(Not So) Wordless Wednesday -- My Very First Rant!

Disclaimer: I am beginning a rant. Reading this rant implies that you are prepared for angry, insulted, disappointed or frustrated feelings to be aired and written down. This rant will not adhere to all the standard polite societal niceties. You have been warned.

I assume all of us at one time or another have discovered erroneous information about our ancestors floating around the Net, propagated from family tree to family tree on services like GenForum and Ancestry and the like. I've long been aware of the phenomenon and, while irritating, it was an understandable aspect of this ancestoring business. I was able to deal with it in that manner up until now but it's never really hit me like it hit me this weekend. It's been percolating for the last couple of days and I have to admit I'm a little hot under the collar.

What was different? It became personal. How, you say? Well, it wasn't someone else's random family -- it was mine. This time it was about my Samuel Browning and his wife Margaret Markee.

I've been researching Samuel and Margaret for over ten years now. About five years back I wrote a book about them entitled "The Leaves Do All Come Back: The Family and Descendants of Samuel and Margaret (Markee) Browning." It was a small run, self-published book on CD (I wasn't made of money, hah!) that only sold about 30 copies, mostly to cousins and any other family members interested in our lineage. I won't state unequivocally that I'm the foremost expert on this family just because I've published a book, but I can say that unless I'm mistaken I'm about as close as there can be to one.

One of my major goals for this family in the last decade has been establishing proof positive for the parentage of Samuel Browning. As I spoke about in my posts here and here, there's some amount of circumstantial evidence suggesting that Samuel's father may be the John Browning found in the Harrison County (OH) census in 1820. I've had other working theories and other ideas and possibilities bouncing around in my head but that's par for the course when you're trying to find something like this.

This weekend I happened to look at the Ancestry MemberConnect feature and found, to my utter surprise, that apparently MANY people now have Samuel's parents listed as (take your pick) Samuel Baker Browning and Rebecca Shipley, or alternately, Nancy Hobbs!

Whaaaaaaaa?

I looked all around for proof (initially excited that someone, somewhere, had found something I hadn't and I would finally solve my mystery) only to find a convoluted ring of OneTrees and WorldTrees and personal webpages that referred back to OneTrees and.....well, you get the picture. In other words, no actual documentation. Not a speck. Just an initial someone's assumption that Samuel fit somewhere in the Maryland Browning tree and then just throwing him in there and having that somehow became a "fact."

Now my cousin Pat (RIP) owned William N. Hurley's "Our Maryland Heritage, Book 12, The Browning Families," which is a great resource for those of us looking for Brownings. She scoured the book for any clues about families that our Samuel could fit into. We never once saw our Samuel's name in that book and I think sticking him into Samuel Baker Browning's family is presumptive barring documentation to the contrary. If Hurley didn't do it, why should anyone else? Just to say they have another generation back? Grrrr. Don't get me wrong; I do understand this sort of thing often propagates because a lot of people don't care to do the research or are collaterally connected at best. But lest we forget, it had to originate somewhere for it to be passed about like it has been.

All I'm saying is that people need to look and think before they place something like that down; even to the layperson unfamiliar with the Brownings, some of what I read obviously has holes I could drive a truck through. Take Samuel Baker Browning and Rebecca Shipley, for one. Even a cursory look would reveal that Samuel Baker Browning and Rebecca Shipley could almost certainly be eliminated because my Samuel was born around 1796 and this couple didn't even marry until 1807.

The second couple (Samuel Browning and Nancy Hobbs) is a better fit, I'll admit. I don't know where my Samuel was born (MD is all I know) but Samuel and Nancy were married in Maryland in 1792. It's possible. It's equally possible that Meshach Browning's uncle John (listed in Hurley's book, old enough, in the right state, and Hurley does not have any further information for him) could also be Samuel's father. The name is at least a fit for the mysterious John that actually was in Harrison County. In other words, all we really have right now is guesses.

I'd love to be able to go through the internet like the proverbial bloodhound, sniff out all the places where I see this being spread, and inoculate the carriers. I know I can't do that. What I can do, though, is present the information that I have on this family here on my blog and maybe someone doing some serious research will see it.

If anyone has located documentable proof that my Samuel is the son of either one of the couples I mentioned above (or even of an entirely new couple, I'm flexible!) I'd ask them to send it to me posthaste, after which they'd become my new hero and I'd hug them and kiss them and call them George! However, until that happens and such proof is located, these connections sound like a lot of assumption and not much more.

And we ALL know what it means to assume....

The Browning Series -- Part One, or James Browning and Jane Nevitt

With this post I begin what I call "The Browning Series." Samuel and Margaret Browning had thirteen children between them and after Margaret's death, Samuel chose to take a widow named Sarah Ann (Bell) Gaddis as his second wife. The two of them had two more children together. I plan to feature each one of the fifteen children in a separate post and finally tie the family together with a discussion of their parents.

My opening salvo is the family of my direct ancestor James Browning, Samuel and Margaret's first born child. James was born on 31 Oct 1815 in Harrison County, OH. I've always suspected that Margaret was pregnant with James before she and Samuel married on 9 Feb 1815 but if not, the poor girl only had a week or so of grace before conceiving!

When James was 14, in 1829, a young girl of 9 named Jane Nevitt became his mother's step-niece. Margaret's brother James Markee had just married Rhoda (Johnson) Nevitt, a widow with two young girls, Mary and Jane. No doubt the two families spent time together and over the years a closeness developed between James and Jane for the couple decided to marry. They were wed on 23 Jun 1839 in neighboring Tuscarawas County, OH by William C. Kennedy, JP. James was 23 and Jane was 19. James had been training to be a cooper before he and Jane married and no doubt his training gave him confidence that he could support a wife and a child. A recording of their marriage license is shown to the left.

Did the couple "have" to get married? Perhaps. Their first born son, Elias, was either born on 18 Apr 1839 or 18 Apr 1840. Lacking a birth certificate, the evidence swings both ways. The date on his tombstone says 1839. The 1850 census, taken in December of that year, lists him as 10 years of age. I can't ever prove it of course, but my own intuition about it all tells me that he was born in 1839 and that's why James and Jane went over to Tuscarawas County to get married. Their families weren't known as well and they could leave the baby behind!

James and Jane lived for a decade in Washington Township near Tippecanoe in Harrison County. The couple had five children there (Elias, Joseph, Thomas N., Sarah Ann and Mary Jane) before becoming the first of the Brownings to move to Crawford County, Illinois. They packed their belongings and arrived there sometime in late 1849 before the birth of their last child, Margaret Ann. They didn't blindly move to a random part of the country -- no, most probably they moved to join Jane’s mother Rhoda and her husband James M. Markee. The elder Markees had made the trip to IL around 1846 to join James’s cousins Samuel, William and John Minard Markee.

James and Jane settled in Montgomery Township in Crawford County and probably wrote home about the land and and its bounty, for they were soon joined by James' parents Samuel and Margaret and nine of their remaining twelve children. Their bliss didn't last long, however; as I mentioned in the last post, an outbreak of yellow fever swept through the country and many people died in those years. It's entirely probable James Browning was one of its victims. He died on 8 August 1852 and was buried in the Browning family plot in the Wesley Chapel Cemetery in Montgomery Township.

After James’s death Jane and her children were left to fend for themselves. Accounts of their life vary. According to their son Thomas Browning’s biographical sketch in Paul Selby’s Crawford County – Biographical, Thomas was “put out among strangers” after his father’s death. It's indicated by their son (and my direct ancestor) Joseph Browning’s obituary, printed in the Palestine Register in 1916, that the family moved to Bristol Landing around the year 1854. Bristol Landing is almost two miles southeast of Palestine IL and is a stretch of land very close to where the Sugar Creek flows into the Wabash River.

The two sons of James and Jane mentioned above, Elias and Joseph, have been featured in my blog before. Remember the civil war mementos my cousin had, here? Elias and Joseph were two parts of that triumvirate that included Jacob Johnson who served together in the Civil War out of a volunteer regiment from Missouri. If you're interested in how their lives meshed in a different way other than that war you should go read that post.

On 21 Jan 1860 Jane married a native of England many years her senior named William Jennings. William and Jane had one son, Richard, in 1861. I found the family in the 1865 IL state census but that's the last time I find Jane anywhere. I can't seem to find her in the 1870 or the 1880 census, which frustrates me to no end! I found her son Richard as a servant in the 1880 census but Jane's nowhere to be found.

The next time I find her is in the Kirk Cemetery in Robinson Township! She died on 3 Feb 1894. I've made a note (one of sooo many in my task list!) to research the local papers to see if I can find her obituary. Perhaps that'll help me add some more color to the last 30 years of her life. Who knows -- maybe I can't find her because she'd married again and moved to Timbuktu? Ahhhhh, supposition! Isn't it lovely?

You can see a list of James and Jane's Browning children on the footer to my blog. I'm sure I'll tell stories about them in future posts, but for now I will supply a small rundown of their marriages. Elias Browning married Sarah Ellen Kent. Joseph Browning -- my direct ancestor -- married Almarena Mathewson. Thomas Newton Browning married Sarah Ann Huls. Sarah Elizabeth married Samuel Selwyn Plummer. Mary Jane married Amos K. Huls, and Margaret Ann married Charles Francis Huls. Five of the six children that James and Jane had took a family photo around 1911 and I have placed a copy of that photo here to the left.

I'll take a moment, though, to list what I know about Richard, Jane's only child with William Jennings. Richard was born 26 Mar 1861 and married Mary Lackey, the daughter of Thomas Lackey and Ann Eliza Boatright, on 26 Nov 1895 in Hardinsville in Crawford County. The couple had no known living children. Richard died on 17 Jun 1938 and Mary died on 3 Jul 1948. They're buried in the Palestine Cemetery in Crawford County.

----

Other posts featuring this family:

• (Not At All) Wordless Wednesday -- Civil War Mementos (feat. Joseph Browning)
• ...Why I Should Stay Away From Cars (feat. Joseph Browning)
• Thomas Newton Browning, Jack of All Trades (feat. T.N. Browning)
  

Genealogy Happy Dance, aka "In Search Of......Margaret, Part I"

I'm a little late in getting around to the Genealogy Happy Dance post I've been reading about in a number of genealogy blogs, but I figure it's better late than never. I've had so many occasions to jig and rhumba (or do my very best disco!) during my 16 years at this hobby, but the most intensely happy moment by far was when I located the gravestone of my Browning matriarch -- my 4th g-grandmother -- Margaret (Markee) Browning. It's been years since this happened, but just doing the writing to tell the tale makes the grin start creeping onto my face and my toe start tapping.

Get comfortable, people. This is a long story.

My 4th g-grandparents, Samuel Browning and Margaret Markee, married in 1815 in Harrison County, Ohio. They were both little more than children -- Samuel was about 18 and had just returned from serving six months in the War of 1812 with Captain Baruch Dickerson's Company, a part of Lieutenant-Colonel William Cotgreve/Colgrove's Second Regiment of Ohio Militia out of Jefferson County. Margaret, the daughter of James Markee (who was the son of James Markey and Amey Trigg of Taynton, Gloucester, England) was barely 15. They were married for 40 years and had 13 children during their marriage, all of whom lived to adulthood. They also took care of their daughter Julia's illegitimate son, Washington, throughout the term of his life. (Washington's story is an interesting one, which I'll blog about at another time.)

They lived 35 years together in Harrison County (moving from Cadiz Twn to Athens Twn to Moorefield Twn) before deciding around 1851 to move on to Crawford County, Illinois. Ten of their thirteen children and their grandson went with them. Samuel and Margaret's eldest son James and his wife Jane Nevitt had moved to Crawford County a few years before that, along with a few of Margaret's Markee nephews. At this point in my research, though, I wasn't aware that Samuel and Margaret had moved to Crawford County and I certainly didn't know that any of the Markees had! I only knew that MY ancestor James had. Not knowing that they'd went to Illinois turned out to be pretty important.

When I first began my genealogical research, I located Samuel and Margaret mentioned on page 535 of J.H. Beer's book, A Commemorative Biographical Record of the counties of Harrison and Carroll. The sketch was of John C. McConnell, who'd married Samuel and Margaret's daughter Rachel. (Rachel was the only one of the Brownings to remain in Harrison County her entire life -- the others moved to Indiana and Kansas -- but as I said before, I didn't realize that at the time. I thought only James had moved to Illinois!) Anyway, the biography spoke briefly of the Browning family and mentioned, as follows: "In 1864 he [Samuel] died, and his remains were laid beside those of his wife, who died in 1855." This small phrase and its implications sent me on a wild goose chase that lasted years and painfully highlighted my fledgling genealogical talents.

I looked all over Harrison County for the location of Samuel and Margaret's gravesite. I spent a very frustrating 6-9 months on the search and when I kept coming up empty I got sidetracked onto other research tasks with other families and decided to lay the burial mystery aside for a while. You must understand -- this was in the years before I learned to concentrate on one family instead of hopping about from family to family. Like I said, fledgling.

A few years later I came back to the Brownings -- to stay, it turns out -- armed with the then-new information that Samuel and Margaret had emigrated to Crawford County, Illinois not long after their son James. I looked at the phrase with new eyes. I finally realized that the phrase had only implied they'd been buried in Harrison County! Since all the other information in the passage about Samuel and Margaret had been true (their children, Samuel's 1812 service, their religious orientation, etc) I wondered if Beers could have been in error about their burial. But in looking at it, Beers never mentioned that they'd been buried in Harrison County. He simply said they were buried together. I thought perhaps they'd been buried in Crawford County instead. But I wondered anew.....where?

I started looking and after some amount of diligence, finally found a hit! Margaret! Buried in the Wilkin Cemetery in Licking Twn. Although I held off on the full-press disco because there wasn't a Samuel listed, I did stand up and allow myself a jig or three. I was pretty happy because next to Margaret there was another Browning listed, one I'd never heard of. A child named Olen B., a son of Asbury Taylor Browning (Samuel and Margaret's ninth child) and his wife Minerva Corderman.

My happiness was tempered by the fact that -- being in Texas -- I couldn't just run out the door and visit the cemetery like every bone in my body was dying to do. I did the next best thing and called a cousin that lived in the county -- one I'd located between my first search and the one that found Margaret -- and dispatched her posthaste to the cemetery to find the stone. She came back emptyhanded. We were crushed.

But my cousin Linda wasn't easily daunted. She started asking around, conferring with the most prominent historian/genealogists in the county. What she found was hugely exciting. Apparently an old cemetery plat existed for the Wilkin, and Margaret and Olen (though not Samuel) were on it! She got a copy made after some finagling and she and her husband Cliff -- who is a treasure, believe me! -- went back to the Wilkin and used the plat to find the position of Margaret's plot. They went armed with a camera.

Look over to the left for what they found. No name there at all, and merely the hint of a death date -- 1856. Hm, I thought, Beers was a little off after all. According to the plat, Olen was supposed to be buried to her right when you faced her stone but there wasn't a stone in sight.

There was little surprise that at their first run of the cemetery, Cliff and Linda had missed her. Without the plat, they'd surely have continued to do so.

As Paul Harvey likes to say, stay tuned, for "in a minute, you're going to hear...the Rest Of The Story."

(If you'd like to read further, go to Part II of this story here, then come back and read Part III of this story!)