Starting From “Here” Before We Can Go “There”

Sometimes, I just have to take “Brick Walls” for what they are—immovable objects hampering research progress—and retrace my steps before I can devise another approach to the impassible. As one reader, Magda, mentioned yesterday, there are resources available from others who have already pondered how to tackle the dilemma.

The book Magda mentioned, Marsha Hoffman Rising’s The Family Tree Problem Solver, is on order right now. In the meantime, as I wait for my brick wall demo team to arrive, I’m going to go back to the beginning of this Flowers path and see what else I can find. Retracing my steps will also allow me to assemble all the documentation I’ll need when I send in my application for my family’s possible entrance into the First Families of Ohio membership of the Ohio Genealogical Society.

If you’ve followed along here, back over a year ago when I began the series on my father-in-law’s World War II letters home, you will recall meeting Frank Stevens’ young bride from Perry County. Norma Jean Flowers and Francis Xavier Stevens were wed in the Saint Rose of Lima Catholic Church in New Lexington on November 5, 1949.

At the point where I introduced the couple, I did include a few pictures of Norma’s parents, but not much on her family. A year ago, I was telling Frank’s story. Now I can begin on Norma’s family—with a focus on the Flowers family line.

Norma’s dad was John Ambrose Flowers. He was a man born, raised and buried, all in the same county. Born on his father’s homestead farm just outside New Lexington, John was third to youngest of a large family—documents are enigmatic enough to dispute whether he was among nine children or ten—arriving on May third, 1885.

In his earlier adult years, several documents indicate his livelihood to be coal mining—and in Perry County, Ohio, he had plenty of company in that endeavor. His World War One draft registration card confirms that he worked for the Wheeler and Mason Coal Company in Saltillo.

By the time of the 1920 census, he was still single and living at home with his parents—the only one of his many siblings doing so, with the exception of one married sister and her family at that same address.

Perhaps, at the age of thirty-four, he was considered one of Perry County’s eligible bachelors—or perhaps not. After all, he was still employed as a coal miner.

I don’t know at what point John Flowers shifted from mining to farming, but perhaps it was about the time of his (finally!) marriage to young Bertha Genevieve Metzger, daughter of another large family from the western portion of the rural county.

The couple was married on May 18, 1926, at Saint Joseph’s in Somerset, where the bride’s family attended church. On the day of their wedding ceremony, John Ambrose Flowers was forty one. His bride was twenty one.

In contrast to the large families in which both John and Bertha were raised, the couple had only two children. Perhaps, considering the age difference between them, it may have been a good thing. Just before their thirtieth wedding anniversary, John Ambrose Flowers passed away at the age of seventy. He died of cancer. Farmer or not, his death certificate listed him as a retired coal miner. Perhaps that had something to do with it.


Photograph, above right: Flowers-Stevens wedding reception November 5, 1949; left to right: Agnes Tully Stevens of Chicago, her son Frank Stevens, the bride Norma Flowers Stevens, Norma's father John Ambrose Flowers, Norma's mother Bertha Metzger Flowers. 

Know He’s Hiding in There Somewhere

You know how it is, tracing genealogical records: you start from what you know, and move gradually backward in time. Each step holds you firmly in place—and refuses to let go—until you can verify that you know that generation’s vital statistics, too. And then you can move on—er, back.

All that is fine and well as long as one is researching a country for which certificates and census records provide the details—those handy research guides known as names. When, in the United States, you encounter the Wall of 1850, you pass from the land of the named to the land of the itemized. If your ancestor is not the head of household, before that 1850 watershed mark, that ancestor will not be named, only counted.

True, in making my way back on the timeline of the Flowers family of Perry County, Ohio, I do have verification of other family members’ names, even before 1850. There are some baptismal records. There are some tax records. And there is the cemetery in the churchyard of the old Saint Joseph’s church in Somerset. Taking a look at the seven hundred thirty eight Saint Joseph’s interments listed on Find A Grave is like taking a walk through my family tree database. Yet, when I check for a listing of all their Flowers burials, the key ancestors I’m seeking aren’t listed on that website. Until I can actually get there, I’ll have to assume that my target ancestor remains hidden there.

The key ancestor I’m seeking is Joseph S. Flowers, senior. It was his wife, Elizabeth Ambrose Flowers, whom I mentioned yesterday—the mother who bore some of the Flowers children in Pennsylvania and some in Ohio. Their son Simon—the one for whom a pre-1820 birth in Ohio is only sometimes supported by government documents—is my husband’s direct ancestor.

If I can find some other sort of indicator that the senior Joseph Flowers was in Ohio prior to 1821, I can apply on behalf of my husband’s family for status as First Families of Ohio members. And yet, finding any such material is proving difficult.

Why? I’ll recount several issues as I review roadblocks to this application in the next few days. In short, besides the pre-1850 census configuration, I’m struggling with naming issues, spotty baptismal records for the early years of the local church, property ownership issues, and discerning proper repository jurisdiction for early government records as Perry County itself was not formed until 1818.

I’ll most likely be revisiting these issues with fellow researchers among our distant Flowers relatives. With the large families replicated over several generations of this Ohio family, I can assure you that there are several descendants also researching this family and its many related branches. That is one positive note for which I’m thankful: the many helpful, friendly distant cousins I’ve met online and worked with for the past two decades. This project may also call for me unearthing those storage boxes of material I’ve found over the years—as well as revisiting the online forum groups that provided so much help along the way.

Somewhere, in all that data, Joseph S. Flowers of Perry County, Ohio, is in there. All I need to do is find him, and document what I find, before December 31 of this year.

Photograph of Saint Joseph Church, Somerset, Ohio, courtesy Find a Grave volunteer Nancy Ann Mull Buchanan.

Not to Make Things Difficult, But…

So we want to certify that our family is eligible to be designated as members of the First Families of Ohio, right? That entails the simple task of documenting descent from a man or woman intrepid enough to settle—before 1821—in what was once the wild and woolly Northwest Territory.

Well, it’s not like the Ohio Genealogical Society is insisting on residence in the area before becoming the Union’s seventeenth state—recognition for that comes with a special 1803 bicentennial pin for Society members whose ancestors were not merely intrepid, but truly trailblazers. This target family—the Flowers family of Perry County—won’t be that special.

There is, however, just that wisp of a notion that qualification for FFO could be in our future. Except for one thing: lack of records. After all, who kept records that far back? Especially for birth? Not the government.

The one set of records I have to rely on for this time period would be church records. True, there are also land records, but those would help only if the direct ancestor signed his name on the dotted line. Those living on and working the land of other family members left no such paper trail.

Of those church records, the earliest baptismal records seem spotty. While someone has been kind enough to transcribe those records and post them online for others to freely access (on this page, scroll down to the second blue subheading labeled, “Transcription”), the listings don’t begin until the year 1818. Our Flowers family supposedly celebrated birthdays dating from before that year.

Keep in mind that these early records were kept by itinerant priests. Actually, the first such records are signed “Edwd Fenwick”—the very man we met during the series concerning P. M. Flannigan, the Irish-born, Michigan-raised pastor of our Stevens family’s Chicago church, Saint Anne. Bishop Fenwick, located in Cincinnati during the time of Pastor Patrick M. Flannigan’s student years, had earlier devoted over a decade to missionary work, traveling throughout both Ohio and Kentucky.

In Perry County, Ohio—home of my husband’s Flowers family ancestors—then-Father Fenwick had blessed the first Catholic Church in Ohio, Saint Joseph Church in Somerset, on December 6, 1818. The transcription of baptisms includes a handful of names for that first year. None of them is surnamed Flowers.

Not many more names add to the list for the following year, although tantalizingly, the list does include some other Flowers family members. As far as I can tell at this point, there are no helpful clues regarding this Flowers family for any of the years leading up to the cut off point of December 31, 1820.

At least, that is, for the specific Flowers line I am researching. You see, I have a dilemma in my preliminary records. Looking at the family of Joseph S. and Elizabeth Ambrose Flowers, let’s take a look at the run of their four sons, beginning with son Joseph S. Flowers, junior, through son George Ambrose Flowers. Son Joseph was born in Pennsylvania in 1811, establishing that this is where the family lived before moving to Ohio. It does take one’s mother being in the same place as the child being born, logic would dictate, and so we can safely assume that where the son was, the parents were likely to be, also.

The next son, Thomas, was born in 1814. For this son, I have a handy report in a secondary source, stating that he was born in Ohio. According to page 405-406 of the 1883 History of Fairfield and Perry Counties, Their Past and Present entry for “Thos. Flowers,” he was “born in Muskingum county [part of Ohio] in 1814; came to Perry county in 1820” and the article specified his parents’ names. Likewise in this case, where the son was born, the mother had to be close at hand. At least, I’d presume that meant she was also in Ohio.

Thomas, as fate would have it, is not our family’s direct ancestor. That would be too easy. Ours is the next child, Simon T. Flowers. And here’s the rub: there are records that state that Simon, born 1817, was in Pennsylvania at the time of his birth—not Ohio.

To complete the picture, the next son, George Ambrose Flowers, was also documented to have been born in Ohio. Thankfully, his arrival was before the First Families cut-off date; he was born in 1819. Mom must have been, again, in the vicinity, one would think.

So, does this mean the family commuted between Pennsylvania and Ohio from year to year? Not with the transportation innovations at hand during those times! If it was true that our family's direct ancestor, Simon, was born in Pennsylvania and not Ohio, can I at least assert that his mom—also a direct ancestor—was in Ohio before 1820, by virtue of the necessity of giving birth to other family members, even though they were not of our direct line? Can mom-hood count? By indirect line of reasoning?

Of course, I’ll make sure to do the due diligence dance and find corollary means for staking my claim. But I just wish ol’ Simon would have cooperated and kept his story straight for all the government officials who kept prying into his personal business concerning those key life events.

Next Project: First Families

Now that I’ve got the to-do list for my D.A.R. application laid out in order—and while I await documentation from the various states’ birth, death, and marriage records—I can turn my attention to the other project I’ve been wanting to accomplish: application for First Families status.

While it may seem logical to stick with my Taliaferro records and pursue another Virginia-linked lineage designation, I actually have another program in mind. Using records from my husband’s family, it appears that my mother-in-law’s paternal line may qualify both my husband and my daughter (not to mention several in-laws) to become members of First Families of Ohio.

There are some sticking points—which I’ll discuss in some future posts—but it appears that portions of the family I’m focusing on were residents of Perry County, Ohio, before 1820. It also appears that, checking the Ohio Genealogical Society’s Roster of already recognized First Families, our Flowers family has not already been recorded. So it will be a journey starting from square one. If I can pull it off, I’ll be a trailblazer of sorts.

The requirement for this particular designation is that the applicant’s ancestor “first resided in Ohio by 31 December 1820.” That seems straightforward enough—until one realizes how few documents and records are available from that time period.

Not that there aren’t other options. The Ohio Genealogical Society has several other designations.

Settlers and Builders of Ohio recognizes those whose ancestor resided in Ohio between January 1, 1821, and December 31, 1860. That’s a pretty broad swath of time.

The Society of Civil War Families of Ohio requires service from Ohio in the Civil War—whether for the Union or the Confederacy—between the dates of April 12, 1861, and April 18, 1865. The company served in does not need to be from Ohio, nor is service limited to enlistment in companies. Documented civilian service and service in related capacities (for instance, nursing) are also considered.

Century Families of Ohio is the designation for those whose ancestor who first resided in the state at least one hundred years prior to the date of application, but after January 1, 1861.

With these other options, not only do I have an alternate goal (if my documentation dilemma is not resolved in time), but if what I’ve read in the past about Ohio being the “Crossroads of America” is really the way it was, I should have plenty of company in the application process.

Above right: photograph of the old Perry County Courthouse in Somerset, Ohio, circa 1951. From the Historic American Buildings Survey, courtesy the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, via Wikipedia. In the public domain.

Stole This From a Reliable Source

Just the other day—and just to make sure—someone checked in to say, “You know how to pronounce that, don’t you?” It was fellow blogger Wendy, who stops by to compare D.A.R. notes occasionally. We share an ancestral Virginia in our databases. The main difference between us is that she is still there, while my family left the plantation, oh, say, two hundred years ago.

The pronunciation Wendy was concerned about had to do with a family surname: Taliaferro. Admittedly, when I first heard my mother mention that name during my childhood attempts at drilling her for genealogical contraband (you know, all those family secrets), I remembered the spelling, not the phonetics. That was probably a good thing; it was the surname Taliaferro that I first researched as a newbie who got that early chance to go to one of those big league genealogy libraries. If I had gone by what I would have heard, I never would have found that book with my grandmother’s genealogy printed in it.

As it turns out—and I can thank my Genealogy Angel regarding the education on this matter—what your eyes perceive as “Taliaferro,” your colonial Virginian ears would have received as “Tolliver.”

Go figure.

Believe me, I certainly doubted it the first time I heard it.

Perhaps it was all in the plan of some Genealogical Big Picture for this to happen on my behalf, but shortly after I was educated by The Educated Genealogist, this gospel truth was confirmed by an online messenger. Of course, to which online resource the credit is owed, I cannot say at this point, thanks to an (ahem) overtaxed memory system.

However, in penance for my lack of giving credit where credit is due, I yesterday undertook to retrace my digital steps, and discovered that there was not just one resource to which I owe credit, but two. I have come to the conclusion that, since the race to the finish line for these two online resources was so close, and since I cannot remember which one I stumbled upon first, I need to doubly give credit to whom credit is due.

Sometime during that first cup of coffee on the morning of October first, I noticed a mention about the pronunciation of colonial Virginian names—and then another mention. Both were on Facebook pages—the one belonging to someone we mostly know as Ancestry Anne, the other the domain of the person behind DearMYRTLE. (Now that I look back on the history, the Finding Forgotten Stories Facebook page credited the discovery to DearMYRTLE's Facebook entry. See, I still needed more coffee.)

What each of these genealogy bloggers was referring to was a post on the FamilySearch.org blog. Quite timely for my case, the title sure caught my eye: “How Did They Say That Name in Colonial Virginia?”

Yeah. That’s what I wanted to know.

In that blog, Nathan Murphy posted a short explanation on September 27 about a piece he had found in an 1895 issue of The William and Mary Quarterly explaining the difference between the spelling and the saying of over one hundred thirty surnames, Virginia style. Handily, to illustrate the point, Mr. Murphy included a chart detailing the variances. He wryly added, “No wonder clerks had problems spelling people’s names!”

No wonder, indeed.

Above right: Adelaide Labille-Guiard, "Portrait of a Woman," oil on canvas, circa 1787; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

The Smoking Gun

Arriving at the right generation, with the right Zachariah Taliaferro, it looks like I’ve connected the dots between my mother’s maternal line and the patriot that entitles me to D.A.R. membership. With such a long line of ancestors, and such a tedious paper trail, it is nearly breathtaking when I realize how tenuous the connection to this lineage society membership actually is.

My claim to that small part of the glory days of the American Revolution is actually based on one piece of evidence that I, myself, would have considered of a secondary nature. But there it is, accepted and published for all to see within the database of the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution: two page numbers in one single, solitary book.

If you are thinking that the book is an index of death records, or some other compendium of vital statistics, think again. This book is not even published by any government entity. And yet, pages two and seventy five hold the very facts that bestow upon me the qualifications for membership.

This smoking gun—the corollary record of my fifth great grandfather’s service on behalf of the fledgling country—was the evidence uncovered by a researcher specializing in Virginia documents. Her name was Lenora Higgenbotham Sweeny. The book in question, known as Amherst County, Virginia in the Revolution, was originally published by the J. P. Bell Company in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1951. A review of the book appeared in The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, volume 60, number 2, in April of the following year. The review, for those subscribing to JSTOR, can still be read here. According to Google™ Books, a reprint of the volume was issued by Southern Historical Press in 1998. However, Genealogical.com indicates that even the second version of the book is now out of print—although Amazon breathlessly insists that, if you hurry, you may purchase one of the last two copies available here.

For the saner among us who hold the purse strings tightly, this coveted book can be found elsewhere. Thankful as I am for my local public library—and especially for the excellent collection of material compiled there steadily through the years by our county’s genealogical society—our local system does not own a copy of the book. However, for the cost of an hour’s drive to a nearby city’s college library, I may obtain a copy on loan. Or I may simply inquire as to obtaining it through inter-library loan. I suspect I’ll take that route.

Actually, I needn’t take any such route at all. It’s simply curiosity that drives me to seek the volume. For, if you’ve noticed by clicking all the links I’ve provided, each stop along the way in this search has provided editorial notes of the historical import of the book. Evidently, Mrs. Sweeny stumbled upon something quite remarkable in her quest through all those dusty back rooms and courthouse records: long lists of rosters and payrolls from militia and rifle companies, claims for property taken, and pension applications. All for the very county in which my ancestor lived. And I’d like to take a look for myself. There are, after all, two hundred and twelve pages of potential bunny trails to be explored.

Try This Again

Since I’ve discovered I have one more generation to research before achieving my goal of completing D.A.R. paperwork to link with an established patriot, let’s take a look at this senior Zachariah Taliaferro.

For one thing, I already know his namesake and second son is in my direct line.

So what about that father Zachariah? He was a Virginia native, born 1730. Marrying young, he took as his wife Mary Braxton Boutwell in 1749. Together, they raised five sons and three daughters (including, incidentally, one named Sarah, possibly the one for which the younger Zachariah named his own daughter, the future Mrs. Sarah Ann Broyles).

The elder Zachariah, the patriot, removed from his parents’ Williamsburg residence to what in 1761 became Amherst County, Virginia. There, he eventually served as Justice of the Peace. An interesting—albeit unsourced—anecdote provides a sketch of Zachariah Taliaferro's resilient and possibly pugnacious character in his role of public servant. He apparently was not one to back down in the face of what had to be done, no matter what the circumstances.

Zachariah Taliaferro is now duly recorded as a Revolutionary War patriot by virtue of his service in Amherst County, Virginia, as Justice of the Peace, and Member of the Committee of Safety, for which he furnished supplies on behalf of the cause. The categories D.A.R. places his service under are those labeled as Civil Service and Patriotic Service.

Zachariah Taliaferro lived a full eighty years. Though I have yet to ferret out all the legacy that he passed along to his children, I know that he came from a line whose genealogy has been pursued and documented both in printed publications and online in several sources. Son of Captain Richard and Rose Berryman Taliaferro, Zachariah’s ancestors emigrated from the area around London, England. You may hardly expect a name like Taliaferro to have originated there, though—and you are right. If the reports I’ve read are correct, the family name originated in the area of Venice in what is now the country of Italy.

All of which represents a genealogical journey of which, in such (to us) early dates as the 1770s, we pick up on a family history already long in the making. For the current project’s purposes, in seeking to document a connection with a Revolutionary War era ancestor, I’ll need to set aside that temptation to peruse those other tempting family history details and focus on the task at hand: get the rest of the required documentation and complete the D.A.R. application.


Above left: Map, "Campaigns of the American Revolution, 1775-1781" in William Robert Shepherd, Historical Atlas. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911. Courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.