Reminiscing — And Reusing

 

The other day, I ran across an article on Family Tree Magazine about RootsWeb, the "granddaddy of genealogy websites." For those of us who wandered the site frequently in those early days of online genealogy, the forums and information posted could be useful—sometimes essential. Thinking about those old websites launched me into a reverie of reminiscing—but not so long that I didn't heed the article's advice to remember to check it out now.

Even though RootsWeb is frozen in time, due to the evolution of computing leaving this technological dinosaur vulnerable to hacks, there is still much that can be accessed. Remembering those many useful posts I had found there on Perry County, Ohio, resources, I thought it might be worth my while to give it a look, via a site-specific Google search. 

What I remembered finding back then were burial records transcribed from decades ago when headstones weren't quite so faded, and researchers who had hand-entered data from handwritten records. I had saved some of these resources to my own computer, in the prescient fear of maybe someday seeing the site go down, but others which I hadn't saved could have come in handy now, in my current search for Adam Gordon's mother, Lidia Miller, before her untimely death.

I did find some notes readable, including a post reminding me to check out the history of the early Catholic Church in Perry County. One entry pointed to Internet Archive, which now hosts the digitized version of the A. A. Graham tome, History of Fairfield and Perry Counties, with its listing of early church members. Someone named Adam Gordon was listed among those early members of the church, though I doubt it was our Adam Gordon. Still, it was informative to page through the 1883 publication to see what was happening in this ancestral location so long ago. I'm keeping an eye out for any biographical sketches on Miller families, despite there being so many people by that name in Perry County.

Another link I found in my exploration brought me to a site from long ago called Ohio Genealogy Express. There, a page transcribed from another early Perry County history book laid out the brief history of the formation of each of the county's townships. Since Lidia's family and the Gordon family had settled in Reading Township, I took a look at the explanation there. Apparently, Reading Township was originally established prior to the formation of Perry County. When that reorganization took place in 1818, two rows of sections which originally were in Fairfield County's Richland Township were now added to complete Reading Township as part of the new Perry County. Knowing this may help explain the location of the original land purchased by Adam "Onsbaugh" in 1806, long before Perry County was even in existence.

I'll probably continue to search through the potpourri of material still accessible through the old RootsWeb and other old genealogy websites. After all, someone once knew the details that now have me puzzled. You can be sure that someone once knew the names of Lidia Miller's parents and siblings. Sometimes, that F.A.N. Club concept is useful for that very reason: someone out there once knew the answer. The key is finding just where that someone stashed that missing kernel of truth.

Meanwhile, on the Miller Side

 

While the routine grunt work of plowing through Anspach records continues in the background—not the scintillating reading material one would prefer—I thought I'd wander over to the other side of the family representing my mother-in-law's Miller roots in Perry County, Ohio. While I seldom like to pay attention to hints copied from other people's trees, I thought just this once, I'd explore a suggestion about mystery ancestor Lidia Miller's possible father.

The suggestion, from ThruLines, was to look for someone named Jacob Miller. Since there was a Jacob Miller listed in the 1820 census in Reading Township, the same place in Perry County where Lidia and her husband William Gordon lived, that was as good a place to start with this suggestion as any.

Though the age brackets used for the 1820 census aren't very helpful for our purposes—the adult age bracket stretches from age twenty six through forty four—I first wanted to check for signs of a young daughter. Indeed, there was one, though the bracket included all girls under ten. Since Lidia died early in 1840, not even two years after her marriage, I have no way to know how old she was. However, we can safely guess she was about twenty when married, putting her birth before 1820, and thus within that "under ten" age bracket for Jacob Miller's 1820 census readout.

At the same time I noticed the one girl in the Jacob Miller household, I spotted three sons, also under ten years of age. Could one of them have been Jonathan Miller, the one whose property we've been following this past week? Hard to say at this point, though the broad age bracket could include both Lidia and Jonathan, as he appears from other records to have been almost ten years Lidia's senior. 

Using Ancestry.com's ProTools, I'm building a Miller network which includes all three of these Millers from Reading Township, just to have a place to park all my discoveries on this possible F.A.N. Club. But as I stockpile records on Jacob Miller from Perry County's Reading Township, I begin to notice a few detracting details. One is that there may have been more than one Jacob Miller in the neighborhood. And for this particular Jacob Miller in the 1850 census, his arrival in America was not only after having married, but just before the birth of his sixteen year old daughter Margaret.

In other words, the Jacob Miller in the 1850 census couldn't have been the Jacob Miller of the 1820 census. 

Tracking the Tract

 

Some research processes take time, and this month's pursuit of possible relatives of my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother Lidia Miller has led me to unexpected resources—which requires time to unfold the winding trail.

The trail follows a tract of land more than it does the person who owned the land. We first found that land described in Jonathan Miller's precise stipulations included in his 1866 will. That document pointed to the southwest quarter of section one, and the northwest quarter of section twelve in township seventeen and range seventeen in Perry County, Ohio.

We first traced that land back to the original owner through the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records, a man identified as Adam Onsbaugh but likely one and the same as Adam Anspach. Now, it was time to see what other mentions could be found for that land description in other legal documents. Since not every document has been digitized and placed online, I first tried my hand at a collection of will abstracts from the old book, Gateway to the West, which is now online at Ancestry.com.

I searched for entries for the surname Anspach without any success, and was about to look for the alternate spelling of Onsbaugh, when my eye caught an entry for Adam Ausbach. Most likely the result of a transcription error—the book did mention something about the text being in German—"Auspach" could merely have been the result of a more European style of writing the letter "n" like the letter "u."

The abstract outlined the names of the will's legatees. The sons included Anspach names I had found in the 1840 census, helping to tie the family unit together. The more helpful part, though, was identifying the daughters by their married names, including the given name of each daughter's husband.

Right away, I spotted one name: Elizabeth Dupler, wife of Philip. It was not lost on me that Jonathan Miller—the possible relative of Lidia Miller who had first gotten me started on this chase—had married a Dupler. Any relationship? You bet I'd go following this trail.

My next step was to turn to FamilySearch.org's Full Text search, where I entered "Adam Anspach" as my search term, adding a keyword "Dupler." Because the Gateway to the West book had given 1833 as the date Adam Anspach's will was drawn up, I set the date parameters rather narrow, to limit the results.

Without including the description of the tract of land I was tracing in my search terms, almost immediately a search result popped up with that precise property description. In that document, Adam Anspach sold that specific property to Elizabeth Dupler for one hundred dollars.

This, of course, caused me to wonder whether Jonathan Miller's wife, Catherine Dupler, might be daughter of Elizabeth Dupler, who in turn was daughter of Adam Anspach, the likely original owner of that parcel. Nothing is ever easy, though. It sounded like a reasonable premise, but you know I had to do some additional checking to see what other documents could connect the two Dupler women.

Circling Back Again

 

The saying that everyone in Perry County is related to each other may be a concept that has roots which reach generationally deep. Or maybe that is a description which keeps circling back again. In seeking family connections for Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother, I'm starting to see the same surnames pop up, generation after generation.

When we considered the original owner of the land which Jonathan Miller willed to his two sons in 1866—a man by the name of Adam Onsbaugh—that chase led us to another similar name: Adam Anspach. In the same census record where we first found Jonathan Miller's entry on the same page as Lidia's husband William Gordon—the 1840 census—we not only found mention of someone named Adam Anspach, but David, Christian, and Benjamin, as well.

That wasn't the only place where the surname Anspach popped up. I had seen it in Jonathan Miller's own will. Only problem was, this time the mentions had to do with Jonathan's daughters.

The 1866 Miller will had granted Jonathan's two sons fairly equal portions of his land, but to his five daughters, he had stipulated that his sons pay them (or their heirs) $650 each. Fortunately for us, Jonathan mentioned each daughter by name: Mary Elizabeth Crist, Belvida Anspach (for whom her portion was to pass to her children), Barbara Anspach, and Catherine and Isabella Miller.

Adding these two daughters to the Miller family tree who had married men surnamed Anspach had me looking forward to the next generation, but it didn't take long for me to circle back again to the generation preceding Jonathan's own time. Jonathan's daughter Barbara had married someone named Leander Anspach in Perry County on November 28, 1852. And Jonathan's deceased daughter—whose name apparently turned out to be Belinda, according to her 1864 headstone—once again had her name mauled in her 1847 marriage record, which stated that Malinda Miller had married Adam Anspach.

What's interesting about that Adam Anspach—in addition to ringing the bell for us with that same name we had seen one generation earlier—is that he was son of a man named John Adam Anspach, whose namesake father, Johann Adam Anspach, was of an age to have been the 1806 purchaser of the property we have been chasing.

These details have indeed kept me running in circles. Granted, this is merely a simple sketch of possible relationships, and details need to be inspected more closely. But no different than the many intermarriages I've witnessed from my mother-in-law's parents' generation in Perry County, the tradition seems to have been far more deeply rooted than just during that time period.

That brings up another question. If Jonathan Miller was related to the original Adam "Onsbaugh" Anspach, what was the exact connection? And more pertinent to my search for Lidia Miller's roots, does she even connect with Jonathan Miller's family at all? After all, we can't lose sight of the original research goal that led me down this circling trail.

Think Phonetically

 

The search for Adam Onsbaugh was on. I had found him in the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records as the 1806 owner of a parcel of land which bore the same township, range, and section number as the property which, years later, Jonathan Miller was bequeathing to his two sons. Could I find any other records on this man?

I probably wouldn't have launched such a search, if it hadn't been for the unknown roots of my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother. Also bearing the surname Miller, Lidia had become the wife of William H. Gordon; after the couple's untimely deaths in Perry County, Ohio, their orphaned son Adam was raised by his paternal grandmother, herself a widow by that point. To connect Lidia to her past meant exploring any possible connections through the friends, associates, or neighbors surrounding the unfortunate young family. Searching Miller neighbors was one approach to this cluster research method.

Land owner Adam Onsbaugh, I reasoned, must be somehow connected to that Miller F.A.N. Club, and I needed to at least examine who he might have been. Could the Millers and Gordons have migrated en masse from Pennsylvania with Adam Onsbaugh? Did they know him in the past, and thus get inspired to follow his migration trail west to Ohio? I had to at least find him in the census records in Perry County to learn a bit more about this pioneer settler.

Searching for Adam in the 1810 census—the first enumeration after he acquired his land in Ohio—presented a problem. Perry County itself was not a county until 1818. The county was formed from portions of Fairfield, Washington, and Muskingum counties. Thus when the Land Office Records identified the location of the Onsbaugh property as Perry County, they were apparently identifying that land by current jurisdiction, not the county in existence in 1806. So I wouldn't have been surprised if no  Adam Onsbaugh showed up in the 1810 census in Perry County—but there was no one by that name listed in the entire state of Ohio.

No matter; let's fast forward to the 1820 census. There, I did find an Adam Onsbaugh in nearby Hocking County, but no one with that spelling in Perry County. However, there were two other listings: one for Adam Onspough, and another one for someone named John Onspough, both in Reading Township where our Jonathan Miller eventually lived.

I moved further on to the 1830 census, where I found several others with similar spelling variations. All in the same Reading Township, I found someone named John Anspaugh heading up one page of the census, and several others listed two pages earlier. All with that same surname spelling, they were David, Christian, Adam, and Benjamin.

Could Onsbaugh be the same as Anspaugh? I barely had time to consider that, when the 1840 census brought me more discoveries. There was a Benjamin and an Adam Anspach listed, again in Reading Township—in fact, on the same page which launched us on this journey when I discovered William Gordon's listing on the same page as "Johnathan" Miller. 

If you think about this morphing surname situation phonetically, it seems quite possible. We started with Onsbaugh. Realizing that several languages pronounce the letter "a" more like an "ahh," it could be possible that an "Onsbaugh" could also have been spelled "Ansbaugh." Then, too, the guttural ending, "gh" could seem similar to some ears as the German rendition of the ending "ch" and thus be substituted in spelling. Thus, we could move from Onsbaugh to Ansbaugh to Anspauch—and possible even to Anspach, as we saw in the 1840 census, all by thinking phonetically.

I couldn't help but notice the Find A Grave memorial for one Johann Adam Anspach, buried in Somerset—the town in Perry County surrounded by Reading Township—in 1838. The sponsored memorial includes a listing of his many possible children, including married names for the daughters. Though this list would represent descendants from a generation removed from our Jonathan Miller, I couldn't help but notice some similarities from names listed in a previous page of another document I had already been reviewing: Jonathan Miller's own will.  

Searching for Seventeens

 

I admit: searching for Millers in Ohio can be a challenge. Even searching for Millers during the earliest years of Ohio statehood can overload a researcher with too many search options—more specifically, with false leads. Yet, here I am, armed with the description of the land in Perry County which Jonathan Miller willed to his two sons at the end of 1866, trying to find a record of how, years before, he himself had received the land.

My thinking was rather straightforward. If Jonathan Miller did happen to be a sibling of the brick wall ancestor I've been seeking—Lidia Miller, my mother-in-law's second great-grandmother—then discovering how he obtained his property might reveal his relatives. And possibly hers.

Jonathan Miller's will identified what appears to have been two parcels, one on the northwest quarter of section twelve, the other on the southwest quarter of section one. Both were identified as being in township seventeen and range seventeen.

My first thought was to check the records at the Bureau of Land Management's General Land Office Records. Just in case it wasn't a laughable idea, my first search there was for any land in Perry County obtained by someone named Miller. There were plenty of options—two pages of listings, in fact, none of which belonged to someone named Jonathan Miller. 

Remembering Jonathan Miller's mention of one parcel of land having once been where "Shelly Dupler had resided," I wondered whether that was the former owner of the Miller land, and searched for the Dupler surname. After all, Jonathan's wife was born a Dupler. Though Dupler was a surname far less common than the overwhelming Miller surname, that search for land records brought up absolutely zero results.

I noticed that the Land Office search results had some columns which, by clicking on the heading, could be sorted in number order. Township and Range were both sortable. I clicked, looking for seventeens. Nothing came up, except for one parcel registered to a man named John Miller in 1809. Though it might have been possible that our Jonathan Miller could have identified himself as "Jon" Miller for short—and thus be mistakenly transcribed as John—I already knew from his entry in the 1840 census that he would have still been a child in 1809.

Rather than manipulate the spread sheet aspect of the file, I tried something else. The Land Office records could also be searched specifically by location. Keeping the main "location" state entry as "Ohio," I scrolled down on the "search documents" landing page to the section labeled "Land Description," and entered my information there. For township, I entered seventeen; likewise for range. For section, I entered twelve. And clicked on "Search Patents." That was it.

Only one result came up for my search: not a property owned by anyone named Miller, but a parcel obtained in November of 1806 by a man named Adam Onsbaugh.

My next question was: could it be worth my while to search for this new surname? Would it lead me to any helpful information about Jonathan Miller—or, more importantly, to my brick wall ancestor Lidia Miller? While it seemed strangely similar to one of those wild rabbit trail diversions, it was worth a try to check it out.

One Hundred Years Ago

 

Much as some people might celebrate a friend's birthday—say, their fortieth, or some other mere decade's amount of life—by buying a reprint of the front page of that exact day's newspaper, I thought I'd do the same today for my mother. Today would have been her birthday, one hundred years ago, and I was curious to see what the world might have held for her family that day.

Since my mother was born in a tiny farm town called Oelwein, Iowa, I couldn't pull up any copies of the local paper from archival collections. Perhaps there wasn't any local newspaper. After all, at the time, Oelwein boasted not quite eight thousand residents, although ever since the arrival of the railroads there at the turn of the century, it had seen a growth spurt. To read the news of the day, I had to rely on the publication at Cedar Rapids, an hour's commute to the south.

There, The Evening Gazette focused mainly on leftover news from a recuperating Europe after the Great War had subsided. Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg, inaugurated that day as President of the German Republic, made three separate appearances on the Gazette's front page, as did French General Charles Mangin, who died that very day. Lawsuits and murder trials rounded out the day's news, as well as an announcement of big plans to bring a replica of Cheyenne, Wyoming's Frontier Days to town. To round out the day's news, an ominous mention of a bank failure in nearby Mason City, juxtaposed with reports of the state's banking situation being "in fine condition," pointed to history yet to be made.

My grandparents' brief stay in Oelwein—a railroad center grown out of a corn field bought from the town's namesake farmer—was an odd juxtaposition of my grandfather's current employment and my grandmother's oddly out-of-place roots as a southern lady whose impetuous marriage to a tall, dark, and handsome eligible bachelor brought her where she never expected to be. The stories of those farm-based days when my mother was born I know well. After all, it was my mother who passed on the family stories from her own relatives; why not share stories of her own parents' lives? But the stories providing the context of her young life and what blend of news mixed to create her own social environment I hadn't before explored.

Sometimes, in addition to gaining the right details about birth dates and places and the names to which they belong, it is helpful to spend a moment surrounded in the news of the day. To see what has yet to come down the road for an ancestor—those newsworthy items which to us are "old news"—can open up new vistas to us and help gain an appreciation for what shaped those family members from past eras.

Above: Headlines from the front page of the May 12, 1925, Cedar Rapids newspaper, The Evening Gazette; image courtesy of newspapers.com.