ROOTS & BRANCHES

When I was relatively new to genealogy – this was the 1980s, before Internet and way before DNA – a researcher who was somewhat of a mentor to me said that he especially liked tracing “umbilical lines.”

In its strictest sense, this is what we now call the mitochondrial DNA line (mtDNA for short) because the mtDNA flows from a mother to all her children but then is carried on only by the females in further generations.

This mentor researcher was an attorney and I think that affected his preference for these lines, since he made the comment “Paternity is always more difficult to prove.”

Well, laying that pre-DNA assessment aside, it’s become somewhat of a Mother’s Day sport for genealogists on Facebook to post either a listing or photos (or both), of their mtDNA lines.

I decided to join the fun, listing my mother, Mildred Mae Hiester Beidler (1927-2011), my grandmother, Luella Emma Fredericks Hiester (1901-1928); my great-grandmother, Rosa Dehart Machmer (1881-1935); great-great-grandmother, Emma Rebecca Dehart Machmer (1855-1941); three-greats-grandmother, Sybilla Rauch Dehart (1830-1918); and ending with my shadowy four-greats-grandmother Sarah Miller Rauch (born about 1801).

All the information I had about this woman was her 1823 marriage to Jonathan Rauch; an entry in the 1850 U.S. Census showing her as 49 years old; and her name on the “mother of deceased” line for several of her children’s death certificates (full disclosure: my ancestor Sybilla Rauch Dehart’s death cert listed “Caroline” Miller as her mother, but I discounted that since siblings of Sybilla born both before and after her listed “Sarah” as their mother).

Now, I have no less than four Miller lines – and became so frustrated with them in the past that I made up the witticism “When you get to a Miller … that’s a good place to stop.” (People with the present-generation surname Miller never seem too amused by that!).

When I decided to make my Mother’s Day post, I wanted to get the birth and death years right and didn’t quite remember them for Sybilla. So I went on Ancestry.com for her death certificate and that led me down an intriguing rabbit hole.

Of course, there will be some verification and analysis to do, but Ancestry.com connected me to Find A Grave, which had a tombstone for Sarah Miller Rauch that showed her born 1798 and died 1859 (which solved a mystery of why I never found her in censuses after 1850).

Find A Grave also linked her to her parents Jonathan Miller (1777-1858) and Elisabeth Schaeffer Miller (1775-1863), the latter another step in the umbilical chain.

In addition, a Google search led me in turn to more information on Jonathan Miller’s ancestors on a WikiTree website run by a frequent correspondent of mine, Brian S. Miller.