Thursday, April 19, 2012

A Mystery Solved

Sometimes while researching your family tree, you have almost no data about a person. Often,  the maiden names of wives get lost to time.Sometimes all you have is a last name. The trick is to find other places to get that data. Here is a genealogy adventure to find a person with little data.

I've been researching my mother's line. My 3x great grandfather, Benjamin Adamson, came from England in 1801. Of his eleven children, for two of them I only had a name and a very approximate birth year (one was 'about 1801' and the other was 'between 1806 and 1810'. I also had the last names of their husbands, but nothing else.

While researching their sister, I found a set of marriage records from the county next door that contained all three sisters, their husband's full names, and the dates of their marriages. That was all I had for a long time.

Armed with a full name, I searched for the husband of the older sister, Hannah Adamson. Oftentimes, you can find the wife by following the husband. There was a man from the same area with the same name who was a U.S. congressman, Jonathan D. Morris. He has a two sentence bio in Wikipedia and in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress. But his last name was fairly common, and I could find no mention of a wife. It did indicate where he was buried, which was the same county as the marriage records. So, I felt this was a solid lead in solving the mystery.

I searched Find a Grave, and found a page for him. But nowhere, except in Find a Grave, could I find that cemetery. I suspected, as often happens, the cemetery changed names or was merged into another cemetery. I finally started searching the county historical and genealogical society's forums to find out more about it. A few weeks ago, I found a person who posted an excerpt from the brochure for another cemetery in the town. The excerpt was the history of the cemetery, and it mentioned that land next to the first cemetery I was looking for was purchased to start the new cemetery. So, the newer cemetery absorbed the original.

Once I had this info, I found the genealogical society's website showing all the graves from this cemetery. I found a grave and stone with the same death date as the congressman, as well as the same birth month and day, but a different year. This happens in historical research, where the dates are off a little. In this case, five years. With a match on the death date and 2/3 of the birthdate, I felt confident I had the right man. And lo and behold, his wife was buried right next to him, with the inscription "Wife of ...". So I had proof-positive that connected my relative to the minor celebrity of the 1840s. I had her death date and age and her burial site, along with that of her husband.

I was giddy all day and told everyone about it, even people with no interest in genealogy or cemeteries.

Resources used:
Benjamin Adamson, From England to America by Elza Hayden Adamson, updated by Hazel Adamson Brannian
Ancestry.com
FindaGrave.com
AdamsonAncestry.com and Jerry Adamson
Marriage records of Clermont County, Ohio
OHCLERMO mailing list
Clermont County Cemetery Photo Project, Clermont County Genealogical Society

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