Madness Monday, and The Browning Series -- Part Eleven, or John Wesley Francis Browning and Matilda Corderman

This post is a three-for-the-price-of-one post. Why? Well, it manages to blend one of my Monday Madness problems with my continuing series on my Browning family as well as directly relating to my previous post about a photo comparison. It concerns John Wesley Browning, the eleventh child of Samuel Browning and Margaret Markee.

John Wes is a Monday Madness problem for me because after 1864, he just.....vanishes. Did he leave Illinois? Go serve in the War? Did he die? I'd love to know but even if I did manage it somehow it would be a bittersweet victory because my cousin Pat -- who's descended from him -- is no longer here to enjoy the knowledge.

Here's what I do know.

John was born around the year 1835 in Moorefield Township in Harrison County, Ohio. He came to Crawford County, Illinois with his parents and siblings when he was about 12 years old. John almost always used his middle name (Wesley) with one exception; upon his marriage to Matilda Corderman in 1856 he placed the name Francis on his marriage certificate. Matilda was born around 1834 in Ohio and was the daughter of David Corderman and Sarah Viola Barron. She was also the older sister of Minerva Corderman, who had married John Wesley’s brother Asbury Taylor Browning in 1852.

Evidence shows that the Corderman family and the Browning family knew each other for some years (and in two states) prior to the intermarriages between them. Matilda’s sister Minerva claimed in her widow's pension papers in May 1863 that she had known her husband Asbury Taylor Browning "from a young boy." (As Taylor was a young boy in Harrison County, Ohio and Matilda and Minerva grew up in Licking County, Ohio this little clue is important -- other Brownings lived in Licking County and I'm very interested in where that leads me research-wise.) Anyway, it seems evident that Matilda got to know Taylor’s younger brother better as a result of her sister’s marriage. Matilda was likely already engaged to John Wes when she was listed as the assistant midwife at the birth of Charles Otho Browning, Taylor and Minerva’s son, on 6 April 1856 because she and John married the next month on 23 May 1856 in Crawford County.

After their marriage the couple may have lived briefly in Crawford County before they moved to Pleasantville in present-day Woodbury Township in Cumberland County, Illinois. The couple is found with their daughter Alice on the census there in July of 1860. Pleasantville was a small community annexed to the west of the town of Jewett and today no longer exists in the county. (The road that presently goes south out of Jewett was the dividing line between Jewett and Pleasantville.) John Wesley and Matilda lived next door to Matilda’s parents and very near to John’s brother Asbury Taylor. At that time, John listed himself as a laborer. By September the couple had moved to Pleasant Grove Township in Coles County, Illinois and are found enumerated on the census in that township. Wesley’s occupation at that time was listed as engineer. It's possible that the family moved to Coles County because John had found a job as an engineer in either Charleston or Mattoon, both well-populated cities at the time.

The next documented evidence found for John Wes and Matilda is October 1864, when Wes filed a patent application in Mattoon, Coles County, Illinois stating that he was a resident of Mattoon. The patent was numbered #44594, was dated 11 October 1864, and was for a “new and improved device for transmitting motion." An engineer I know took a look at the patent drawings and said that John was technically adept and his ideas were good ones (though of course perpetual motion machines have folly written all over them!)

This patent is the last record that John Wesley Francis Browning leaves behind. By July of 1865 his wife Matilda and the couple’s two daughters were living alone in Sumpter Township in Cumberland County. They were enumerated beside Matilda’s sister Minerva, who'd become a widow a few years before. It's uncertain whether John Wesley left his family for reasons unknown, joined the war effort, or simply died. If he did die, I've never been able to locate where he was buried.

Pat told me that stories passed down through her family expressed the belief that he may have served “in the Grey.” This is interesting for it suggests that John Wesley may have been a southern sympathizer and might have fallen in with the Copperhead movement that was prevalent in Mattoon during the Civil War years. He might have joined the Confederate cause -- it's certainly possible -- but despite my research into southern war records I haven't uncovered anything to substantiate Pat's family tale. Lacking hard evidence to the contrary, it's tempting to assume that John Wes died sometime between October of 1864 and July of 1865. This assumption, however, is by no means proven.

In March of 1867 Matilda went before the county clerk of Cumberland County as a witness to help her sister Minerva gain a minor’s pension for the children of her marriage to Taylor Browning. Matilda testified to her attendance at the birth of her nephew Charles Otho Browning and claimed that she was a resident of Prairie City. Three years later, in July of 1870, Matilda was still living in Prairie City with her daughters Alice J. (b. 1857) and Sarah Viola 'Kate' Browning (b. Mar 1863) a few doors down from her parents. She was listed as a seamstress.

After July of 1870 there is no further record of Matilda either. She isn't found on the 1880 census but this might be because she was remarried before that date. Sadly, a courthouse fire in 1885 caused the loss of all Cumberland County records filed before that date so I may never know if Matilda remarried. I can't even hunt her down through her daughters -- if Alice married in Cumberland County her marriage, too, is lost, and then of course there's no 1890 census.....

And what of Kate? By 1880 Kate -- Pat's g-grandmother -- had become pregnant out of wedlock and stories in Pat's family relate that Kate and Matilda never got along again after that. The pregnancy drove a wedge between Kate and her mother and before she gave birth Kate took her father's picture and his patent papers and ran away to Terre Haute in Vigo Co., IN. I wonder, though -- if Kate took his papers that mean John didn't take them. Surely if he left the family for some reason other than death, he'd have taken his papers?

I just don't know what happened to John Wes. I don't know whether Matilda remarried or died. I don't know what happened to their daughter Alice. John Wes and his family drives me mad. I do have the patent papers and I do have the one photo that Pat gave me (the positively identified photo from the previous post) though it is not a good copy. Pat was given the other unidentified photo (the black and white one, not the sepia toned one) from another cousin who believed that it was John and I think she was right. The collar that he is wearing reminds me of a war uniform, perhaps? If so, maybe the story about John Wes going into the service isn't just a family rumor. Anyway, I'm working on obtaining good, high-resolution scans of both photos and when I do I'll unashamedly take Brett up on his offer of digital overlay.

Monday Madness -- Browning Misinformation Soup

I've spent the better part of two days trying to contact everyone on Ancestry that has the misinformation posted about the family of Samuel Browning and Margaret Markee. I've only received two replies and one told me (in a clipped, irritated reply) that it wasn't their fault and that Ancestry.com automatically feeds information from Family Trees already in the system to any new ones.

Is this true and does Ancestry actually just place data that's already been input into the family trees of other researchers into your tree without your express permission to do so? If there are any readers that are on Ancestry and build family trees there, I'd appreciate it if you'd leave me a comment and tell me if it's true or was this person just blowing smoke up my you-know-what?

If true, that sounds very counterproductive to me, and that's why I'm not sure I believe it. We all know things are bad enough as they are without developing a environment where unsourced and unproven information leeches through entire systems without checks and balances. Like a virus....

It's driving me crazy!

I finally got sick and tired of posting messages to everyone and just referred them to the following link:

http://genforum.genealogy.com/browning/messages/4026.html

I hope that helps.

Madness Monday - All My Germans

Of late I've become more and more drawn to research my mother's father's German side of the family. When Randy Seaver had us list our Sweet 16 a few weeks ago the listing made me realize how little I knew about that side. There are many reasons for that, of course; some that involve distance (geographically and emotionally) and others that don't belong in a public forum. Suffice to say that my mother's father's side of the family were the stereotypical taciturn Germans.

My mother's parents divorced when she was an infant. Her mother Clementine initially tried to gain custody of her children (my mother and her elder brother) and when that failed, she tried to gain visitation with the same result. My grandfather, my mother and her brother moved in with his mother Minna after the divorce and Minna became my mother's surrogate mom as well as her grandmother. My mom moved back in with her father when he remarried but that didn't last long; after his second wife became pregnant my mom was told to move back to her grandmother's house. Basically, she was shuttled around. There's a lot more to the story but it doesn't really need to be shared here. The moral is that none of this really fostered any sense of familial closeness.

There's a part of me that mourns this. When I was about seven I spent two summers at my grandfather's house and spent some of those evenings in front of the TV eating ice cream with chocolate sauce, drinking Pepsi, and watching the Cubbies with my aunt. I didn't know at the time that my aunt's mother and my mother's mother weren't the same person because no one in the family ever said anything about it. You just didn't speak about such things. Come to think of it, that sentiment -- buck up, soldier, don't cry, keep your chin up, don't be weak! -- was essentially the attitude of the German side of my family. You couldn't afford to let your guard down, that's for sure.

Still, memories of those two summers stay with me. They are the only times I remember feeling close to my mother's father or any of his immediate family other than Freddie, his brother. I've written about my Uncle Freddie in this post so I won't revisit what he meant to me. I have a few other memories, too -- I remember my great-grandmother Minna would allow me to go down in her basement to play, or to use her Vicks Inhaler. She seemed stern and I would never dream of crossing her but she was sometimes indulgent with me. I suspect it was because I was her "Dolly's" little girl.

When Minna passed away she took a storehouse of memories with her. I was too young to ask her the things about her German ancestors that I should have and to my knowledge there's precious little left from her life. Her children sold most of her things to pay for her last days in a nursing home (she lived to be 98) and whatever was left was parceled out amongst the kids or thrown away. I remember she kept a huge portrait of Alvin, the son she had that died young, in her basement. She had a beautiful big bible written in German that had been brought over from Germany by her parents. By the Bible she always kept a picture of her father in his red German calvary uniform, posed next to the Lippanzer stallions he trained for Kaiser Wilhelm I.

All these things -- it seems -- are gone. At least all my inquiries as to their possible locations have come to naught.

It wasn't until I was about nine that I learned there was another woman in this story. My mother took me along with her to meet a woman in a mobile home park and I played and quietly watched the two older boys that were also there while the two women talked. I was told this woman was my mother's mother -- my grandmother Clementine. I've written about her in the past in this post. I remember only being curious and a bit confused about the relationship but it must've been a very emotional time for my mom. That visit marked the first and last time she ever met her mother. By that time Clementine had remarried and had gone on to have five more children -- my mother's half-siblings.

After their meeting the two corresponded for a few years or so but Clementine eventually stopped writing and the cessation wounded my mother deeply. I remember hearing my parents speak of it in their room (yes, I was a nosy child -- surely a personality trait of any good genealogist?) and the pain in my mom's voice. As an adult I've spoken to her about that time and she said she never understood why her mother stopped writing. I wish I had an answer for her but the same thing happened to me. I decided to try to locate Clementine again after I had my own daughter in the early 90's. She and I wrote back and forth for a few months (her letters to me remarkably resembling those she wrote to my mother two decades earlier) and then the letters stopped.

In the late 90's I managed to locate her nephew, who by happy coincidence lived fairly close to me. We went to dinner at his house once and he gave me photos and shared some memories. One of the most important ones to me was his rememberence of a picture on his "Aunt Tootie's" mantlepiece of a flaxen-haired baby girl in a pink dress (see picture at right.) He said as a boy he'd always wondered who that little girl was. I told him I had a copy of that picture and it was my mother.

It seems to me that in her way Clementine did mourn her lost children and I'm sure she was ashamed of her inability to go up against the force that was my great-grandmother Minna. I don't think she knew how to move past those mistakes and embrace her older daughter while simultaneously managing to maintain the children she had with her second husband. I think her desire to love us was stronger than her actual ability to do so. I don't hold anything against her for these things -- people are what they are and the past shapes them. Then again, I think I probably have the luxury of feeling that way about it because she wasn't my mother.

I found out one day last year that Clementine died in 2002 by putting her name into the social security death index.

Anyway, back to the purpose of this post -- the madness that is the entire German side of my family. I had names of the places they were all supposed to be from that -- until this last week -- I'd never been able to find! Incidentally, one of my most promising discoveries is that none of them would be considered "Germans" any longer if they'd stayed put in the villages they came from. Many borders have changed since the late 1880's. They'd be Polish now. (Yes, I know, grandma Minna, I can almost hear you rolling about in your grave and saying something about you'd never be Polish, so I'm very sorry about that, hehe!)

I know there are many bumpy roads ahead of me. I've never done this sort of research before so it's uncharted territory. I have maddening issues, of course. Alternate spellings of all the surnames (Papstein, Depperman, Koplen, Koehn, Sanglam/Sennhousen, Schultz, Vierkow) abound. A death certificate I have is faded in the exact place where names of parents are. I have no idea what ports any of them came through when they got here. Passenger index searches have come up empty even though in one case I have an exact immigration date. (Maybe I'm not looking in the right places, though, so when I discovered recently that a few of them were naturalized I ordered naturalization indices. Waiting on them now.)

Funny story of a convoluted relationship I've found in this family: one of my 3rd g-grandmother Henrietta's sons (Franz) married her step-granddaughter Minna. That makes Franz and Minna's children both Henrietta's grandchildren AND her step-great-grandchildren. How messed up is that!

In the coming weeks I'll be posting some of what I'm beginning to discover. I'm growing excited about all of it. I do love a good challenge. It's a good thing I do, too, or my hair would be all over the floor on a daily basis!

Monday Madness - You Say Tomato, I say Tomahto...

One of the things I hope to solve when I go to Ohio on Wednesday is a little matter that's been niggling at me for years -- a correct surname. Dickerson or Dickinson? The jury is still out.

I thought I had this surname figured out when I found the marriage indexed in the Tuscarawas County, Ohio marriage records. There it was, clear as day:

Browning, Samuel - Sarah Ann DICKERSON 4 Oct 1849

For a year or so I took that at face value. That was before I got around to ordering the marriage itself from the courthouse; I was finally concentrating on researching Samuel and Sarah's descendants. When I got the license, it looked like this:

Yeah. Horrid. Absolutely horrid. So I wrote it down as a "need to get a new copy" on my to-do list. The last time I was in Ohio, in August, I went to the courthouse and pulled up the record on the microfilm reader. Voila, it was in the same shape! The ladies there informed me that the original records -- being old and delicate -- had been microfilmed and then sent off to the Tuscarawas Genealogical Society for safekeeping. I was told it was in Dennison and that there were odd hours. The hours that it was open didn't correspond to my remaining time in Ohio and as a result, I left without getting a copy.

It's obvious that I really need to see that marriage license. It's important because our Samuel here (Sam Jr., who is Samuel and Margaret's son) married Sarah Ann and they had three children together (Effie Emmaline, George, and Samuel) before she died, between 1858-1860. Samuel then remarried a woman named Julia Ann Dickinson in November of 1860.

After Samuel's death in 1862 his children with Sarah became the wards of George W. Dickinson. By all accounts this George W. was either Julia Ann's brother or cousin. Now George's mother's name was Effie Emmaline. Hm, the same as Samuel and Sarah's daughter -- coincidence? Also, George's father was also named George Dickinson Is it another coincidence that Samuel and Sarah's son's name was George Browning? I wondered about the names and wondered why Samuel's children would become wards of the unrelated second wife's Dickinsons and not the Brownings....unless they were also related to his first wife Sarah? So, maybe Sarah's name isn't Dickerson after all?

Or....wait. Yes, perhaps it was Dickerson. See, Samuel and Sarah raised a boy named John Christy (b. c1843) in their household from about 1850 until Samuel's death. This little boy might've been the orphaned son of a couple who were married in Tuscarawas County in 1842 -- John Christy and Julia Dickerson. Gahhhhhh! But wait, this typed marriage was also as badly microfilmed as Samuel and Sarah's was, and it might read Dickinson too? Yeah, I'll be checking that one too if I possibly can.

It should be easy to rule out one surname but to complicate matters, there were Dickinson and Dickerson families in Harrison County, Ohio at the same time. It could be either. All I do know is that it was the Dickinsons that were taking care of the Browning kids after their parents' deaths.

Hopefully I'll learn more in a few days. I've made it a point to schedule time for a visit at the Society, with cousins that I have never met yet! We're making it a first meet/breakfast/go see records session that I'm looking forward to.

I hope the Society will allow me to view the original marriage record and at least snap a photo of it. So please everyone, pray with me that the genealogical gods look upon me favorably and I get the chance to do that. If not, perhaps the ladies there will view it for me and at least tell me if it's DickINson or DickERson!

Madness Monday - The Possible Progenitor, John Browning

The most solid of all my brick walls (it feels like the Great Wall sometimes!) is the question: Is John Browning the father of Samuel Browning? And if so, how do I prove that he is?

Circumstantial evidence suggests that Samuel (b. c1796 MD) may possibly be the son of John Browning, who is found in the 1820 and 1830 censuses of Harrison County. In the 1820 census John, who is listed as living in Cadiz Township and as aged 45 and over, is living with a female (probably his wife) who is also 45 and over. They are living within a six household radius of Samuel and his wife Margaret. This John is shown with three males -- one under the age of 10, one aged 16 to 18, and one aged 16 to 25; and six females – two under the age of 10, three aged 10 to 15, and one aged 16 to 25.

In 1830 John Browning is shown living in Freeport Township aged 50 to 59, with a wife also aged 50 to 59. They are shown with three children: a boy aged 15 to 19 and two girls, one aged 10 to 14 and the other aged 15 to 20.

Taken as a whole, these two censuses show that both John and his unnamed wife were born between the years 1771-1775. As Samuel was born around the year 1796, the possibility exists that he is their son.

A search for possible siblings of Samuel's unearthed a number of prospects. Early Harrison County marriage records provide evidence of the marriages of at least five Browning women. A Polly Browning married James Graham and Margaret Browning married Richard Medley, both in 1826. A Wilsey Browning intended to marry John Thomas in 1830 but although a license was issued, no marriage took place. A Hannah Browning married Thomas Drake in 1837. Lastly, a Cassa Browning married Alfred Calvert in 1841. It is uncertain, however, whether any of these women were siblings or other relatives of Samuel's.

In the 1820 census, another Browning is also within the same six household radius and on the same page as Samuel and John in Cadiz Township; William, aged 16 to 26. William is shown with another male aged 16 to 26 and a female, most probably his wife, aged 26 to 45. Harrison County marriage records contain the entry of a marriage of a William Browning to a Hannah Barr on 1 December 1818, and it is possible that this William may be a brother to Samuel and another younger son of John.

By 1840, neither John nor his wife are found on the census records of Harrison County nor have they been located in any neighboring counties. It could be assumed that both died between the years 1830-1840, but this assumption has never been proven. Efforts to further locate John Browning have so far proved fruitless.

There is also slight evidence to suggest that Samuel may have had relatives in Licking County, Ohio. Two of Samuel's sons, Asbury Taylor and John Wesley Francis, married Corderman women in Crawford County. The David Corderman family had come from Pennsylvania and had settled in Jacksontown Township in Licking County in the late 1830's. They had then moved on to Crawford County, where two of David's daughters, Matilda and Minerva, married into the Browning family. Minerva Corderman Browning, Asbury's widow, stated in her Civil War soldier's widow's pension application that she had known Asbury from an early age. She stated that she had "always knew him since he was a small boy."

If her statement is accepted as true and Asbury and Minerva had known each other as children, then Samuel Browning and his family may have made trips to Licking County to visit relatives. The Browning families in and around Licking County in the early 1840's – specifically those of Asa and Jeremiah Browning of Union Township -- may have been relatives of Samuel's. Samuel's supposed father, John Browning, might have been a brother or cousin to one of these men. While this is unproven, the presence of Van Browning in Crawford County (a known son of Jeremiah of Licking County) during the same time period as Samuel also lends some support to the connection between the Brownings of Licking County and the family of Samuel Browning.
Pat and I searched for years. I wish I could figure out what it was.

I've looked in early Harrison County records….I've had a researcher I hired do it and I did it myself back in August. No John. No will for any John Browning exists in Harrison County or Tuscarawas County for the right time period. There IS a John Browning in Tuscarawas in 1899 but I have a copy of that will and that is another family entirely. I have looked at Carol Bell's "Wills To 1850" and there is no John recorded there either. I found a Jeremiah Browning in Jefferson County and I ordered and received his estate papers. What there is does not plainly refer to any names that would connect with mine, though I keep it filed away because of the Jeremiah in Licking County that I mentioned earlier. I plan to travel to Jefferson County myself in a few weeks and do another round of research. I prefer to see these sorts of things with my own eyes, if you know what I mean?

One more thing. Early Harrison County deed records show at least three other Browning men that, as far as I can now determine, do not connect with me. (That's not to say they don't….I just haven't proven anything yet!)
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25 Dec 1817: Joseph FRY to Lewis Browning -- This deed was between Joseph Fry and Amelia (Permilia) his wife of Harrison County on the one part, and Lewis Browning of Brooke Co., VA (now WV)on the other.

31 Mar 1834: William TINGLEY to Lewis Browning -- bill in chancery court against Frederick SALMON, for the right to sell his lands to pay Browning back for debts owed now that Salmon is considered a lunatic.

13 May 1835: Lewis BROWNING to Isaac Weldon, Sr. -- This deed was between Lewis Browning of Brooke County, VA (now WV) on the one part, and Isaac Weldon Sr. of Harrison County on the other. Witness: Joseph FRY, Justice of the Peace.

4 Jan 1836: Rees JONES, Daniel SPRINGER and others to Lewis Browning for the use of Emelia Salmon -- This deed was between Rees Jones and Jane his wife, Daniel Springer and Jane his wife of Harrison County on the one part, and Lemuel Browning of Lewis Browning of Brooke Co VA (now WV) on the other, for the use of Emelia Salmon of Harrison County.

25 Oct 1836: Isaac WELDON to Lemuel Browning -- This deed was between Isaac Weldon and Elizabeth his wife of Harrison County on the one part, and Lemuel Browning of Harrison County on the other. Joseph FRY was Justice of the Peace.

20 Jun 1837: William BUKEY to Ellis & Jones -- This deed was between William Bukey and Susannah his wife of Ohio County, VA on the one part, and Ellis D. Jones and Lemuel Browning of Harrison County on the other.

19 Aug 1837: Jonathan PEOPLES to Jones & Browning -- This deed was between Jonathan Peoples and Mahala his wife of Harrison County on the one part, and Ellis D. Jones and Lemuel Browning of Harrison County on the other.

1 Sep 1837: John STRADLING to Jeremiah Browning -- This deed was between John Stradling and Sarah his wife of Short Creek, Harrison County OH on the one part, and Jeremiah Browning of Jefferson County OH on the other.

21 Mar 1838: Lewis BROWNING to Amelia Salmon: This deed was between Lewis Browning of Brooke Co, VA (now WV) on the one part, and Amelia Salmon of Harrison County on the other.

2 Apr 1838: Jeremiah BROWNING to James Roberts -- This deed was between Jeremiah Browning and Catherine his wife of Steubenville, Jefferson County, OH on the one part, and James Roberts of Harrison County on the other.

18 Aug 1838: Lemuel BROWNING, et al. to John NEBLICK -- This deed was between Ellis D. Jones and Mary his wife and Lemuel Browning and Caroline his wife of Harrison County, OH on the one part, and John Neblick of Harrison County on the other.

15 Oct 1838: Lemuel BROWNING to Lewis Browning -- This deed was between Lemuel Browning of Harrison County on the one part and Lewis Browning of Brooke Co, VA (now WV) on the other part.

15 Aug 1840: Lewis BROWNING to Samuel Wilson: This deed was between Lewis Browning and Margaret his wife of Brooke County, VA (now WV) on the one part, and Samuel Wilson of Freeport, Harrison County on the other.

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These deed records show that throughout the period of 1818-1838, a few Browning men were buying and selling land in Harrison County. Lewis was living in WV, and the Jeremiah I mentioned earlier in Jefferson County. He was there as early as 1815 and died around 1843 -- his wife's name was Catherine Mansfield. Lemuel Browning was the son of Lewis and Margaret (Phillips) Browning (the other buyer of land) of Frederick Co., MD/Brooke Co WV. He was born about 1805 in Frederick Co., MD and married Caroline Beck on 15 Feb 1825 in Brooke Co., WV. Caroline was born about 1815. They lived in Harrison Co. OH c1837, but moved to Warren Twn., Jefferson Co., OH by 1850.

My Samuel was born in Maryland. I just HAVE to fit in here somewhere; that's my 'gut' instinct talking of course. I still haven't figured it out after all these years.