Elusive Matriarchs

I came back from last week’s Illinois State Genealogical Society Fall Conference re-energized about breaking through some of my personal brick walls of actually finding women in my father’s family. Most of them do not appear in writing anywhere until sometime after taking their husband’s surname. So my paternal line is filled with first name only women and sketchy details of their lives before marriage.

Which is what brought me to the search for Great-Grandma Jennie’s mother and my first serious roadblock—and ultimate triumph—in genealogy research a few years ago. I found this woman in the 1860 US Census listed simply as “Manervy,” wife of Garret Garretson.  In 1870, she's listed with him and their  two daughters Jennie and Alba. Ten years later, she was Minerva, living in the same place with the same man, around the same other Garretson families, with one daughter Jennie and born in New York in about 1832. And ten years after that, in 1880, she was nowhere to be found in the Michigan Census; her daughter Jennie was a milliner in another Michigan town. Minerva reappears later and died in 1904, which gave me the first clue. I found her death certificate! Her father was Thomas Armstrong.

So, backtracking through New York and Michigan indexes I managed to find her, along with her mother, step-mother and eight natural siblings and three step siblings: Minerva, second daughter of Thomas A. Armstrong and Laura Fosmire. The family migrated to Michigan, where Thomas eventually remarried following the death of his first wife. Minerva married into the Garretson clan.

Now for challenge number two—which New Jersey Garretson’s are these folks? It’s a fairly common name in several NJ counties, dating back to before the American Revolution in some of them. And that’s where I am now—looking for my particularly elusive Garret Garretson, son of (surprise!) Garret and perhaps his second wife Lillis Wood. Or maybe, like his brother Freeland, the elusive Ellen Vreeland from New Jersey was his mother?

It’s solving these sorts of mysteries that makes genealogy such an engrossing hobby!