The One Good Thing About Taxes

Put simply: taxes create a paper trail. While they may be painful to pay at the time, participation in that historic event, say, two hundred eighteen years ago can leave us now with enough governmental budget dust to sway a genealogical opinion about an elusive ancestor.

One such ancestor, in my family's case, was the third great grandfather of my mother-in-law, a man by the name of Simon Rinehart. According to reports from other researchers of this family, Simon's daughter Sarah was born in the late 1790s in a state newly-admitted to the Union: the state of Kentucky.

I've always looked askance at such reports of a woman from that time period and place subsequently marrying a man from back in Pennsylvania, and then moving to Ohio to raise their family, but it may turn out that the simple—albeit painful—act of paying one's taxes might just have been the trick to confirm this one part of a crazy eighteenth century itinerary.

Of course, there's no way I could have found any such documentation through dint of will or my own research powers. Only thanks to online search capabilities could I run across any record. But there it was: from a collection at Ancestry.com labeled Kentucky Tax Lists, 1799-1801. Dubbed the "second census" of 1800 Kentucky—itself a brand new state missing that first United States census by the time of its formation—the searchable list is transcribed from original tax lists now in the holdings of the Kentucky Historical Society.

If Sarah Rinehart was indeed born in Kentucky, as census records in the later decades of her life asserted, it was possible that her father's name could be showing on such a tax list. It was worth a look.

The reassuring entry—Simon "Rineheart" in Bracken County, dated 22 November, 1799—confirmed which of two previous self-published genealogies contained the correct information. Not only can I confirm the family's presence in the state, I can now safely rule out the possibility of Sarah's birth farther south in Somerset, Kentucky.

The discovery also sent me scurrying to the FamilySearch wiki to learn all I could about additional resources for Bracken County. To my dismay, I learned that marriage records for this county were only available from 1797 onward; that county would not provide me any information to help confirm or rule out a Kentucky marriage for Sarah's father Simon and his bride, Ann Wiley. My only possibilities for resolving that question would be to look to records from where the family likely emigrated, back in Greene County, Pennsylvania—or hope that the county from which Bracken was carved (either Campbell or Mason counties) would have holdings that predated Bracken County's formation.

Knowing the possible scenario from later census records—with Simon born in Pennsylvania and Ann coming from New Jersey—it seemed unlikely, in that era, that Simon would have traveled from Pennsylvania with an unmarried Ann to set up housekeeping in distant Kentucky. While it seemed the most logical approach to look for their marriage record in Pennsylvania, though, finding the right Simon Rinehart in Greene County, Pennsylvania, would turn out to be a search with challenges of its own.

Above: Yes, it was Bracken County in Kentucky where Sarah Rinehart Gordon's parents had settled—at least for the decade in which her Kentucky birth occurred. Excerpt from digitized image of transcribed tax records from the state of Kentucky courtesy Ancestry.com.

Where Simon Says He Is

When self-published family histories all seem to be screaming different details as fact which couldn't possibly co-exist with the others, the only solution to resort to is that of hunting up the original documentation. With the pursuit of Sarah Rinehart Gordon's family story from the late 1700s, the challenge might turn out to be that records from those pioneers' Kentucky wilderness may not even be in existence. Let's see what we can find.

We've already found one record—thanks to a comment by reader Marian Koalski—listing Sarah's parents as Simon "Rineheart" and Ann Wiley. Still, that was Sarah's own death record from 1876, found in Perry County, Ohio. What about earlier records?

The difficulty with tracing Sarah's earlier years is that this woman apparently didn't stay put in one location. In fact, the narrative of her story's locations makes her sound like a child of a much more modern era. Reports consistently gave her state of birth as Kentucky, not the Ohio location where she was resident as a married woman, according to the census records for 1850, 1860 and 1870. And yet, she married a man—James Gordon—who, with his extended family, moved to Perry County from Pennsylvania, not Kentucky.

Since families back then, if moving at all, seemed to migrate within a group, I wondered whether Sarah's parents—still back in Kentucky at the time, for all I knew—might have moved with their daughter. Since Rinehart was a popular surname in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where the Gordons once lived, it was worth testing that hypothesis.

I took a look at what I could find in the earlier census records for Perry County. While it is a matter of guesswork to determine whether any given head of household in a pre-1850 census is the right individual, at least I could see whether the hypothesis could be ruled out entirely. If no Simon Rinehart in Perry County, Ohio, then I get to nix that theory.

Getting a running jump with the 1850 census for Perry County, it turns out there was a Simon Rinehart listed. Added bonus: living with him was (presumably) his wife, named "Anne." In addition, on the following page, three more names were added to the household: Hannah "Rhinehart," Lucinda, and Charlotte. Of course, given the limitations of the 1850 census, I can't just presume they were daughters of Simon and Ann, but there is that slim possibility.

The 1850 census listed this Simon Rinehart's age as seventy six, giving a potential birth year of 1774. Ann's age was given as sixty eight. While Ann's birthplace was reported to be New Jersey, I was particularly interested to see that Simon's birth location was stated to be Pennsylvania. Despite his daughter's claim to have been born in Kentucky, I happen to know there were a good number of Rineharts in the same Pennsylvania location where Sarah's husband's family once lived: Greene County. At this point, I am envisioning a scenario in which Simon meets and marries his bride, Ann Wiley, in Greene County, rather than any romantic tryst on riverfront real estate in northern Kentucky.

The 1840 census for Perry County, while lacking the detail of the 1850 record, did include a head of household named Simon Rinehart. While the household did including a puzzling young male between the ages of ten and fifteen, it also showed an older man, aged somewhere between sixty and seventy. Encouragingly, the household also included a woman between the ages of fifty and sixty, as well as four younger females, one in each of the age divisions from five to ten, ten to fifteen, fifteen to twenty, and twenty to thirty.

If Simon and Ann reported their ages, in 1850, as seventy six and sixty eight, then the age slots for the 1840 census would match up with their presumed earlier ages of sixty six and fifty eight. With the three younger women, in 1850, aged thirty eight, thirty five and thirty two, respectively, things didn't fall as neatly into place—one would expect three tick marks in the category for ages twenty to thirty, not one—but knowing how iffy age reporting could be in those older enumerations, I can't rule that entry out entirely at this point.

What the 1850 census does give me, though, are three additional names to trace, in my effort to determine whether this Simon and Ann Rinehart in Perry County were parents of—and had migrated with—the Sarah Rinehart Gordon who had claimed she was born, back in the 1790s, in Kentucky.

   

Above: Excerpt from 1850 U.S. Census, showing household of Simon and Anne "Rhinehart" of Perry County, Ohio; digitized image courtesy FamilySearch.org.

Things That Count

For a seemingly never-ending task like "completing" one's family tree, it helps to keep track of progress. Most likely, it's because I need the encouragement that I do a bi-weekly count of how many names have been added to my family trees and our DNA matches at three separate companies. I like the fact that the numbers keep going up—well, everywhere except the DNA match count at 23andMe, where customers apparently didn't take the test to work on their pedigree—and it helps me gauge my progress.

For instance, lately I've been working on a puzzle regarding my mother-in-law's Rinehart ancestors. It's easy to see that is where I put my focus in the last two weeks' work, for her tree has jumped from 12,822 names to 13,209—387 names added in a mere fourteen days. Correspondingly—since I can't keep up a blazing pace like that on all four of the trees I regularly maintain—my own mother's tree simmered on the back burner, adding only twenty six names to bring the new total there to 11,644.

Sometimes, I hit a fluke in my progress—like realizing I had forgotten to add in all my husband's cousins' families—and a quick straightening up can add a tidy increase. For my father-in-law's Irish family, that means adding thirty nine names to boost the total up to 1,392. (I even managed to add one more name to my own father's tree with an accidental discovery of an obituary, so now there are 452 in that tree.)

But it's all on account of those DNA tests that I'm pushing the margins on those four family trees. I can't very well trace the connections to fourth cousins in our DNA results if I don't know the most recent common ancestors—in that case, third great grandparents—that connect us. Given how so few DNA test takers seem to have built their trees to that depth, I also like to build my own trees out in the opposite direction—what people now call "reverse genealogy."

The idea is that, having contacted those DNA matches, we can all work together to fill in the missing parts of the branches in the family tree. Of course, the flip side is that it becomes irritating to see a viable match show up on the list, yet discover the person has no interest in participating in the genealogical side of the process. That is what makes the disappearing match numbers at 23andMe so bothersome for me. I can only imagine the amplified sense of frustration for adoptees who are hoping for a breakthrough with this last-ditch DNA effort.

Perhaps that is the throbbing pain point that AncestryDNA jabbed this past week in issuing their blog post entitled, innocuously enough, "Continued Commitment to Consumer Privacy and Control." Considering the 270 reactions to the Ancestry post—most of respondents, especially adoptees, protesting the change—this is not simply a matter of people disliking the prospect of change.

Perhaps I'll just have to resign myself to seeing shrinking match numbers at two companies now, instead of just one. After all, I lost three more matches this week at 23andMe—in the face of what surely must be an overall increasing count for their business—to total 1,149. Similarly, for my husband, the count at 23andMe was down by eleven to 1,183. With that company, we started the year with 1,198 and 1,256, respectively. The down trend will likely replicate itself at AncestryDNA with this new change.

Hopefully, the other company we've tested at—Family Tree DNA—will not follow suit. There, I have 2,485 matches (up 26 for the past two weeks), and my husband currently has 1,588 (up 20)—with the major holiday sales about to boost the numbers well into the new year.

It's understandable, with the litany of naysayers taking their complaints to the pages of digital news outlets, that direct to consumer DNA testing companies are seeking to pro-actively protect themselves, legally. Privacy is an important issue, and there are no guarantees that current legislation designed to protect consumers in this instance will continue to remain on the books in an unaltered form. Perhaps we don't realize how good we have it, as genealogical researchers, with the current testing atmosphere. If only there were a way to pedal faster.

Now Indexing: More New York Immigration Records

Two weeks ago, FamilySearch.org held one of their Worldwide Indexing Events. With all the hoopla they could muster, they encouraged volunteers everywhere to try their hand at transforming already-digitized historical records into a form allowing computers to do the heavy lifting for us family history buffs still on the hunt for missing ancestors.

Since I already try—hoopla or not—to index at least a batch or two of records each month, I figured I could join in the fun on the designated weekend. Turns out, I was in good company. According to a recent report on the indexing site, nearly eighty thousand people joined me in the effort. Better yet, we all managed to index seven million names and add them to the search results at FamilySearch.org. Not bad for one weekend.

And now, it's November. You know me: my philosophy is to keep working at a goal—take it slow and steady. So, hoopla or not, it's a new month and time to index, once again.

This month, I decided to go back to the same collection I had been working on in October. It was gratifying to see, this time, that the collection—naturalization records for New York—has jumped to ninety nine percent completion from the puny few percentage points it had registered at the beginning of the Worldwide Indexing Event.

I had a few reasons for revisiting that collection. Besides the fact that it had barely started showing participation last month, New York is home turf for me, as it was for my immigrant ancestors. I may seem to be altruistically helping others when I index, but the truth of the matter is that I have some skin in this game. Who knows? I might end up indexing the very record of a relative who has eluded me all these years.

That's not all. Indexing naturalization records, whether in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles, makes me quite aware of the resources which are daily becoming accessible to all of us who use online resources like FamilySearch. I hear from students all the time that they can't find a trace of their immigrant ancestors—while I know from my indexing experiences that, bit by bit, these documents are getting added online, where they are accessible by a lightning-quick search protocol. It does pay to go back and revisit those ancestors' files which had us stymied in the past.

That's not to say that indexing is a snap. This month's session did present some challenges for me. But what I like about the newly reformatted indexing program is that there are help guides at every step of the process, there to answer questions that might pop up while the indexer is in the midst of the task. If you can follow step-by-step instructions, you can do this. If you are unsure, the FamilySearch people have even provided a sample tutorial so people can try their hand at it. Besides, for the less experienced indexers, each batch is rated by level of difficulty; you can choose to start out at a very simple level until you gain confidence.

Since the records I worked on this time were nearly completed, I doubt I'll be able to work on this same record set next month, but I'm sure I can find an immigration-related batch from another city. There's always more to work on, whether in the United States or another country, whether in English or another language. The sheer vastness of the digitized holdings at FamilySearch.org never ceases to amaze me.

It Pays to Look Twice

I'm wrestling with the question—again, after a twenty year hiatus—of just how my mother-in-law's second great grandmother could have been born in Kentucky but grew up in Pennsylvania and possibly got married there, then raised her family in central Ohio. All, of course, occurring before the 1850 census could shed much light on the family situation.

I'm not particularly fond of relying on the older census records predating the expanded data included with the 1850 enumeration. Granted, even that record was a stripped-down version, compared to later enumerations. Still, I'll take what I can get—and when it comes to families fond of re-using the same names as were appropriated in the previous generation, it's nice to see a well-rounded snapshot of just which Simon Rinehart family we're talking about.

Of course, when I last was tackling the issue of the origin and parentage of this particular second great grandmother—Sarah Rinehart, wife of James Gordon of Greene County, Pennsylvania—I was doing it, well, over twenty years ago. Things were different then. While I couldn't access many records online for Greene County, Pennsylvania, it just so happened that the Gordon family's home in later years—Perry County, Ohio—was a mere hour's drive from the home of relatives whom I visited nearly every year.

You just can't pass up chances like that for some hands-on research. I'd find myself wandering the cemeteries of Somerset, stalwart husband and captive daughter in tow, or visiting the county courthouse in New Lexington to peer through old records.

At that time, the courthouse holdings were accessed in the form of typewritten indices, by type of record: birth, marriage, death. Because of the index set up, records were listed alphabetically. It occurred to me, given the distance traveled to even get to Ohio from my west coast home, that it might be more expeditious to have the clerk photocopy not one, but every record for the surnames I was seeking. Thus, I received copies of all the pages for the Flowers surname, for Gordon, for Metzger, and for Snider. Once at home, I could glean the basic information and insert it into my database at my leisure.

That seemed like a viable plan at the time. It spared me the agony of realizing I might have missed something, once back in California—and then have to either mail away for the missing piece, or wait (and remember) for the next year's trip.

Once entered into my own records, the index copies were filed out of sight and out of mind. Meanwhile, twenty years slipped by, and it never occurred to me that there might be something more to be discovered in ensuing additions to online holdings. After all, I had the dates I was seeking, attached to the right names. With the exception of those few frustrating name-afters, where I couldn't determine which of two cousins with the same name, for instance, was the correct one to enter into my records, I considered the task complete.

What I was reminded of, thanks to reader Marian Koalski's comment following yesterday's post, is that there is always more that can be discovered. We just need to remember to go back and check the holdings at our favorite repositories.

Because what I had used, twenty years ago, was the available index to the death records, it only supplied me with a few key data points—but not all that were available in the original record. My mistake was assuming that there was nothing more in the original ledger than was collected for the indexed summary.

Apparently, taking a look at the link Marian shared yesterday, I saw there was just enough more to be quite key in assisting me to step back one more generation in the case of our Sarah Rinehart Gordon. In addition to what I already knew—name, date of death, confirmed state of birth—the original record provided confirmation that Sarah Gordon's parents were Simon "Rineheart" and Ann Wiley.

Granted, there are many times in which family members, under stress in the event of a loved one's passing, blurt out the wrong name in reporting the deceased's parents. I'll keep searching for a corroboration of that Wiley for Sarah's mother's maiden name. But it was nice to see this record—in the very place where I thought I had already gotten all that was there to be had—providing documentation of just who might be peopling the previous generation in this family history.

Above: Parents' names for Sarah Rinehart Gordon as found in 21 May, 1877, entry for Record of Deaths, Probate Court for Perry County, Ohio; digitized image courtesy FamilySearch.org.

Picking Up the Pieces

After surviving a month of earnest effort in my Fall Cleanup project, I've left a scattering of family history notes in my wake. That, of course, reminds me of my duty to clean up the mess I've unearthed in the process.

In particular, I've been reminded that there are two family branches for which I'd like to find some resolution. Both of them are from my mother-in-law's line. One was the Snider family, a name so common in the state of her roots—Ohio—as to make conclusive closure a near impossible feat. The other—and the one I'm more likely to pursue right now—was the Rinehart line.

Where the Rinehart surname entered into my mother-in-law's line was at the point of her second great grandmother, Sarah Rinehart. Sarah, of course, was a mystery—otherwise, why would I be writing about her?—and thus she's been left unattended, a name with very little detail, on our family tree.

I do know a few things about her, of course—and by using the word "know," I mean that I've managed to find some documentation on these few facts. Details about the end of her long life were easier to come by than those of her origins.

Like most of my mother-in-law's forebears, for instance, Sarah found her way to that rural enclave in central Ohio—Perry County—where her progeny eventually saw their genetic material interwoven with that of many other families. Thus, when I tackled this research problem back twenty years ago, I had plenty of online company with whom to commiserate over our collective lack of progress.

Because Sarah died in Perry County in 1876, she could conveniently be found in the three previous census enumerations. Notwithstanding the error in the Find A Grave entry for her year of birth—"in the 80th year of her age" would not yield the 1786 date rendered in her memorial—each of those census records seem to provide a similar record of her birth, which helps. The enumeration closest to the date of her death showed her birth to be about 1797. The 1860 census concurred, though the 1850 census placed it at 1798. Still, close enough.

What was interesting was that all three enumerations indicated her place of birth as Kentucky. Not unusual, you might think, for a pioneer family of that era. The difficulty, though, was that she married a man—James Gordon—who was supposedly a native of Greene County, Pennsylvania.

Of course, it doesn't help that I've not been able to unearth any record of the couple's marriage. Still, their oldest child—son Basil Albert Gordon, born in 1818—was consistently reported to have been born in Pennsylvania, as were the next six children. Only with the arrival of namesake daughter Sarah in 1832 was the birth reported as occurring anywhere else—in this case, in Ohio, not Kentucky.

In fact, the extended Gordon family once seemed to all live in Greene County, Pennsylvania. Perry County families being Perry County families, it may come as no surprise to learn that my mother-in-law's family had more than one Gordon in their roots, and this other Gordon, as well, hailed from Greene County, Pennsylvania.

My primary question, then, has always been: how did a Gordon from Greene County, Pennsylvania, end up deciding to marry a woman from Kentucky?

You would think, with a surname like Rinehart, that that would be an easy question to answer, but that has not been the case. For one thing, immigrant ships belching up endless streams of refugees from the embattled German Palatinate included many claiming that very surname—Rinehart—or its various spelling permutations. Secondly, earlier family histories—as we researchers twenty years ago discovered while compared notes—included family legends which may or may not be verifiable. Some of those stories were along the lines of "there were three brothers...."

Included in some of those earlier self-published histories were assertions that Sarah was daughter of a Simon Rinehart and Ann Wise—while still others insisted the mother's name was Wiley. One reported that Sarah was born in a place in Kentucky called Somerset—which is now in Pulaski County, deep in the southern portion of the state—and another claimed her birthplace was in Bracken County (which makes more sense, considering its original borders extended north to the Ohio River).  Sometimes, I wondered if those narratives were even talking about the same Sarah Rinehart as mine.

Since my Fall Cleanup has unearthed a file well over an inch thick with Rinehart resources and communication, my first step will be to review what others had shared about their research findings. I can consider that material to be trailblazing efforts; with today's online resources, it will be fairly easy to confirm—or reject—those twenty year old theories.

I suspect I may be tracing an immigration pattern for the proposed Rinehart families. Perhaps they started out from Greene County to settle in a promising area in Kentucky—then, seeing it, decided it made more sense to return home to Pennsylvania. While it may seem like a disjointed story to us from this two-hundred-year-removed perspective, it likely was a narrative that made sense to those entangled in the problem at the time. Hopefully, I'll be better equipped with this go-round to discover a timeline that makes sense to us, as well.

       

Day Thirty-Two: Photo Finish

It all ended with "Y" for Y2K. It's a good thing there was no "Z." I really needed to be finished. I suspect you needed it, too.

Projects like a Fall Cleanup can be wearying. The tedious multiple decision points reassert themselves all too often. In the face of indecision, that resolve to steadily advance can strip gears—or at least wear some tread off the tires of progress.

To think that my file cabinet was crammed full of printed copies of twenty year old emails was sobering. Running into a folder still in my possession labeled "Y2K" gives you an idea how badly needed this errand had become.

Granted, much of the information was, at one point, valuable material to people groping blindly in the ether of the newly-minted online genealogical scene. As research opportunities rapidly unfolded over the years, who wanted to stop tap dancing long enough to review—and toss—the already-filed tidbits which might, by then, have become stale-dated. I certainly didn't.

Looking back at this month of re-discovery—hey, I had that in my files?!—drew out some moments to reflect on the vastly changed state of online genealogical research, sure, but it also reminded me of a kinder, more cordial time in which fellow researchers of all stripes, professional or avocational, responded to each other as colleagues pursuing a fascinating mission. It was a time when fellow researchers aired their well-reasoned discussions publicly on the pros and cons of a given theory of ancestry, in the hopes of mutually assisting others pursuing the same family lines.

This month of the Fall Cleanup also reminded me of the friendships forged during that process, and caused me to wonder whether any of those researchers with whom I shared extensive discourses on our mutual ancestors might still be out there. Are they still researching? Did they ever find the answers to the questions that frustrated their progress? I'm tempted to try and contact some of them and see if there is a twenty-years-afterwards story to be found. After all, these were—and still are, hopefully—all distant cousins. Sadly, I already know some of the seniors whom I wrote back then are no longer here. But for those of us who were then young moms juggling home life (and possibly a simultaneous career) while pursuing our genealogical passions, there is a chance that we can still reconnect.

There is, of course, more work to do on my file cabinet. Yes, I cleared out the bottom drawer and then conquered the top drawer full of genealogical treasures, but there are two other drawers filled with material yet to be vanquished. Those two drawers, however, belong to different compartments of life—slices of life outside the realm of genealogy, where I put on such masks as home educator or nonprofit organization newsletter editor. No role was as satisfying as the one which was my first childhood call and most lasting heart's desire: to preserve the stories of the family members who've gone on before me.

I suspect routing those other two drawers won't be as taxing as the ordeal of the last month. While there might have been some sentimental attachment to a first newsletter published for a fledgling organization, that comes in a distant second to the passion of family history; it will be easy to chuck what needs to be tossed there. I won't feel the need to talk about it, pine over the times long gone, or mourn the passing of a connection, so don't expect a blow-by-blow report on progress.

Eventually, I'll face the need to make decisions about what to back-fill in the spaces now liberated from their twenty-year-long burden. I have more genealogical files in storage which need to see the light of day—and face their day in "court." But I doubt I'll either substitute one set of files for another or create a whole new stash with the research I accomplish in the future. Times are changing and the research methods of the early twenty first century are already a far cry from those of the 1990s—who's to say how things will change in the next twenty years? I certainly won't want to create the next era's monster mess.

Looking back, it was probably a good experience to go through all these files. From nostalgia to exhaustion to sheer grit, the month evoked a wide range of emotions—but these were all feelings that probably should have been dealt with about fifteen years earlier than they were, if I weren't so busy living the life I led back then. There is always something to face, however, and there is no time like the present to get a job done. I guess this October was just the time for me to do it.

   
Above: "Boulevard Clichy in the Snow," 1886 oil on canvas by French Impressionist Paul Signac; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.