Nancy, who are you?

 Do you read “The Legal Genealogist” blog? Informative, well-written, and entertaining -- though how the author ever finds time to do her own research is beyond me, since she posts every day. On January 12 she wrote about a mysterious Nancy, who died in 1886 and is buried in a Texas cemetery. It is one of those tantalizing problems that keeps the family historian digging.

And the article reminded me of my own puzzle -- another Nancy, whose children had the surname Howard and, after she  died,  were farmed out to various Montgomery County, Indiana, families.  Try as I might, I have not been able to find out anything more about their mother.

She came to my attention because two of her youngsters were placed in the home of Alpheus Gregg, where they are counted in the 1850 census.  Alpheus had been married to my relative, Amanda Howard, until her death in 1848 (same year as Nancy), and the Howard children’s presence there makes some researchers believe they are Amanda’s from a previous marriage. But I knew Amanda, my great- grandfather’s sister, was the daughter of Frederick Howard, and had been born in 1822.  Furthermore, she was too young to have been the mother of the eldest of these Howard children.

So the question is: who IS Nancy Howard? Her name came from a court record collection,  the Guardians’ Docket of Montgomery County, Indiana (1825-1874), which has been digitized and is online at the website for the Crawfordsville Public Library (bless ‘em). 

I have searched marriage records for a possible husband/father, not just in Montgomery County, but neighboring counties and nearby states as well. I have looked for men with the same given names (Augustus , Tilghman, Robert and George) in case a son was named for his father. To confuse matters further, there was a Tilghman Howard who  was prominent in Indiana politics at the time, but his biographies tend to disprove any connection he might have had with my Nancy. 

Still tantalized, still trying to find the answer.

Who will know?

When I began searching for information about my family’s history I had no intention of publishing a book. (Still true.)  It was more about the thrill of the hunt -- tracking down familiar names, determining relationships, and finding critical dates wherever I could.  It was always exciting to enter new data for people I knew about, and to find relatives  I had never known existed. And along with the satisfaction of solving puzzles, I began to learn a bit more about how these kin must have lived, why they moved from one place to another, and what the political and social environments were like in their times and places. 

In the process, of course, I amassed a huge collection of material, and with it came the realization it had to be arranged so that I knew what I had, and where to find each piece of it. That, as you know, is a never-ending project, much like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. ( And I’ve been writing about it here, off and on, for some time.)

But there is still more I’d like to do.  Why have all these wonderful documents, letters, photos, and mementos, if they don’t make sense to anyone but me? And what will become of them when I am not here any more?  They may be neatly filed in acid-free folders, each with its tidy list of contents, or lovingly placed in archivally-correct photo albums, but … do they tell a story?  As the one responsible for gathering up all this, I certainly know the background myself. I can tell the viewer what each piece of paper means and how it relates to the overall picture. But without my explanation, that overall picture is blurred and incomplete.

The task, then, is to create an album, or series of albums, that hold the sigificant documents and most meaningful photographs, with the words that will tie them all together.  Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn’t it? Well, as I soon found out, it is not.

Does one begin with onself and work back in time, the way we are advised to pursue our research? Or should the earliest known ancestor in a particular line be the starting point?  Should “how I found it” be included (sometimes this is irresistible), or do we go for a simple description of who is related to whom, where they lived, and what we know of their lives?  There are, of course, books and articles to help with these decisions, since a single set of family history albums is no different, in that sense, from something written for publication (though we are free of the business decisions, and our layout possibilities are not dictated by a printer).

So far I am planning to take the earliest-ancestor approach: beginning with a great-great grandparent in my father’s line.  Frederick Howard apparently came from Pennsylvania to northeastern Kentucky sometime after 1793, the approximate year of his birth, and before 1811, when his name first appears in Bath County tax records.  His marriage to a woman named Jaley Grant is also recorded there, as well as a court document showing his appointment to survey a particular road in the area.  Frederick and Jaley had three children in this Kentucky county, including my great-grandfather, but in1829 the family moved up to central Indiana, where they settled in Montgomery County, not far from Crawfordsville.

The first hard choice comes when I must decide how to deal with the descendants of Frederick’s daughters.  The whole family fascinates me, but naturally my focus is on the direct ancestral line.  I need to lay out the connections with the son, Samuel Parker Howard, to his daughter, and then to her son, who is my father.  But I also want to include what I’ve found about the others -- not only because their lives were important, too, but  because I have some interesting documents relating to them.  Among these are a clue-filled 1884 letter from my great-grandmother’s half-sister, an 1854 obituary relating the circumstances of the death of my great-grandmother’s first husband, and a photograph of a great-uncle's tombstone, typical of those provided the Civil War dead. 

Have you, dear reader, attempted this sort of project?  How did you go about it? What treasures do you have and how do you incorporate them in your work?  I’d really like to hear from you.

Who was Nancy Howard?

Here is a puzzle to mull over:

A relative of mine (actually my great grandfather’s sister) named Amanda Howard was married in 1843 to one Alpheus Gregg, in Montgomery County, Indiana. They had two sons, and, sadly, Amanda died five years later.

In 1850 the Gregg household shows Alpheus with a new wife, Anna (later shown to be Anna Wilson), two Gregg children, and two Howard children, Caroline, age 14, and Robert, age 12.

This might seem evidence enough to establish that the deceased Amanda Howard had been previously married, and that these young Howards were from that earlier marriage.

But a closer look indicates otherwise. Amanda’s age as given on her gravestone shows she was born in 1822, and this is corroborated by the range of ages of her siblings in early census records.
Caroline Howard’s birth year would have been about 1836, when Amanda was 14. Mother and daughter? Possible, but not really likely.

Because of the age question, I looked elsewhere for more information. There is a Guardian’s Docket for Montgomery County, digitized and indexed online thanks to the Crawfordsville Public Library. There I found an entry, dated 24 Sept. 1848, for Caroline E. Howard, “about 13,” and Robert W. Howard, “about 10.” In fact I found three other Howards in the same entry: Augustus F., Tilghman A., and George W. Howard. All are listed as “heirs of Nancy Howard, deceased.” Caroline’s and Robert’s ages correspond to the ages given in the 1850 census for the Gregg household.

In this docket entry, a David Thompson was listed as guardian, and Andrew A. Whitmack was surety.

So now there are more questions: who is Nancy Howard? Who was the father of her heirs/children? What became of the other children? And why is David Thompson acting as guardian?

The discovery of the name Nancy Howard certainly shows the children were not Amanda’s, if further proof were needed. Even if one could postulate that Nancy and Amanda were the same person (they both died in 1848), the oldest of Nancy’s heirs in the guardianship case was born about 1830, definitely too early to be the child of Amanda, born just 8 years earlier.

So was it just a coincidence that two of Nancy Howard’s children ended up in a household with children of the by-then-deceased Amanda Howard?

First I searched for the other children. David Thompson had one in his own household in 1850, another is in the household of Larkin Leak, and Augustus has not yet been tracked down in any indexes, under his given name or any variations I could think of.

Thompson himself seems to have been involved in a number of guardianship cases, and I theorize that he may have acted in a semi-official capacity, either on behalf of the local community, or a church. This is perhaps the reason all but one the children under his guardianship were placed in other homes. So far I have found no personal connection between him and the Howard family. Census records shows him as a farmer, and an 1868 Indiana gazetteer lists a David Thompson as a Montgomery County grain dealer.

So who is Nancy? Who was the Howard she presumably had been married to? Amanda had only one known brother, whose wife was named Jaley; their father’s will, made in 1853, names just this one male, two other daughters, and “the estate of Amanda Gregg’s children.” No mention is made of any other Howard children.

One of my steps was to look for any of Nancy’s children who might have appeared in the 1880 census, in order to discover their parents’ birthplaces.

Caroline seems to have married a George W. Wilson in 1853, but both died before 1870. Robert’s tracks are faint indeed, and confusing because his name is not uncommon.

In the 1880 census for Montgomery County I found a Tilghman Howard, of the right approximate age, born in Indiana. The record states both his parents were born in Ohio. If this is Nancy’s son, it gives a slender clue. But I would like to find another of her children in that census, to help confirm the birthplace. We all know how vague (forgetful, ill-informed) people can be when asked to name the place where their parents were born.

Searches of the online Indiana State Library Index to Marriages to 1850 for the relevant period have revealed three brides named Nancy, married to men with the surname Howard. Following these trails so far has not been very fruitful. And perhaps she was married in Ohio. Or not married at all...

There, dear reader, is where I am at this point. Your comments or suggestions are most welcome.

At the very least I hope this exposition has given you some strategies for your own research.