So Much More to This Story

 

Do you ever look for clues when you are stumped on a stubbornly-hidden ancestor in your family tree? Sometimes when I do that, I run into unexpected details that tell me there may be so much more to the ancestor's story than what I was expecting. When it comes to Clinton Metzger, the supposed son of Joseph Metzger, that is exactly what I'm beginning to think.

For one thing, census records for Joseph's household do not support the notion that Clinton was his son. Take the 1880 census entry for then-sixty year old Joseph and his family in Knox County, Ohio. Joseph, born in Pennsylvania to immigrant parents—as we already know, since Joseph's father was my mother-in-law's ancestor—was by then raising five children along with his wife, Rachel. Also in the household was his step-daughter, Mary Houck, whose very appearance in that census tells me that her mother's entry in the 1857 Knox County Metzger marriage record was incorrect in labeling her as "Miss" Rachel Houck. See? There's always more to the story than what appears in one single document.

Those entries in the 1880 census for the five Metzger children—Joseph, Cornelius, George, Joanna, and Albert—provide ages, therefore approximate years of birth to guide us. Thus, we can figure that the junior Joseph was born approximately in 1859, Cornelius in 1861, George in 1863, Joanna in 1866, and Albert in 1871.

Notice, however, that there was no mention of any son named Clinton. Could he have been a son born after the 1880 census? Possibly. Or a son born right after the Metzger marriage and out of the house by 1880? Perhaps. But at this point, there is no sign of any Clinton in this Metzger household.

Incidentally, flipping to the 1900 census where Clinton Metzger appears with his own family, the record shows that he was born about June of 1860, giving enough wiggle room to fit within the approximate birth years of the five in the 1880 Metzger household.

There are, however, other concerning signs popping up when we look on the Clinton side of the equation. Take, for instance, Clinton's own marriage license application in 1881. Scrawled across the header containing his name and that of his bride, Ida Bell, was the admonishment, "Don't publish for 3 weeks." Why? There's surely a story there, as well.

Yet, on the other hand, Clinton's 1900 census entry provides the promising sign: his dad was born in Pennsylvania and his mom in Ohio, just like our Joseph and Rachel.

One sure way to settle this puzzle might be to locate Joseph Metzger's will. Unless there had been a terrible falling out between father and son, surely Clinton's name would appear among the legatees, wouldn't it? Unfortunately, it appears that when Joseph died in 1885—perhaps unexpectedly at age sixty six—he left no will.

That, however, is not the end of the story, for his widow Rachel made sure to leave a will of her own before her passing in 1912. Her will, though simple and direct, was drawn up in 1893, several years before her death, and ultimately included a codicil providing more detail on the daughter from her first marriage. In that document, we can easily glean the names of all her surviving Metzger children: James, Joseph, Cornelius, George, Joanna, and Albert.

No Clinton.

Now what?

The Quest for Clinton's Roots

 

Finding an unexpected member of one's family can be unsettling, especially for those of us who have spent years trying to get the details right about our ancestors. Discovering that that newfound relative has descendants who now are on our DNA match list calls for a much closer examination. That's what I'm into now, with the discovery that some descendants of a man named Clinton Metzger claim to be cousins—albeit distant ones—of my husband. Let's see what's already known about this Clinton Metzger so we can delve deeper into his roots. At some point, hopefully the nexus will appear. But first, you know the rules of genealogy: start with what you know.

Here's what I "know" about Clinton Metzger, based on some easy-to-find documentation. Buried in the same county where he made his home—Delaware County in Ohio—Clinton Metzger's headstone made it clear that the man, who died in 1933, was born in 1860. A family man, he sometimes went by the nickname "Clint"—as in the 1900 census—or simply by his initials, C. N. Metzger. Married in 1881 to the former Ida Mae Bell, he was father of six children—three sons and three daughters.

But where he came from or who his parents were, that is the questions. Some helpful researchers years ago had posted burial information for all Delaware County cemeteries on the sorely-missed old website, RootsWeb, on which list Clinton Metzger did make an appearance. But for the column labeled "father," the slot next to Clinton's name was frustratingly blank.

How, then, no less than 104 other Ancestry.com subscribers were able to assert that Clinton's father's name was our Joseph Metzger is beyond me. I can find no substantiation for that claim. 

Perhaps, though, that simply means we'll need to dig further to find an explanation.

Image above from the search function at Ancestry.com, the result of selecting "Family Trees" for the search term, "Clinton Metzger."

Too Close for Comfort

 

What do you do when someone else's research suggests a family connection that hasn't shown up in your own records? That DNA match I've found whose tree claims an ancestor named Clinton Metzger has introduced a nagging problem. As it turns out, this may be a problem which is too close for comfort, at least if I'm assuming this is a case of mistaken identity.

First of all, I have no record of any Metzger by that name, Clinton, in my mother-in-law's tree, and yet someone—wait, make that three someones—matching my husband claims such an ancestral name. What's the explanation?

I thought the best approach to dealing with this would be to face the problem head on: look more closely at the details known about this Clinton Metzger. So today—and, who knows, maybe for the rest of the week—we'll take a look at what can be found online.

Having decided to launch into that question, I ran across some interesting details. Let's just say those details don't exactly help the situation; they may actually compound the problem. Keep in mind that in the background, I'm slowly chugging through generation after generation of Metzger descendants of my mother-in-law's founding immigrant Michael Metzger.

Right now, I'm nearly completed with the line of Michael's son Joseph. My current focus is the line of Joseph's son James. James' middle child, a daughter named Florence, married someone by the name of Delbert Ulrey, a farmer from Morrow County, Ohio. Florence's 1908 wedding took place in Delaware County, the next county over from Morrow County, the same county where she had been born. All this was easily gleaned from their marriage license application.

Though Ulrey may seem like a less-common surname, I hadn't counted on the number of times that name showed up in documents, incorrectly spelled as Ulery. Even in their own application, handwriting of the clerk who completed the form made the surname appear to be spelled that alternate way, though looking at Delbert's own signature, it was clear that the spelling should have been Ulrey, not Ulery.

Though the newly married couple, Delbert and Florence, spent the rest of their life in Morrow County, connections with Delaware County remained. I hadn't counted on just how much those connections did remain, however, until I started looking at records for Clinton Metzger, this DNA match's supposed connecting ancestor.

Just looking at Clinton Metzger's Find a Grave memorial pointed out that sticking point right away. Clinton Metzger—at least, according to Find a Grave volunteers—had a daughter named Ida May. Ida May, in turn, married someone in Delaware County by the name of Ulery.

Yes, Ulery. Check it out for yourself on the headstone for the couple. Ida May married someone named Ernest Gale Ulery.  Not Ulrey.

So now I have Florence Metzger marrying Delbert Ulrey, and Ida May Metzger marrying Ernest Ulery, all in Delaware County. Granted, the two brides were eleven years apart in age, but even in a place the size of Delaware County—twenty seven thousand people at the time—the place was small enough for some people to have noticed, and possibly confused, the two family names.

With that caution in mind, we'll proceed even more carefully as we begin to explore just who that Clinton Metzger might have been, and if—or how—that man connected with my mother-in-law's Metzger family.

Looking for the "F.A.N. Club"

 

Where are those family and friends, associates, and neighbors when you need them? 

I'm referring to those genealogically-supportive clues, collectively appearing as the "F.A.N. Club" of our elusive ancestors. These were the family members and other friends and associates who traveled with that hard-to-trace immigrant ancestor from their homeland to their new life in America. In the case of my mother-in-law's second great-grandfather Michael Metzger, it appears that his F.A.N. Club numbered, um, zero.

I tried an experiment to see if any other family members might have traveled with him from the Old Country, wherever that might have been. Since Michael, according to later census records of his children, must have arrived in Ohio before the birth of his son John (a.k.a. Johann) in 1824, I thought I'd look for signs of other Metzgers in the subsequent census.

Try as I might, I could not find one Metzger in the 1830 census in Ohio. Not even our Michael and his own family. The reason? Apparently even in German-speaking Ohio, nobody knew just how to spell a surname like Metzger. This gives me pause to consider the supposed German "native tongue" of his son John who, if you remember, ended up moving away from family to settle in a German-speaking town in Indiana. Perhaps his wasn't such a familiar-sounding dialect of German, after all.

As it turns out, Michael was indeed in the 1830 census, under spelling that looks more like "Meichar" than Metzger. Granted, I'm looking at a digitized version of a nearly two-hundred-year-old document, faded ink and all. Some of the lighter strokes of the handwriting likely have faded into oblivion. Perhaps the original was written more like "Metchar." Granted, that was close...sort of.

But what about looking for any other Metzgers in 1830 Ohio? If we can trust that the rest of the state got the spelling right, there were seventeen other families that I could find, at least at Ancestry.com—but none of them living close enough to Michael's Perry County for me to be confident of a connection.

Perhaps that supposed F.A.N. Club that Michael traveled with on his journey to America might have been the relatives and acquaintances that settled with him at his first stop in Pennsylvania. After all, two of Michael's children—Joseph and Mary Ann—were born somewhere in Pennsylvania before the family's final stop in Ohio.

I tried the same approach, looking at the 1820 census for mentions of Metzgers in Pennsylvania. This time, there were thirty nine Metzger possibilities according to Ancestry.com, including one named Michael in Lancaster County—but not so fast here: this Michael remained in Pennsylvania, buried in the Mennonite Cemetery. Definitely not our Catholic Michael Metzger, for sure.

Granted, many documents from that era may not have been included in records online. Some may not even be in existence anymore. Learning more about church records in Pennsylvania will be helpful to identify just where in Pennsylvania the family had briefly settled. Perhaps, along the way, it will become clearer just who the Metzger family's traveling companions might have been—and where they all came from.

In the meantime, it will be back to building out the Metzger family lines for DNA that I'll continue working on. I've still got to figure out how our Catholic line crossed paths with that mystery Clinton Metzger of those DNA matches. 

. . . Then the Hard Work

 

It was supposedly the pitiable character Eeyore in A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh who advised, "Brains first, then hard work." Normally, I'd consider that sound advice. Today, after a weekend of frustrating research non-results, I think I'm now stuck on the second part: I'm on the "then hard work"—no brains included.

After stumbling upon several DNA matches who claim relationship to my mother-in-law's family through a line which includes a non-Catholic Metzger, I've been on a hunt to find where this mystery Clinton Metzger might have fallen in the family tree. Though the centiMorgan link is admittedly small, there is a possibility that the match is correctly placed in this line. But where? If Clinton Metzger was truly these DNA cousins' ancestor, his parents weren't who those cousins said they'd be.

And so, I begin speed genealogy, filling out the family tree, one Metzger at a time. While I haven't yet found the answer, I have run across one Metzger descendant who (gasp) left the faith for a wedding ceremony in a Methodist church. It is quite possible I may find more.

This search involves a routine process of moving through each line of descent, step by step. Take one child of Michael Metzger—right now, I'm working my way through the children of Michael's son Joseph Metzger—and methodically register every document where that child's name is found, then repeat the process for each of that child's children. Move down the line, step by step, from oldest to second-born and beyond. Repeat the process for each of those children, down to the present day. When that list is completed, go back to the top and advance to the next child of Joseph, beginning the downhill slide through the generations once again.

Tedious? Yep. But thorough. When I'm done—don't hold your breath; this may take a week or more—I'll have all the children of Michael Metzger's son Joseph documented in my mother-in-law's tree. And then I'll move on to the next child, who at this point has been listed as Mary Ann Metzger, born in Pennsylvania at the end of 1822, just before the family moved on to Perry County, Ohio.

I anticipate gathering another two or three hundred names through this process. This is the kind of hard work which allows me to spot DNA matches far more easily than at the first, when my husband tested back in 2014 and I sat there, stumped and awash in the flood of the thousand-plus names of strangers who were supposed to be kin. There may be brains in genetic genealogy, but for me, it's really the "hard work" part that makes DNA testing workable.

Tracking the Metzger Lines

 

When I've worked on my mother-in-law's Metzger line in the past, I always could count on the numbers for my biweekly count ratcheting upwards fairly quickly. Why? Almost all of her relatives were Catholic; in the past, that could mean lots of large families to track. 

Now, however, it seems a struggle to document some of the branches of her second great-grandfather Michael Metzger's tree. The documentation just doesn't seem to be there. Perhaps that is a combination of Michael's being a newly-arrived immigrant plus a time frame occurring before listing household names became the routine with the 1850 census.

Still, in the past two weeks, from records in Michael's adopted home in Perry County, Ohio, and the Indiana location of some of his descendants, I've managed to document 301 more names in my mother-in-law's tree. That means I now have 35,346 individuals connected with her, up to the sixth cousin level for DNA matching purposes.

Though I still am unable to push back another generation on this Metzger line—after all, second great-grandparents is not that far back in time—I am working on completing each line of descent while I probe for possible connections to the past. Remembering the F.A.N. Club principle, reaching out to distant cousins for clues, and inspecting all documents for overlooked information have been my next steps. So far, no leads. But we keep on researching, anyhow. The answer is out there somewhere.

Where They Came From

 

Anyone who is researching immigrant ancestors eventually wants to know where they came from. Naturally, since I've been working on my mother-in-law's Metzger line, I'd like to know, too. But even though Michael Metzger and his wife Apollonia were only her second great-grandparents—so close!—that detail is tantalizingly just outside my reach. And out of the reach of others, too, apparently.

Since I'm the nosy type, I thought I'd hop over to the universal-tree website FamilySearch.org to see if anyone there had come up with the magic answer which seems to evade me. There was a spot in their tree for Michael Metzger, of course, but whether that entry included any pertinent documentation was another matter.

Like my own approach, I see on the FamilySearch entry that apparently others have also depended on the information provided by Michael's children. His son Henry's death certificate—with information provided by Henry's daughter Manaleta—claims that Henry's parents were born in Switzerland. No city provided, I noted, though inexplicably, the FamilySearch tree also identifies a specific location in Switzerland: Möhlin in the canton of Aargau. No documentation is there to back up that assertion, though a quick peek at the FamilySearch catalog shows several entries for records and information from that canton.

Of course, many of those library holdings are in German, not English—but what would you expect? This might be more of a challenge to research than I was anticipating. If, that is, Michael and Apollonia really did come from the Aargau canton in Switzerland. Maybe they didn't.

Thinking of any other way to determine whether Michael Metzger and his family traveled with any others from their hometown to Ohio, I recalled that Perry County tax records were available online for the time period around their arrival. The Metzgers were in Perry County in time for the birth of their son John in the summer of 1824. The closest tax record I can find to that date is the county's listing of personal property from 1831. Michael is the only Metzger listed in that year's alphabetical entries. If he did travel with neighbors to Ohio, they did not share his surname.

While records from that early time period may be few or incomplete, I'm holding out hope that there is a way to verify those statements about Michael's ancestral home—or at least the names of his parents. His marriage and the birth of at least three of his children should also carry the marks of his origin—somewhere. It's just a matter of continuing the search in more directions.