Helping Those Who Help Themselves

That DNA testing stuff can be a pricey proposition. Why anyone would delve into an inquiry with that kind of price tag, and yet not bother to follow through and use it as the tool it was meant to be, is beyond me.

It's stats time again around here, and I'm noticing one thing: of the four major family trees I'm tracking—my husband's paternal and maternal lines and those of my own—the two with mushrooming numbers are the two with DNA matches who actually answer inquiries and emails.

While I don't want to ascribe any supernatural powers to the practical aspects of real-world DNA, this experience puts me in mind of that old saying, "The Lord helps those who help themselves." Only, in this case, it's more like, "DNA test results help those who help themselves."

In my camp, the proof is in two of our four family trees. The ones without much headway—the paternal lines for both my husband and myself—are the ones without much follow through with matches.

My paternal tree is virtually flatlined; I haven't received any new DNA matches since April 7. Thus, the tree itself still stands at 150 names. While one person did contact me—quite the anomaly from my usual experience over the last two years of working with DNA testing—we were snared by that undocumented name change orchestrated by my paternal grandfather back in the early 1900s. Though I appreciated the contact, the connection—wherever it might have been—couldn't possibly have sprung through that paternal line.

My husband's Stevens tree, while edging up oh-so-slowly to a total of 910 names (besting the count two weeks ago by 28), has only gained three more DNA matches to reach a total of 504. Actually, he hasn't even received any further matches since over a week ago.

On the other hand, I keep waiting for one test result in particular to come in: that of a presumed third cousin on my husband's Tully side. Oh, when will that result come in? Two families are waiting with baited breath, wondering whether the science will confirm or reject our hypothesis that our respective Tully forebears belong in the same family tree.

And then, there is the matter of one Ann Kelly of Lafayette, Indiana, who may—or may not—belong to my husband's second great grandmother's family there. Finding out whether Catherine Kelly and Ann Kelly were sisters seems to be easier based on DNA testing than it has been by old-fashioned paper trail, in this case.

Other than those two possibilities, there have been no emails in or out, seeking verified connections. Those DNA matches just sit on the sidelines, idling, until the grunt work kicks in to line up confirming paper trails.

On each of our maternal sides, though, there is much more action to be seen. There is something motivating about finding potential matches via DNA testing: it encourages researchers to pull out their paperwork and see if they can mutually put the puzzle pieces together. There's synergy in teamwork.

Take my husband's maternal side, for instance. With our recent foray into War of 1812 pension papers and the questions about the Ijams family and their connection to both Captain John Whistler and a much younger John Jay Jackson stationed at Fort Belle Fontaine near Saint Louis, there is much motivation to round out that family tree—and bring it forward through all lines of descendants. That exercise is designed to help reach out to others whose DNA match is telling them more than their genealogical paper trail is equipped to reveal.

Small wonder, then, that our Flowers tree now includes 1,452 names, an increase over the last two weeks of 97 names.

Likewise, with the ongoing motivation on my own maternal tree of finding that elusive nexus with my mystery cousins of the "exact match" mtDNA test status, I've been busy with the Davis tree as well. That tree now stands at 4,930 names, up 87 since the last count. It's no surprise, with all those endogamous colonial roots, to see that I am now up to 901 DNA matches, including seven more which arrived in my in-box through this Friday. One of those results promises to lead us to a connection as close as second cousin—another researcher and I are in the process of comparing research notes on that possibility, right now.

With every confirmed DNA match comes the built-in tool of being able to manipulate all the other results. A handy device—at least at Family Tree DNA—is that of being able to sort results based on commonality. Once I can confirm that someone matching my maternal side is specific to a certain branch of that tree, I can sort through the rest of my results to see if any others match up. Even if those people hadn't provided trees—or even cursory lists of surnames—with a common third party's match, I can still tell where he or she lines up in the universe of our respective families.

But only, of course, if I've already confirmed someone else has matched that surname, as well.

That's the importance of finding matches in the midst of those hundreds of DNA test results. It's not so much whether a person lines up as a second—or third, or fifth—cousin, but where in the family constellation I should place them. Each clue confirmed leads me to yet another clue. But I can't really confirm a clue without some teamwork from those others who match me. Those who believe in that teamwork help themselves by helping each other. It's as simple as that. 

Couldn't Have Found This Without Some Help

The one clear line I have, delineating a dividing point before which Captain John Whistler couldn't have married the widow Elizabeth Howard Ijams, comes with a date concerning John Whistler's first wife. As we saw yesterday, some time during John's return trek northward from Newport Barracks to Fort Wayne, he received word that Anna Whistler had died, back at the Kentucky post, on April 25, 1814.

Where John Whistler was, when he emerged from mourning the loss of his wife to decide upon marrying Elizabeth Ijams, I still can't tell. Was it while he was still at Fort Wayne? Could he have returned to Newport Barracks to reclaim family property? Or had his wife died while in transit to her former home at Fort Wayne?

Complicating matters are the conflicting dates given for Whistler's various assignments while in the military. After his honorable discharge in 1815, one other note in Heitman's Register gives us some bearings as to Whistler's whereabouts: on March 5, 1817, he was again appointed to the position of military storekeeper, but this time not at Newport Barracks. This time, he was stationed at Fort Belle Fontaine, the post on the Mississippi River near Saint Louis—the very place where John Jackson was now stationed.

Try as I might, I had not been able to find any record of Elizabeth's second marriage to the Captain—not any more than I had been able to locate records for her daughter Sarah's marriage to John Jackson.

After reviewing my old notes from the first time I had tackled this problem—remember, I had started this project nearly three years ago, just before some major family upheavals—I rediscovered a few things. First, that the wonderful resource of Cheryl Whistler Garrison's online notes came to us, thanks to the research prowess of Intense Guy, who sent me the link back in December of 2012.

I've certainly used that online material several times—truth be told, coveting Cheryl's possession of that letter from a descendant of Nancy Jackson, the daughter of John and Sarah Howard Jackson, which Cheryl had mentioned in her notes. The other day I finally realized, despite the most recent update to Cheryl's notes being back in 2006, that she had included contact information.

I emailed her, hoping that address was still valid. And held my breath.

In the meantime, in reviewing all those old notes and posts, I also came across a comment sent in 2014 from someone identified only as "Sunderland-Ijams Researcher," providing a totally unexpected location for the Whistler-Ijams marriage. Whoever that kind soul is, I'd love to express my gratitude for the help. I would never have suspected that marriage had occurred back in Ohio, but according to that comment, two resources claimed that was so.

The only drawback: Elizabeth's surname was spelled "Yuas."

Think I should buy it?

According to records digitized at FamilySearch, John Whistler and Elizabeth Howard Ijams were married on March 12, 1817 in Fairfield County, Ohio. Elizabeth's name in the margin looks a little bit more like Ijams than it does in the official entry itself, but hers was a surname for which there were historically many name variations, anyhow.

The trip back from Saint Louis , as described in newspaper and book entries published long since the time of its occurrence in the early 1800s, had left me confused about the true date and location of each couple's marriage—both that of widow Elizabeth and Captain Whistler, and her daughter Sarah and John Jackson. Despite all the help I had received back in 2012, it had not yet painted the full picture for me. After all, those articles identified Jackson's bride as only "an Ijams, a sister of..." and not much more. How could I rely on information like that to lead me to the correct dates and places for each of the two marriages?

That's what made it so helpful to hear from another researcher. Someone like Cheryl—with that letter she received which I so wanted to read in its entirety—could perhaps fill in the blanks in my many questions about the various Ijams marriages.

Above: From the Fairfield County, Ohio, Marriage Records, the entry showing the union of John "Whisler" and Elizabeth "Yuas" on the 12th day of March, 1817; image courtesy FamilySearch.org.

Whistler's Wife's Forts

In my quest to discover exactly how—and where—it might have been that John Jay Jackson married Sarah Howard Ijams, I've taken up the parallel track of the courtship of Sarah's widowed mother by Captain (and widower) John Whistler. However each of these women met up with their prospective husbands, sometime around 1818, the one's story cannot be far from the other's.

We've already seen how John Whistler's tour of duty took him to many outposts of the then-western frontier of the United States. Keeping in mind that his wife and family would follow him in some assignments—but due to their nature, not in others—I became curious to see just where John's first wife might have been during his military career.

There are a number of discrepancies concerning genealogical reports of Captain Whistler's first wife. Her name was supposedly Anna Bishop, but whether she eloped with the young John Whistler after his return to England following the War of 1812 (as some stories portray it), or was just someone he met when he settled in Maryland in the newly-formed United States, I can't be sure. Some Whistler family researcher have disputed this story.

Piecing together John Whistler's military history was a chore, considering that various histories of the last century seemed to carry details in disagreement with other reports. One of the best ways, I thought, to trace his wife's whereabouts was to see where her children were born. After all, John and Anna Whistler were the parents of fifteen children. That should have left some sort of genealogical trail.

For much of my behind-the-scenes work on this question, I relied on the footnotes of a family history posted online: that of Cheryl Whistler Garrison. It was through her work on the descendants of John Whistler that I found the 1917 Griswold book, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Some of her other citations led me to resources I otherwise might not have discovered.

Even so, combining Griswold's Pictorial History with Whistler's biographical sketch in Heitman's Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army didn't provide a full picture of the family's whereabouts. Nevertheless, keeping in mind my hunch that where the Whistler children were born would clue me in on where their mother was located, I proceeded as best I could.

Sometime after enlistment in the United States Army, following injuries sustained in battles in the western frontier, John Whistler was sent to Fort Washington to recuperate. It was at that point when his family joined him.

Fort Washington is a location I want to take a moment to review, for that location will figure in our story at a later point. The fort itself was part of the early history of Cincinnati, located on the Ohio River at the mouth of the Licking River. Though the fort is no longer in existence, its location is commemorated by a plaque on Fourth Street in the city, as well as by Fort Washington Way, a corridor of the Interstate that runs through downtown Cincinnati.

As early as 1803, the fort was relocated, just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, to the newly-established Newport Barracks. For the purposes of our story, though, John Whistler was by then long gone, having joined General Anthony Wayne's campaign northward from Fort Washington. It was during that tour of duty that John Whistler became involved in building the first Fort Wayne.

That, however, was not a trip for women and children. Anna and her young children likely stayed behind at Fort Washington. While the Whistlers' older children were likely born in or near Hagerstown in Washington County, Maryland, by the time of the tenth child—Ann, born in 1794—we finally have a way to pinpoint the domestic unit trailing then-lieutenant Whistler. Baby Ann's arrival was at Fort Washington.

By then, however, Ann's father had moved on to other assignments. He was part of the Battle of Fallen Timber somewhere near present-day Toledo, Ohio, less than two weeks before Ann was born at Fort Washington. After the battle, Whistler continued on with General Wayne to the location of the current city of Fort Wayne. After completion of the fort's construction, apparently the family rejoined the newly-promoted Captain Whistler, for the family's thirteenth child, George Washington Whistler, was born there at Fort Wayne in 1800.

There were other children born to John and Anna between Ann and George, of course, but places of birth were not indicated. Then, too, some records indicate that John did not remain at Fort Wayne, but had been reassigned to another fort in the Detroit area upon his promotion in 1797. Whether the family went with him in this in-between time, or stayed on at Fort Wayne is not clear. However, by the time of George's birth, the family was together again, back at Fort Wayne.

By 1802, the family was on the move again, likely following John's transfer to Detroit. We can tell where John's wife was once again, by the proof of the arrival of daughter Caroline Frances on Christmas day, 1802, in Detroit. This was the Whistlers' fourteenth child, followed only by a son born in 1808.

At this point, with the War of 1812 upon them, it is hard to determine where John Whistler's family stayed. A note in the Pictorial History indicates that at some point, the family had stayed on at the fort in Indiana, living in quarters there on the compound and socializing with others of the same circumstances. One woman, a neighbor at the fort, later reminisced of her association with the Whistlers,

The commandant was a man of high character, a linguist and a musician; his wife was a woman of rare charm and force of character.

After the war's conclusion, the dates of John Whistler's assignments again become unclear. He was sent back to Fort Wayne to rebuild the garrison there—according to some reports, either in 1815 or 1816. Or, he was honorably discharged in 1815. Or, he was reassigned in 1815 as military storekeeper at Newport Barracks, the post which replaced the old Fort Washington, across the Ohio River in Cincinnati.

However it happened, one thing we can tell: no matter where Whistler was on April 25, 1814, his wife was back at Newport Barracks in Kentucky. This time, we can't trace her whereabouts based on the arrival of any of her children. The news that reached John Whistler this time—wherever he was stationed—was not happy news. On that day, Anna Whistler had died, and was buried somewhere in Newport, Kentucky.

Above: "Fort Washington as it Appeared about 1810," illustration from Volume 1 of Charles Frederic Goss' Cincinnati, The Queen City, 1788-1912, published by the S. J. Clarke Publishing Company in 1912; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

When Life Teaches You Genealogy

I had a horrible thought the other night while writing yesterday's post. This morning, something happened to change all that...

I've heard insanity defined as doing the same thing over and over again, yet expecting different results.

Perhaps, in my case, it has seemed insane to keep poring over the same people's history, hoping to find the smoking gun evidence to answer my question of how it was that two single women in the northwestern frontier of 1800s Ohio would have the guts to travel yet farther west to an outpost near present-day Saint Louis. After all, no matter which way I attack the research problem, I keep coming up with the same result: no documentation that I can find, yet indications that others are saying with certainty the exact date and location for the wedding of Sarah Howard Ijams (the Ohioan) and John Jay Jackson (the quartermaster stationed at Fort Belle Fontaine).

How did they find those details?

How come I can't find that documentation?

And so, wearyingly, I linger over lists of possible proofs, dawdle amidst details of military campaigns—over and over again, rehashing the obvious in hopes of culling the minutest details that would help narrow the focus of my search. And, hopefully, point me to some indication that, yes, it really was true: this couple did actually get married at the right place and the right time.

Insane, I know. But I keep at it.

So, this morning, I awaken to my daughter asking me if I know how to turn on the shower.

I know: that is an unusual request. After all, showering is one of those activities of daily life that we repeat mindlessly. It seems like insanity to have asked such a question.

But today, we are not at home. I'm actually writing this post from the hotel where our family is staying while my husband attends a business conference.

To set the stage for my daughter's un-insane request (after all, if doing the same thing repeatedly yet hoping for differing results is insanity, wouldn't that make doing the same thing expecting the same results the opposite of insanity?), let me remind you that such mundane details as how a bathroom is designed may remain standardized, say, if you were traveling in the same country as that in which you live. For those who have traveled internationally, however, it is very obvious that the engineering of such customary conveniences may turn out to be quite unexpected. Witness my daughter's travels to Ireland last year, when in her first day's sleep-deprived stupor, she couldn't figure out how to do something as routine as turning on the lights in her hotel room.

I assure you, the same sort of thing happens when encountering foreign bathrooms.

Lest you think I am now traveling in Zimbabwe or Kazakhstan, let me put your mind at rest. I'm really only three hundred miles away from home. Yet I'm staying in a rather nice hotel—an impeccably landscaped property where the management chose to customize their shower design.

This is where the definition of insanity kicks in. Roused from my sleep to answer my daughter's question, I go in to inspect the shower design. As I suspected, it was one of those configurations without separate faucets for cold and hot water. One knob did it all. One customized knob.

That knob and I had quite the pre-coffee morning encounter. I twirled it to call it to action. I got action: water coming out the bathtub spout. No shower.

I pulled it. I pushed it. I rotated the knob further. I tipped it. I pressed it. Like a blind soul trying to locate the braille readout, I worked my fingers along every edge of that knob, as well as along the spigot. All I could find was one streamlined design: no hint of abberations. No clue to reveal the magic button.

It was after the third attempt at doing the same thing—turning the knob the full extent of its range, hoping it would click over to routing the water upwards through the shower head—when I remembered that definition of insanity.

Why would anyone choose to be insane?

I stopped.

But that just killed me. After all, we were going to need to take a shower at some point. So we hit upon a different course. We brilliantly deduced that, in the wee hours of the morning when dutiful conference attendees have to get up and prepare for a full day of education, my husband had surely already fought this battle. He obviously engaged the enemy and overcame him. He certainly smelled shower-fresh when he kissed me goodbye through the sleep-deprived haze.

We were about to text him for the secret password to shower operation when it just overcame me: I was not about to succumb to an unconquered shower head. Insanity or not, I was going to head back to that bathroom and get the best of that customized snobbery. I was going to make that shower submit.

And here was just the point at which I learned that doing the same thing over and over again hoping for different results is not always insanity. This time, something in that streamlined, customized design—something that had gotten stuck the other three times and didn't function quite the way it was supposed to work—sprung loose from its moorings and dropped into place.

It was a small, rectangular steel bar. With gravity—and, obviously, pointed in the right direction—the bar was supposed to drop into place and redirect the water stream from its downward flow to the bathtub upward through the pipes to the shower head. This time, a delicate stream of diffused water emerged from just the spot I had anticipated the other three times I had tried this trick.

As I crawled back into bed, trying to orient myself to the fact that it was now a fresh new day, the experience reminded me of another attempt I had been making—one that I was sorely tempted to re-dub as insanity. It snatched me away from the brink of giving up on this Jackson-Ijams pursuit, gently reminding me that, sometimes, doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results is, in fact, not insanity.

Sometimes, those prissy little customized steel bars that malfunctioned the other three times finally decide to fall right into place.

Whistler's Forts

Just like John Jay Jackson—my husband's fourth great grandfather whose life history we are trying to piece together—Captain John Whistler was a man assigned to build military outposts. It may well be this very propensity that led to Jackson's meeting and, ultimately, marrying Sarah Howard Ijams.

To check this possibility, let's review John Jackson's fort-building itinerary, and then move on to that of the Captain.

When I first began researching John Jackson, one narrative providing a listing of his service was in the book, Pioneers of Perry County, Ohio, by 1830, published by the Perry County Chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society. I had first written about this discovery after my return from a visit to the Allen County Public Library, where I had found the entry. (It was, incidentally, the excerpt that clued me in that my husband's sisters are eligible to join the Daughters of the American Revolution.)

Basically, once John Jackson enlisted in the army as part of the 4th Regiment of U.S. Riflemen, he was eventually sent down river from Pittsburgh to Fort Belle Fontaine near Saint Louis, then up the Mississippi to Prairie du Chien, where, among other assignments, he participated in the building of Fort Crawford.

John Whistler, enlisting in the United States Army much earlier than John Jackson, had also been sent to the western frontier. He was involved in battle there as early as the Harmar campaign in 1790. His first assignment in the area that was to become Fort Wayne—the location at which I suspect these families eventually met—was in 1794.

That was an assignment specifically to build the fort there in Indiana territory. Whistler was not stationed there for long, however, as by July of 1797, he was transferred to Fort Lernoult in Michigan, and then again, by the summer of 1803, he was assigned to participate in building yet another fort.

This time, he was part of the company building Fort Dearborn, which location later became the site of the city of Chicago. All the while, John Whistler was being promoted through the ranks, and by the time of his stay at the new Fort Dearborn, he became its first commandant.

That was far from his final assignment, however. Due to a dispute with a prominent local trader, Whistler was transferred back to Detroit—a fortunate "setback" for him, personally, as it preceded the Fort Dearborn massacre by about two years.

After his service in the War of 1812, John Whistler eventually returned to Fort Wayne—this time, with the charge to rebuild the now-decaying old fort.

Tracing Captain Whistler's military whereabouts, however, was not entirely a straightforward endeavor. Depending on which narrative we follow, we'll see other forts were part of his tour of duty—but they are not clearly specified in reports of his assignments.

Some of these forts, as we'll soon see, have significance to our exploration of the personal micro-history involving John Jackson. Some of these assignments may help us determine the time and location of the Ijams-Jackson nexus. Others may reveal the possibility of a younger William Ijams—likely, Sarah Howard Ijams' brother—being the go-between leading either to the marriage of Whistler to Sarah's widowed mother, or to that of Sarah, herself, and John Jackson.

Exploring further records about Fort Wayne may also provide hints about these connections. Perhaps you remember my stumbling upon the newspaper article, written back in 1990 in Toledo (of all places), reporting on a roleplaying exhibit in which the main characters stationed at Fort Wayne were named John Whistler and William Ijams. Who picked out names like those? That couldn't have been a script writer's choice based solely upon coincidence or artistic whimsy.

Then, too, it may be the records of Fort Wayne—and also, possibly, those of Fort Washington by Cincinnati—will help us more closely place both the times of the Whistler family's interface with the Ijams family and the timeline of Whistler's first wife's death.

Keep in mind: at one point—either at the first, when Whistler enlisted with the U.S. Army, or at a later point—Whistler was posted at Fort Washington, located at Cincinnati. This assignment becomes important when, recalling the custom back then of wives moving along with their husbands during their military assignments, the locations where they stayed as families may reveal possibilities of the families' social connections. I've also ended up tracing Whistler's service based on his children's birth places. Knowing where he was stationed—and when—will become necessary when I need to zero in on details related to our Ijams and Jackson stories.

It may be the timeline of Whistler's first wife's death will help us pinpoint the date and location of his second marriage to the Ijams widow. More than that, due to the possibility of these women—Anna Whistler and Elizabeth Ijams—living with their husbands at these same forts, it may be likely that, long before that second marriage, Elizabeth Howard Ijams already knew John Whistler.

Above: Image of the signature of Captain John Whistler, from B. J. Griswold's 1917 volume, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana; in the public domain.

Tracing a Third Connection

Whistler is a name that has embedded itself in the American consciousness in a small but indellible way. If you have ever heard of the portrait known as "Whistler's Mother," you are more likely to be able to tell me that it was painted by James Abbott McNeill Whistler than that it was officially named, "Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1."

However, for our purposes today, it is not Whistler's mother I'm seeking—nor James Whistler, himself—but Whistler's grandfather, Captain John Whistler.

As we've already seen, all my research contortions, in hoping to discover just how it was that John Jay Jackson in Saint Louis would come to meet Sarah Howard Ijams of central Ohio, have up to this point proved fruitless. However, a chance discovery in the military records from the War of 1812 yesterday led us to someone bearing the exact same name and Maryland whereabouts as Sarah's father, William Ijams.

It just so happened that this younger William Ijams at one point served under Captain John Whistler at Fort Wayne. As far-fetched as it may seem at this point, the connection between this other William Ijams and John Whistler may be the very point leading us to an explanation of how John Jay Jackson met up with William Ijams' daughter, Sarah. Before we can contemplate the possibilities, though—and why they might be useful to our current research mission—we first need to explore what can be discovered about John Whistler, himself.

John Whistler had an interesting military career—actually, in one way, unusual. Although ridden with conflicting reports, his was a story in which most of the inconsistencies do not detract from what we need to know about his career path.

Born about 1756 in Great Britain—most likely, in or near Ulster in Ireland—John Whistler was reported to have run away from home as a teen and joined the British army, serving under General John Burgoyne during the years of what their colonial American enemies might have referred to as the Revolution. With the surrender of the British general at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777, Burgoyne's entire captured army became prisoners of war, including John Whistler.

Though at this point, there are conflicting reports of Whistler's timeline, after the war's conclusion, he eventually married and settled in Maryland.

Before 1790, however, Whistler had joined the army again—only this time, it was the United States Army—and in its service was stationed at various outposts in their western frontier over the course of the next two decades.

With the start of the War of 1812, he served with his company in the First Infantry, under General William Hull, who had charge of the United States Army in the northwest. That particular general had been instructed to prepare for an invasion of Canada, but ended up surrendering to the enemy at Fort Detroit despite outnumbering the British forces, thus putting John Whistler in the ironic position, during his military career, of having become a prisoner of war on each side of America's two early wars with Great Britain—as a British soldier captured by the colonists in 1777, and as an American soldier captured by the British in 1812.

What makes John Whistler of interest to our story, however, is that he served in the capacity of building or rebuilding forts in various locations along the waterways of the then-western portions of the United States—not unlike my husband's fourth great grandfather, John Jay Jackson. Here we stumble upon a possible nexus—not only with this other, so far unidentified William Ijams, but with John Jackson, as well.

There is yet another event that strengthens this possibility—though just as lacking in documentation as the other connections. This one involves the Captain's own bereavement of his wife, Anna, and remarriage, within the next few years, to none other than the widowed wife of the elder William Ijams, Sarah Howard Ijams' father.

So now we have three parties, somehow connecting: Captain John Whistler, various members of the William Ijams family, and John Jay Jackson, the quartermaster stationed at Fort Belle Fontaine near Saint Louis. It will take a closer look at Captain John Whistler's assignments before, during and after the War of 1812 to discern where that connection between the three parties might have occurred.

Above: Illustration of Captain John Whistler from B. J. Griswold's 1917 volume, The Pictorial History of Fort Wayne, Indiana; in the public domain.

Another William Serving

While it appears our William Ijams was too old to serve during the War of 1812, there was another man by that same name whose file showed up in the archives of War of 1812 records. This William Ijams enlisted at Pittsburgh for a period of five years, beginning March 2, 1812.

According to his record, he was a man of dark eyes, dark hair and dark complexion, standing about five feet seven and a half inches tall. William Ijams had been a laborer and farmer, born in Washington County, Maryland. At the point of his enlistment, he gave his age as thirty two, thus giving us an approximate year of birth in 1780.

This William Ijams was assigned to serve in the First United States Infantry under the company's commander, Captain Hugh Moore.

Though this most likely was not our William Ijams, what was interesting about this man with that identical name was the description of his service, as provided in the Records of Men Enlisted in the U.S. Army.

Appointed Corporal May 1/13. Present Sept. 25, Nov. 1, 14, Dec. 20/13, May 1 & Oct. 20/14. D.R. Capt. John Whistler's Co. Feby. 15 & I.R., June 30/15, Sergeant, Present. D.R. 3d U.S. Infy. Oct 1/15. Present, Joined from 1st Infty. Book 570. Discharged from Capt. C. Larrabee's Co. at Fort Wayne, March 2 or 3/17. Term expired. See Pension case.

While I've unfortunately been unable to locate that pension case mentioned in the summary transcribed above, the War of 1812 pension papers are still in the process of being digitized and posted online. Hopefully, this William Ijams' record will soon be accessible—and in a place where I can find it.

Even though this William Ijams was likely not our Sarah Howard Ijams' father, since he also came from Maryland as did our family, there is a possibility of a relationship with our Ijams family. At least, this is a lead to check out.

But more than that is a different detail that catches my eye—that of the location from which he was discharged. And one other name mentioned in this summary of William Ijams' service: that of his captain, John Whistler.

Before I can explain why that connection might be significant, we first need to explore a bit more about just who John Whistler was, something we'll begin with tomorrow's post.