All My Ancestors

I am thrilled!

I’ve done genealogy for almost 20 years now, and the big finds are few and far between these days. But one came this week.

One of the first families I got interested in was my Ball line. My maternal grandmother used to tell me the story of her grandmother whose father had been killed while the family traveling via wagon train to California. She would tell me that story as we were driving across the prairie in South Dakota and I had no problem imagining it. I’ve written about documenting that story and when I took that family back a couple more generations, there I was in New York City.

What do I know about researching in New York City? It’s been along hard trip for someone who has most of her ancestors coming through the south and being landowner farmers. This New York City bunch were shipbuilders.

Sure enough, I documented William the shipbuilder–there’s a story about his burials on my genealogy website www.allmyancestors.com and in this post.

I think I’ve documented that his father was John, and that he also had a brother named John. But what was his wife’s name? William and wife named their first son Jacob Weaver Ball, so I hypothesized that perhaps her maiden name was Weaver and maybe her husband’s shipbuilding partner Jacob Weaver was her brother or father. William died in 1818 and some of his survivors went west to Clark County, Indiana. His son William G. Ball married Elizabeth Charlton there in 1828 and he supposedly studied there to be a doctor. Later I found a short biography of William G’s sister Ann Pamela who married in Delaware County, Ohio in 1824. That bio said she and her mother were in Clark County and that her mother had died there.

In 2000, Hubbo and I took a trip to Clark County. It convinced me of the importance of rivers in this country since it was right on the Ohio River, right across from Louisville, Kentucky. I searched diligently for signs of this family having been in Clark County, but I found very few. Another daughter got married there in 1820, Adeline Ball to James Linton, and that marriage record is there, as is William G. and Elizabeth’s. But that’s about it. I’m now sure that their mother is buried there but there is no sign of a marker that I could find. (It would probably be more accurate to say that I haven’t found a published record of her marker–I want to go back now that I think I know where in the county they were living, not to mention knowing her name.)

This week I put in my credit card number and subscribed to the new GenealogyBank database. I’d had some good luck with some of the holdings in this database, searching the old fashioned way. But being able to search early New York City newspapers electronically was just too tempting.

So I started searching on all the Ball family member’s names. And there she was–

In the October 26, 1821 issue of the New York Spectator, there was a short obituary. With her name. And her date, place and cause of death. And “consort of the late Wm. Ball, Esq. deceased” confirms that her husband is dead and she is the surviving spouse. (I consulted the Encyclopedia of Genealogy just to be sure.)

Y’know, I teach classes in doing genealogical research, I work in a place where the majority of what I do is respond to genealogical research questions, and I even do some “professional” genealogical work for others. It is more than embarrassing to admit that I’ve searched for years for a newspaper from Clark County Indiana that might have an account of Mrs. Ball’s death. Never once did I think it would be in a New York City newspaper. Maybe it would be more accurate to say I didn’t think I’d ever find anything about her in a New York City newspaper. I let my unfamiliarity with doing urban research and a common name keep me from doing what I should have known to do. After all, I’d found other “grandmothers’” obituaries in newspapers, and newspapers of where they’d formerly lived. What can I say? I hope the lesson is learned, but mostly I’m just grateful to finally have her name.

Now, what is her maiden name?