Trusting Dates in Family Research

One of the problems for genealogists is sorting out conflicting stories and references.

Many official records exist and are being made available online, but the character and condition often is problematic. Courthouses burned with shelves of ledgers, and town meeting notes and ledgers in New England are barely decipherable today. Nevertheless, the family history industry is expending huge efforts to make existing records available.

This entry is about history and genealogy in conflict, and the need to inspect the history behind reported dates.

The first documented person in my Woods study is Jeremiah P. Woods, born 26 May 1797 in Dayton, Ohio, according to his tombstone in Missouri. We have no reason to doubt the date, but the location is curious. The city of Dayton lies fifty miles up the Miami River from Cincinnati in today’s Montgomery Co., created in 1803 from Hamilton. The first settlers arrived to establish Dayton in 1796, the year before Jeremiah’s birth. Travel was quite challenging for the founders.

< Dayton in 1800, fancifully portrayed about 1880.

In March, 1796, Dayton's founding enterprise left Cincinnati in three parties, led by William Hamer, George Newcom, and Samuel Thompson. Hamer's party was the first to start; the other two companies left on Monday, March 21st, one by land, the other by water[Miami River]. Hamer's party came in a two-horse wagon over the road begun, but only partially cut through the woods, by Cooper in the fall of 1795.

"The sixty miles from Cincinnati to Mad River was a tedious and exhausting journey. The road was merely a rough, narrow, unbroken path through the woods and brush, except that part of it which led to Fort Hamilton, which, as it was used by the army, was kept in tolerably good condition. They suffered from cold and dampness in camp, as it had rained and was spitting snow."

The Woods name is not listed among those settlers. By these accounts and date, and given the date of Jeremiah's birth, it seems the family arrived within weeks or a few months after the founding and built among the first dwellings in the city. The absence of the Woods name in early accounts and available records is confounding. It is possible and perhaps likely that Jeremiah’s birth in Dayton is self-reported and subject to some error. And yet the later known character and occupations of the family show they were builders who pioneered towns.

The census records for Ohio before 1830 have been lost, making the task of tracing Jeremiah Woods’ family quite difficult. The estate of a possible father or uncle of Jeremiah, Samuel Woods of Dayton, born probably before 1786, was probated in 1807 in Montgomery Co., confirming a Woods family, perhaps this one, was established in that town in its first decade. Jeremiah (1797) named his ninth child Samuel in 1840, but other evidence of his parents’ names has not been found.

The take-away here is the need to be thorough about dates and places. It always is helpful, if not mandatory, to attempt to understand the history of the moment regarding dates. They may be from reputable sources, as from a grave marker, but it's helpful to know the life of the time.