Doing the Numbers

In working through any pedigree chart, we start from our current era and record each preceding generation as we progress backwards in time. When the chain of names, dates, and events is broken by an unprecedented move—such as emigration from one's hometown to a new frontier—it can have a disrupting effect. A situation like that leaves us without any toehold to grasp and pull us farther into the deep recesses of our family's history.

Such is the case with my current situation. I'm still trying every which way I can to flush out clues on just who the parents might have been of my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, Simon Rinehart from Greene County, Pennsylvania. Finding a relative in his new hometown of Perry County, Ohio, I've grabbed that clue as a possibility to lead me further backwards in the story of that Rinehart line. Yet, even there, this backwards direction is keeping me stumped for one specific reason: at first glance, the numbers don't seem to add up.

There is another direction that can be taken, however. Noticing that one Isaac Brown—the name which kept showing up in my mother-in-law's ancestors' wills—had married a woman from the extended Rinehart family in Perry County, we can follow that line backwards to see what can be found. After all, if the hint found in a Find A Grave memorial for Cassa Rinehart Brown is correct, we now know her parents were William Rinehart and Delilah Inghram. Perhaps tracing the connections with those two people can reveal a clue worth following.

Fortunately, William and Delilah have their names mentioned in some of the old biographical sketches and history books of the 1800s. Whether those recountings of pioneer families are entirely correct, I can't yet say, but we are about to take a look.

According to two different renderings of the family history in the Howard Leckey book, The Tenmile Country and Its Pioneer Families, Delilah Inghram was the daughter of Arthur Inghram and his wife, whose name was alternately spelled Olive or Allive Smith.

Fortunately, the Tenmile Country book spells out dates for Arthur Inghram and for the earliest of his children. Thus, we learn that Leckey identified Arthur's birth as some time in February of 1746, and his death, according to his headstone in the Inghram family cemetery, as October 28, 1834. We also can see that his oldest son, William, was born November 24, 1778, followed by daughter Margaret in 1780. After that, some of the subsequent children of are only mentioned by name, followed by a date of death, not birth.

By the time the Tenmile Country gets around to mentioning Arthur's eighth child—Delilah—Leckey only mentions her name and that of her husband, William Rinehart. All we can deduce is that Delilah must have been born after 1787, for that is when her next-oldest sister Cassandra arrived. Thankfully, we do have a cross-check on Delilah and William's marriage in the mention of her married name in her father's 1834 will.

Approaching this family tree from the opposite direction, we can glean a few numbers from the Tenmile Country accounting of the Rinehart family tree. William Rinehart was son of Thomas Rinehart and Hannah Inghram. If you begin to notice those same surnames swirling around in repeated manner, I warn you to get used to this: the Tenmile Rineharts and Inghrams intermarried on several counts throughout the generations.

William Rinehart's father Thomas was apparently a "junior." Leckey recounts that Thomas the son was born around 1746, and that he married Hannah—daughter of William Inghram, senior—around 1774. Thomas and Hannah's oldest, son John, was born in 1779, followed by son Thomas (the third) in 1783. By the time Leckey gets around to mentioning son number three—that would be our William—he runs out of dates. Leckey mentions only that William Rinehart married Delilah Inghram, daughter of "Arthur and Alive (Smith) Inghram."

Thus, our William Rinehart arrived in this world—somewhere in what was then Washington County, Pennsylvania, in its earliest, frontier years—after his brother's birth in 1783. Census records for the William Rinehart we found in Perry County, Ohio, for 1850 and 1860, estimate his birth in 1789 or 1785, respectively.

And then, we have Simon Rinehart. Where he fits in the Rinehart picture in Greene County, Pennsylvania, I still don't know. How he was related to the man he named as executor of his estate—Isaac Brown, William Rinehart's son-in-law—I also don't know. That Simon was born around 1774 is supported by the ages indicated in several census enumerations in both Greene County and Perry County, right up to the last one before his death.

From the proximity of their two properties in Perry County, or from the connection between William's son-in-law and Simon's relatives, you'd think it reasonable to assume that Simon and William might have been brothers. But if you were to rely on the genealogy published in the Leckey account of Tenmile Country, you'd be hard pressed to find a Simon Rinehart who fit the descriptions of those with the same name in Leckey's book.

Seems like we are just about to get up to head-banging time.

Looking that Gift Horse in the Mouth

It's all very well and good when we receive an unexpected gift of the names of a long-deceased relative's parents, but despite such serendipity, it's best to look that gift horse in the mouth. Unsourced recommendations can turn out to be not much more than hearsay.

So it is with the volunteer-added note on Cassa Rinehart Brown's Find A Grave memorial about the names of her parents. We originally stumbled upon Cassa's name, if you recall, by following up on a clue from the wills of two related men in Perry County, Ohio. That clue was the repeated appearance of the name Isaac Brown; as it turns out, his wife Cassa was a Rinehart, married in Perry County in 1837.

My first question, in making that discovery, was whether the stated parents—Cassa's parents were said to be "William and Lila Ingram Rinehart"—actually lived in Perry County, Ohio, at the time of Cassa's wedding. Being that the year of her marriage pre-dated the conveniently more-detailed census returns of 1850 and beyond, census records would not be entirely helpful, but it was reassuring to see that there was, indeed, a William Rinehart resident in Perry County at the time of the census immediately after her wedding.

The 1840 census showed this William living in Pike Township, which, if you recall, was the same location in which our main interest, Simon Rinehart, also owned property, as well as the Isaac Brown whose name kept appearing in my mother-in-law's ancestors' wills.

In addition, while William Rinehart could possibly be a common name—in other words, with the likelihood that there could be more than one person with that same name in the same region—one headstone in Perry County could very well be his. Situated at the First Methodist Church cemetery in New Lexington—not only county seat for Perry County, but also located in Pike Township—a burial for someone named William Rinehart was marked January 18, 1869. Though the Find A Grave memorial does not include a photograph of his headstone, a volunteer there noted that the marker was inscribed, "aged 82y 9m 12d."

Though that cemetery Find A Grave entry did not include a memorial for Delilah Inghram Rinehart, there was a memorial there for someone named Lucinda Rinehart, which, as the memorial noted, was inscribed at her 1844 death to say she was the daughter of "William and Delia Rinehart."

If this William were indeed one and the same as Cassa Rinehart Brown's father, we would be quite fortunate, for we should be able to find his entry in both the 1860 and 1850 census records. And sure enough, in that same Pike Township in 1860, there was a listing for a seventy-five-year-old farmer named William Rinehart—and in his household was a sixty-six-year-old woman named "Delila." Added bonus: both were born in Pennsylvania.

So, if the William we've found in those two references turns out to be the same as Cassa Rinehart Brown's father, that puts his own birth around 1785 or 1786. That, of course, is reasonable for a father's age at the time of Cassa's own birth in 1816. What doesn't work, in this massive relative-grab of nested family tree building, is William's birth in light of Simon Rinehart's own birth around 1774. Whatever the relationship between Isaac Brown, the man who served as Simon Rinehart's executor, and Simon himself, it wasn't so clear-cut as that of brothers-in-law—if, that is, we have the right names and dates for the Rinehart relatives we've already discovered.

The down side to all this is that I wasn't able to find William or Delilah in the census record for 1850 in Perry County, despite their presence there in Pike Township in both 1840 and 1860. Finding them in 1850 could possibly outline the names of other Rinehart relatives so that we could better identify this branch of the extended family. It seems the more we look, the more jumbled the record becomes.

A Little Grumbling About Spelling

Finding that Isaac Brown's wife's maiden name was Rinehart certainly piqued my interest. After all, not only was I searching for a reason why his name might show up in the wills of both my mother-in-law's Gordon ancestors and her Rinehart roots as well, but I am still trying to figure out just how Isaac's wife might be related to the Simon Rinehart who was my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather.

Finding yet another Rinehart connection certainly couldn't hurt. But I'm not sure just how it will help, either. Still, I can't pass up the opportunity to follow the trail laid down by the Find A Grave volunteer who asserted that Cassa Rinehart Brown's parents were "William and Lila Ingram Rinehart."

But first, a little moment to do some grumbling. About spelling.

Now, everyone who knows anything about history—at least, in the early days of the United States—likely realizes that spelling was not always...shall we say, standardized. Not until 1806, when Noah Webster began his efforts to develop a consistent standard for spelling, did the English words our ancestors all took for granted in their everyday speech become formalized in their written format.

That standardization, of course, was for words—nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, prepositions. As for names, that may have been an entirely different matter, with one brother spelling his name Reinhardt while his sibling, moving to a different town in that new, English-speaking world, might eventually find his name spelled as Rinehart.

Despite that casualty in an era which was not yet accustomed to the rigorous demand for standardized spelling, there was one surname which somehow managed to maintain its spelling idiosyncracy: a surname prevalent in the Tenmile Country region which was consistently spelled Inghram.

Yes, there is an "h" in that "Ingram." If you doubt the spelling of that surname, witness the numbers of descendants of that original family of settlers who all maintained that same unusual form of spelling in this listing of obituaries transcribed from Greene County, Pennsylvania, newspapers of the 1800s. Scroll down to the entries spelled Inghram, and you'll see why I balked, yesterday, at spotting that Find A Grave note about Cassa Rinehart Brown's parents.

If you spend enough time wandering around the records of your ancestors in a given town or county, you eventually start seeing details you might otherwise have missed in a more cursory review. I call this "reading between the lines." In other words, extrapolating from the black and white details laid out on a page of records to discern what might have been going on behind the scenes.

In the case of Greene County, especially when researching my mother-in-law's Gordon and Rinehart ancestry, I couldn't help but notice how many times those extended families intermarried. I've seen Rineharts married to Inghrams, and Gordons married to Inghrams. Face it: if you are researching a family with many children who make it to adulthood—and those adults live in a limited community with a small, isolated population—you eventually notice multiple intermarriages among the same surnames. Enough, even, to make your head spin.

Now, couple that with the habit, among some people groups, of naming their precious babies after the oldest relatives for whom they still hold fond feelings. Of course, that is likely what is behind my difficulty in determining the right Simon Rinehart, a step vital to progressing toward that next one of ascertaining the identity of his parents. But it is also behind another prevalent name-after favorite: the given name of Delilah.

Yes, there was likely a Delilah Inghram. Worse, there were likely many Greene County belles with the name Delilah Inghram. In fact, in pulling out my latest family history acquisition, the Tenmile Country book by historian Howard Leckey, there was indeed (on page 310) a Delilah—not "Lila"—Inghram who married a William Rinehart. Cross-checking Leckey's notes on the corresponding Rinehart family, once again (on page 323) he mentions William Rinehart, conveniently listed as marrying someone named Delilah Inghram.

Lest you cut to the chase here and assume that our Cassa Rinehart who married Isaac Brown—the man who eventually became executor of Simon Rinehart's will—was, say, a sibling of that same Simon Rinehart, let warning bells and whistles go off in your head. There are problems with such a "solution," the least of which is the difficulty of conflicting dates in each person's timeline.

We may have to take a step back, cool our heels—after all, this search has been going on for years—and let a much more level head take charge. In which case I predict that, in our near future, we will begin building yet another test tree before we can form any hypothesis as to the connection between Isaac Brown, his wife Cassa, and the Simon Rinehart from Greene County who is still, sadly, parentless in his final resting place in Perry County, Ohio.

Simon Rinehart's Namesake

Is it just that the name Simon Rinehart was ubiquitous among the children of Greene County, Pennsylvania, settlers? Finding the right Simon Rinehart—and, thus, the correct parents for him—is complicated by the local lore of one man by that name who tragically lost his life there by 1781. No matter how touching it might be that one Simon Rinehart lived on for so long in the memory of his fellow Greene County pioneers, that still doesn't help me identify the right parents for the Simon Rinehart who was my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather. And that's my main focus in this search.

I've been working on this problem for years, off and on, but it wasn't until yesterday, when I built a tree for one seemingly unrelated neighbor to our Simon Rinehart, that I began stumbling upon exciting details. That "seemingly unrelated" neighbor was a man by the name of Isaac Brown, who kept showing up in the wills of members of our Rinehart relatives, and for good reason.

For whatever reason, Isaac Brown thought it was an appropriate gesture to name his eldest son by the same name as the man for whose will he eventually served as executor. However, Simon Rinehart Brown was born barely two weeks after the husband of our Simon Rinehart's daughter Sarah had died—the 1840 will where I first spotted Isaac Brown's name.

With such wide disparities of dates of birth and death for the extended family, I'm beginning to question all the material I've assembled on this Rinehart family. After all, research confusion can reign when multiple descendants in the same family chose to name their children after the same ancestors. That may precisely be the case here.

Before we jump to such an alarming conclusion, though, let's take a look at this specific Simon Rinehart Brown, son of that Isaac Brown who kept showing up in Rinehart family wills. First of all, Simon Rinehart Brown was likely born on August 2, 1840. His birthplace was reported as New Lexington, Ohio, according to his obituary—which happens to be the county seat of Perry County, the destination of our associated Gordon and Rinehart families once they left Greene County, Pennsylvania, in the early 1830s.

Furthermore, the most reasonable explanation for the insertion of the middle name Rinehart into this Simon Brown's name is that that was his mother's maiden name. Cassa Rinehart was among those early arrivals in Perry County from Pennsylvania, as her marriage to Simon Rinehart Brown's father Isaac was documented on July 13, 1837, in that very county. As a young single woman during that era, it is unlikely that she would have traveled there unaccompanied, so unless she was, by that time, an orphan, it is possible that we can identify, among all the Rineharts there, the most eligible man to be her father.

However, we could just cut to the chase and pursue a suggestion made by a volunteer who posted such information on Cassa Rinehart Brown's Find A Grave memorial. There, the assertion is that Cassa was the daughter of "William and Lila Ingram Rinehart" who were married back in Greene County, Pennsylvania, in 1812.

As I said, we could do that. But having poked around the old records and various histories of both Greene County, Pennsylvania, and Perry County, Ohio, for far too long, I know too much about the Rinehart and associated families to be satisfied with doing simply that. One telltale clue is the spelling for "Lila Ingram," but there are other details which have me concerned.

With that, to find our Simon Rinehart's parents—and those for Cassa's mother "Lila," too—there is nothing else that can be done but to go back to both Perry County, Ohio, and Greene County, Pennsylvania, and take a closer, deeper look at all the Rineharts and their associated friends, neighbors...and in-laws.

Above: Though too faded a version to discern the writing on the copy available at Ancestry.com, this version available at FamilySearch.org reveals the date when, a day after their marriage, the minister provided his return to the Perry County, Ohio, courthouse for the marriage of Cassa Rinehart and Isaac Brown (see entry #112).

Warming up to Some Hints

It's a wonderful thing to discover that we can do an end run around what we thought was a genealogical brick wall. To glean any hints from such an effort, though, we need to be willing to do some research on our ancestor's collateral lines.

In the research problem where I'm currently stuck, I need to find three details. First, I need to find the names of the parents of my mother-in-law's third great-grandfather, Simon Rinehart. Following that, it would be nice to determine the name of Simon's wife, the mother of Sarah Rinehart, the woman born in Kentucky who somehow made her way back to her dad's home in Greene County, Pennsylvania, to marry James Gordon. And finally, the icing on the smashed-brick-wall cake would be to determine if the mother of Sarah's brother Jesse was the same as her own mother, or was another woman with the same given name of Ann.

Fortunately, all of these players in my current mystery ended up in the same place: Perry County, Ohio, where they moved from Pennsylvania, sometime during the early 1830s. Yet, try as I might, I have not been able to find any records to indicate the names of Simon Rinehart's parents, a task complicated by the existence of another Simon Rinehart whose tragic demise was recalled by local lore for over one hundred years after the fact, back in Greene County, by a tree linked to his name, marking the exact spot of his murder.

That was in 1779. Our Simon Rinehart was obviously quite well and living in Perry County for decades after that point, and though he would have been of an age to have been a son of the doomed other Simon Rinehart, the ill-fated older Simon had not left behind any namesakes.

Yet, no matter where I looked for other documents on our Simon Rinehart, I found no records linking him to his parents. Nor could I find—online, at least—any verification of the maiden name of his wife Ann, though circumstances of the birth of the two eldest of Simon's children lead me to believe Simon may have been married twice.

So now, I've resorted to what I do in any case which seems to confront me with a genealogical brick wall: I look for details on collateral lines. Unfortunately, though, researching the siblings of Sarah Rinehart Gordon proved unsuccessful. What would be next? Looking for any aberrations I could possibly find.

It was in Simon Rinehart's will that I stumbled upon a clue: a name which I had recently seen in yet another will related to this extended Rinehart family. The clue came in the form of the name Isaac Brown. Though I had no idea whether this would become a collateral line or not, I began building a tree for this new suspect, and then for his children.

Following the line of this one Isaac Brown, neighbor of Simon Rinehart and appointed executor of Simon's estate, it turned out there was, indeed, a worthwhile clue to follow up on: for whatever reason, Isaac also had a family member whom he named Simon.

Now, granted, Simon—at least during that time period—was not an uncommon given name. But there it was in the 1850 census—albeit hard to read—in the form of the nine year old son of Isaac Brown. In the midst of more commonly-chosen given names in their family like Matthew, Robert, and John, was the name Simon, oldest son of Isaac and Catherine Brown.

Just to be sure I was reading that handwritten entry correctly, I moved on to the 1860 census to check. Sure enough, there was a nineteen year old son named Simon. And though his father was again reported as having been born in Virginia, his mother was listed as a native of Pennsylvania. This would be the location of Greene County, previous residence of both the Rinehart and Gordon families. The hints are getting warmer.

And then came the Civil War. By then, this Simon Brown would have been in his early twenties, a prime candidate to be in the thick of battle. Afterwards, the 1870 census for Perry County revealed no sign of a Simon Brown.

The rest of the story, however, was that somehow, in the midst of war, Simon Brown had made his way to Pickaway County, where he married Martha Alexander in December of 1863 and, after the war, settled with his wife and their two children in Henry County, Ohio.

Along the way, chasing after this son of Isaac Brown, I picked up some tempting clues. One was a Civil War record, filed under the transcribed name of Simon Rineweart Brown. The other, a Find A Grave entry showing a headstone labeled Simon R. Brown, came with a volunteer-entered memorial under the more complete name of Simon Rinehart Brown.

Now, despite the fact that even Find A Grave volunteers have been known to make mistakes, that's more to my liking. But, of course, it means answering another question: why would Isaac Brown name his oldest son after the neighbor whose will subsequently listed him as executor?

Above: Marriage return for Simon Brown and Martha Alexander, dated December 23, 1863, and filed in the records of Pickaway County, Ohio; image courtesy FamilySearch.org.

New Toys!

Whether you were one of the twenty-thousand-plus brave ones to face the crowds at RootsTech 2020 or, like me, stuck with the #NotAtRootsTech stalwarts, you may have noticed one thing: RootsTech is the time when genealogy companies—and innovators—often use the conference stage to make their announcements of big improvements to come.

This is the time, in past years, that launched such valuable creations as Jonny Perl's DNA Painter. With developments like that, who wouldn't be interested in seeing what's next in genealogy?!

While this year's RootsTech Innovation and Tech Forum brought some interesting concepts to the forefront—blogger Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings for last Friday gives a convenient overview of the highlights—the latest development to catch my attention turned out to be an announcement that didn't come from the RootsTech stage, but was delivered straight to my in-box, courtesy of social media.

If you are an avid genetic genealogy customer at 23andMe, I imagine you noticed that message, too; great news can sometimes spread like wildfire. If you missed it, the company's blog explains what's headed our way, beginning today: automated genetic family trees.

Actually, the news from 23andMe came out before the big reveal was launched. With news like that, it didn't matter to me that it was still February when I read it; I headed straight to my account at 23andMe and checked it out. Yes, despite it being Leap Day, I could still download the beta version of the predictably-named "Family Tree"—the site promised it would take less than a minute to accomplish that—and take a sneak peek at what would go live this morning.

We all will, of course, have to wait until the feature's official start this morning, but by going to the drop down menu labeled "Family and Friends" and selecting the "Family Tree beta" option, I could see the swoops and swirls of the lines which promised to connect me to all those thousands of DNA matches at 23andMe whose names, in the recent past, have had me totally stumped.

It's an algorithm which enables 23andMe to predict how your matches flow together to form a family tree. Like all algorithms, it takes into account certain assumptions, one of which is the stated age of the customer. This, if you are aware of the idiosyncrasies of my own family, will probably cause some problems. And I am not alone in this. Just think: how many others have families where the age gap between oldest and youngest sibling can run upwards of twenty years?

Concerned about how an algorithm with such built-in assumptions would handle a tree like mine, I couldn't wait until the official unveiling on March 1; I headed straight to the website to load my tree and take a look.

Sure enough, though the explanation warned that the computer-generated tree could not yet predict which was the paternal versus maternal side of a customer's tree, my mystery grandfather's legacy extended its grasp to twist even this tree. I had DNA matches whom I was sure belonged to one side of my father's tree inserted on the far opposite end of what should have been the maternal side of my tree.

Just in case it was just my family which was too weird, I jumped over to my husband's account to check out his automatically-generated tree. In his case, my husband has two cousins who are keen on checking out their DNA results at 23andMe, but despite the company listing them correctly, on another part of the site, as his first cousins, in the automatically-generated tree, they were magically transformed into his aunts. Once again, I suspect that assumption about age disparities was what threw off the calculations.

Oh, dear. And I couldn't even edit the mistakes. Not yet, at least. That comes with today's big reveal. Or perhaps even later, as the company promises that their team will be working on further improvements throughout the rest of 2020. The bright spot is that the tree will come with tools to edit and make additions, even of family members who might not have taken a DNA test with 23andMe.

There's a good reason for a company like 23andMe to develop such an aid as this. The company recently discovered, in a survey, that although more than half of respondents expressed interest in learning more about their family history, they encountered barriers in proceeding any further than taking the DNA test.

Despite the high awareness and interest in family trees, very few people play an active role in developing their own tree, as 52% of respondents cited difficulty to create and not knowing where to start as the main barriers to creating one.

While a statistic like that should cause local genealogical organizations to perk up and take note of how they could be of service to such DNA-testing customers, I'm certainly glad that such a revelation inspired the development that 23andMe is now launching. It's a promising start. I look forward to seeing how they develop this germ of an idea—not to mention, find a way to connect all those mystery DNA matches to the right branches of my extended family tree.

An Extra Day! Consider it a Gift!

Have you been considering a new project, but keep stalling out because you don't think you have enough time to even start it? What about all that catch-up work which, cleared away, would eliminate so much stress from your life? We all have plans and dreams that we, well, never got around to because we let the specter of "not enough time" badger us into taking no activity at all.

Today, however, is a gift: an extra day eased into your crowded calendar. It's Leap Day, leaping up to squeeze that needed margin into your life. Consider this calendared contrivance as a gift: extra breathing room in the midst of the 24/7/365 grind.

If you choose to accept that gift, what boost would you let that gift give to your day?

I, for one, would love to have a day filled with...nothing. I'd love to read a book, sitting outside with a cup of coffee and soaking in the gentle spring sunshine.

Or idly clearing out all those less-than-important messages that have filled up my email inbox over the past several years. My inbox needs breathing room, too.

Maybe even taking advantage, as one of the steadfast #NotAtRootsTech gang, of the free live streaming of some of Saturday's sessions. Or snagging some of the sales extended to those of us staying home instead of going to Salt Lake City (brrr).

Of course, the marketers have already filled our in-boxes with that "leap" revelation—and the coupons to go along with it. If you keep up on genealogy news, I'm sure you've already noticed genea-friend Thomas MacEntee's Genealogybargains.com  emailed announcement about the rock-bottom DNA kit price for this weekend at MyHeritage ($39)—something to prompt anyone to find a way to get "a round tuit."

But the "round tuit" I better get hold of—and soon!—is the ticket to attend another event in Salt Lake City, at a much more temperate time. Come this May 20 - 23, the National Genealogical Society is hosting their annual conference in Salt Lake City. And here's the kicker: in a matter of only half a month more, the NGS early bird discount will fly away for those of us who don't seize this extra day now to make things happen.

While I've already managed to collect a list of possible things to do on this Leap Day that will more than fill the next twenty four hours, I'm sure you've already made a mental list of your own. Whether it's filled with family history pursuits or other peaceful gifts of time, consider this day a gift and carry on in like manner.