Recently I was interviewing a number of students for a scholarship to study abroad. As I was putting together the schedule and contacting all the students, I noticed that one of them shared a last name with my son-in-law, Christman, and that she also lived in the Lehigh Valley. I wondered if she and my son-in-law were related and decided to see if I could find a connection (without telling her).
I had traced my son-in-law's ancestry a few years earlier and knew that he was descended from a man who emigrated to the Lehigh Valley in 1731 and who settled just a few miles from where I live - in a place called Sigmund's Furnace. His ancestors continued in Lehigh County for the last 250+ years, and I was able to trace them from census records, cemetery records, and other sources in ancestry.com. So in order to see if this young lady was related, I only needed to trace back her family line to see if it intersected.
Since I was doing this without her knowledge, the hardest part was getting the name of her grandfather (her father was listed on her application) so that I could find him in the 1940 census (the newest census that is available to the public) as her father would not have been born by then. I finally found an obituary for her great-aunt which listed both her parents and her grandfather. From there I kept tracing back through census records and other records, but the family seemed to be only in Northampton County and Carbon County and there was no intersection with my son-in-law's family line. I finally reached an ancestor who emigrated to Northampton County in 1741 with no resolution. But then I went back one more generation and found that the man who came in 1741 was an older brother to my son-in-law's ancestor who came in 1731. Both of them had the name "Christ" in Europe and both changed to Christman when they came to the US. That made this young lady my son-in-law's 9th cousin!
In the process of doing this, I saw that her mother's maiden name was Rumsey, which coincidentally is the same as my sister's former husband. I thought that interesting, and wondered if there was a second family connection there. I traced that family line back to the 1870's before reaching a dead end. But I put all this information into an email to her before the interview was scheduled. She responded with interest and her mother asked if I would be interested in some ancestry documents that she had collected.
On the day of the interview she presented me with a stack of copies of some documents that had been passed along by relatives on both the Christman and Rumsey side. The Christman documents verified that my research had been correct but they hadn't gone back as far as I had. So they were grateful for my research. The Rumsey documents were another story.
In comparing all the documents, I could see a great many inconsistencies in them - they had a couple of different family lines that were claimed, and one gentleman was shown with two different fathers and three different dates of birth across the documents. But they gave me a few leads to look at - and a couple of long sessions of research before I was able to come to a resolution.
I had traced my ex-brother-in-law back to England a couple of centuries ago, so I first tried to trace that line forward a few generations while simultaneously tracing the Rumsey line from this family backwards to see if I could have them meet. My initial rounds of trying were not successful. I was able to verify one of the documents that they gave me was correct until the early 1800's. And I was able to verify that same document back to the 1870 census, but I couldn't verify the connection that the document claimed. Going to some outside sources, I was able to find that one gentleman, Preston Rumsey was born around 1810 and I could find some of his family in later documents. I was also able to see that there was a James B Rumsey who was one of this young lady's ancestors who was born around 1840. But I could not prove that Preston was the father of James as the one document claimed.
In fact, to the contrary, I found a grave stone for Preston's wife that said she died in 1835, five years before James would have been born. Another complicating factor for trying to make the connection was that the Rumsey family members lived in (1) Sullivan County, NY, (2) Sullivan County, PA, and (3) Sullivan, Luzerne County, PA. And there were James Rumsey's in all three places (hence the varying dates of birth in the document that they provided me)!
So I stopped my research for a few days to try and sort all this out in my head and decide if there was a strategy that could work. After clearing my head, I tried again, and this time successfully. I was specifically looking for James, living with his father, in the 1850 and 1860 census, somewhere in or around the northeastern part of PA where it said he was born in the 1870 census (when he was married and no longer with his father). My success came because I was able to construct a search pattern that allowed for mis-recorded information.
In the 1860 census, I found "Press Rumsey" and his son James. Then looking in that same township in the 1850 census, I found "Preston Rundry", his second wife Letitia (thus verifying that his first wife did indeed pass away in 1835), and their son James B. So, apart from the abbreviation of Preston as "Press" and the mis-hearing by the census taker of Rumsey as "Rundry", the records were there and I was then able to make the connection all the way back. So, not only was this young lady the 9th cousin of my son-in-law, but she was also the 9th cousin of my ex-brother-in-law. What are the odds of that!
I submitted the corrections to ancestry.com and they have both been accepted as alternates. Doing this kind of research fascinates me. In the process, I learn a lot about our history, how families in the early days of this country moved around, and how so many of us share common ancestors.
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