the official name for the baby Eddie, whom the author indicated was born in the United States that very year of their arrival back home?

Nothing is ever easy, especially when it comes to genealogical research. For each of the Wilson children listed in that White genealogy, other than for Mary—who had returned to India—the brief bio indicated each one was now "residing in the West."

For a genealogy of a family which originally settled in Massachusetts, "in the West" could be anywhere beyond the Appalachians. Talk about a broad hint.

Just What Was Needed

Just when it seems like every direction a stymied researcher turns pulls one up short against yet another brick wall, a breakthrough emerges out of nowhere. Of course, in some of those struggles, it helps to have friends. Talented, researching friends.

In trying to discover whatever became of the now-motherless children of the Reverend P. T. Wilson, I thought the most logical route was to check the families of his deceased wife's siblings. Unfortunately, I couldn't find any clues to determine which Mary Whitcomb would lead me to the right family. Likely, using the very same special Google sauce that conjured up those helpful hints for Peachy Taliaferro Wilson in the first place, I could have found what I was looking for. But did I think of that?

Of course not.

Thanks go to the ever-helpful Intense Guy for locating the "Memoir of Mrs. Mary Jane Whitcomb Wilson" online. With that discovery, I've spent the better part of a day pulling up records for the rest of the Whitcomb family.

The memoir itself confirmed that same date of death—May 23, 1874—that had led me to a Find A Grave entry for the wrong Mrs. Mary Wilson. In this case, however, our Mrs. Mary Wilson died in Springfield, Illinois—about one hundred miles east of the Reverend's childhood hometown near Quincy in Adams County.

In addition, the memoir provided Mrs. Wilson's date and place of birth: November 13, 1840, in Leominster, Massachusetts. From that, I was off, adding names, dates, places and details on the rest of Mary Whitcomb Wilson's family.

That helped swell the numbers on the count for my maternal family tree, of course—and just in time for my bi-monthly tally, so let's take a look. It turns out this month's first count was encouraging, for I have been so busy, I hardly thought I'd made any progress at all on my research. The numbers tell a different story—confirmation that this exercise is well worth the effort.

In the last two weeks, I actually managed to add 177 names to my maternal tree, increasing the overall count to 7,613. On my husband's maternal tree, the count was even higher: 353 in two weeks, bringing the total there to 4,151. And here I thought I hadn't done much at all.

Of course, absolutely no progress was made on either of our two paternal lines. But one surprise did surface there, even though I accomplished no work: there were two additional matches from Family Tree DNA on my father's line, a rare occurence, since there has been no increase in DNA matches there since the middle of February.

As for the rest of our DNA matches, the greatest increase in the last two weeks has been for my maternal line, where 17 additional matches brings the total at FTDNA to 1,095. Ten more for my husband's maternal line brings his total number of matches to 656 at FTDNA. Our Ancestry DNA accounts clipped along at a more modest rate, with his adding three more for a total of 107 matches, and mine increased fourteen to top out at 282 matches.

Not that I put any effort into the DNA side of the equation this time. I was not able to make any contacts whatsoever, other than to follow up on a couple email conversations that were already in the works.

When I see such gradually evolving progress, I have to remind myself that genealogy is often a painstakingly slow endeavor. We work and work on our quest, often showing nothing for our labors for days on end. And then, suddenly, a breakthrough opens doors to document after document. It's when we can barely keep up with all the stuff coming at us that we may be ecstatic, but in those standstill moments when we can budge that brick wall not one inch, keeping track of those numbers can at least award us a glimmer of hope that we are still moving forward. 

Right Date of Death, Wrong Mary Wilson

As interesting as this literary diversion on the study of the Reverend P. T. Wilson might have been, there is unfinished business on the genealogical side of the story. After all, had it not been for my goal to determine as much as possible of my matrilineal line for genetic genealogical purposes, I would never have run into this story of the American missionary with the outrageous name that won him a spot in Rudyard Kipling's host of memorable characters. But I still need to remember that quest.

We know from Peachy Taliaferro Wilson's memorial that he had taken a five year furlough from his work in India from 1873 through 1878. A passenger list confirms his travels home with his family in 1873, arriving in New York City via Liverpool on April 4—at least, if I'm reading the hasty handwriting correctly for "Rev. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson" of the United States plus their India-born children. This last leg of their journey home was aboard the SS Algeria of the Cunard Line.

Since the Reverend P. T. Wilson's memorial had mentioned he and his wife had had four children, I had looked for these descendants, of course. That was not an easy task. Besides the memorial's mention of the Wilsons' daughter May later serving as a missionary in India in her own right, the only other indication of who those children might have been was in two enigmatic entries in Ancestry's U. S. Social Security Applications and Claims Index. One was for a son named Harvey Clendening, and the other named Mansel Clendening, both born in India on the same date, July 16, 1871. Their parents were listed as Peachy T. Wilson and Mary E. Whitcomb.

That, in fact, became my clue that the entry on the Algeria's 1873 passenger list for the Reverend and Mrs. Wilson had been the right Wilsons: among the children, besides May—whose name actually was Mary, same as her mother's—was a one and a half year old boy named Harvey Wilson. However, besides those two children, there was mention of only one more: William. (At least, I think it was William; it was abbreviated "Wm" in such a way as to mimic the same scrawl used to represent the "Mrs." supplanting his mother's own name.) I can only presume the other twin died in India, or possible en route home.

It must not have been long afterwards when his mother died, as well. The missionary's memorial mentioned that Mary Whitcomb Wilson "had been in feeble health" when the family left India for their furlough, so her passing must have been sometime between their 1873 arrival in New York and Peachy's 1878 return to India.

Fortunately, another church publication mentioned the concise dates for this couple: that they were married in India on November 19, 1864, and that the former "Miss May Whitcomb" died on May 23, 1874.

What a wide world of possibilities that fact left me for sifting through to find any documentation on that date of death. Here we now had Mary Wilson—a rather common name, both first and last—dying somewhere in the United States. No notion of where she was born, who her parents or siblings were, or where she might have been buried.

Bless you Find A Grave, I thought when I finally located an entry for a Mary E. Wilson who had died on that very date. I clicked through to see if there were a photograph of the headstone.

There was one. It read:

Mary E.

Wife of

M. J. Wilson

Died

May 23, 1874

Below that, the following line read "Aged" but the actual numbers were next to impossible to read. "Impossible to read" was the line below that, which seemed to be some sort of illegible inscription.

Obviously, we have a problem here. We have the right date of death, but definitely not the right Mary E. What could be more frustrating?

Besides hoping to trace the descendants of this couple, it was important to locate something more on Mary's family for another reason: when the couple returned to the States in such poor health, Peachy Wilson had "arranged homes for his children"—though not specifically stating this, one would presume those arrangements would have been made with relatives. Since Peachy himself had only brothers—and I have yet to learn anything about the rest of them—it seems more reasonable to assume those placements might have been with the parents or siblings of the former Mary Whitcomb. Knowing how easily census enumerators sometimes confused surnames in extended families all living under one roof, the task is only complicated by this handicap of not knowing anything more about Mary Whitcomb than merely her maiden name.

Above: The last trace of a mother who died young: likely the passenger list entry for Mary E. Whitcomb Wilson on her return trip from India, shortly before her death; courtesy Ancestry.com.