Careless Transcriptions and Brick Walls
Careless Transcriptions and Brick Walls
Mary Emeline Brown Armstrong Ernst (1833-1910) was my great-great-great-grandmother. She appears on 101 users' trees on Ancestry.com, including mine. Of the 88 public trees on which she is listed, 24 also name her parents, and 20 of those give her parents' names as John Brown and Ruth Nelson, based on the parents' names recorded on Mary's death certificate.
For years, those names and Mary's marriage place were all the information I had concerning her origins. Unfortunately, there was only one strong candidate for a possible father named John Brown in the county Mary came from, and no matter how I tried, I could not link him to a daughter named Mary or Emeline or even one close to the right age. Many other folks have gone ahead and linked this John Brown to Mary on their trees, but I couldn't bring myself to do that. There were no records of any kind naming a Ruth Nelson in that county either, nor any marriages between a Brown and a Nelson within a useful timeframe. I could not find any records at all for Mary prior to her marriage to John M. Armstrong in 1848. I was stumped.
Digging Deeper
A few months ago, I decided to look through every Ancestry tree that named Mary, to see if there was any clue I had missed. I scrolled through tree after tree of the same repeated information, questionable connections, and dead ends. And then I found one that was different. Instead of John Brown and Ruth Nelson, Mary's parents were given as Vincent Brown and Elizabeth Wilson.
I contacted the person who had built the tree to see where this information came from, and he told me he had researched that branch (outside his direct line) decades before, and did not know where the documentation was anymore. But he had made a note in Vincent's timeline about the guardianship of his heirs, giving the initials of one of his children born between his marriage in 1828 and his death in 1834 as M. E. Brown.This was enough to get me started again. I began researching Vincent Brown and Elizabeth Wilson, and right away I started finding more clues.
In 1839, Elizabeth Wilson Brown remarried to Jonathan Routh, which was sometimes spelled (and probably pronounced) "Ruth". Mary's death certificate does not name the informant, but it was likely to have been one of Mary's daughters who lived locally. It is easy to imagine that they might have called their grandmother "Grandma Ruth", and assumed that to have been her first name. They might also have known that her husband (long gone by the time Mary's children were born) was called Jon, and assumed him to have been Mary's father, i.e., John Brown.
On the 1840 census, the household of Jonathan Routh included two girls close to Mary's age, not accounted for among the known children of Jonathan's first marriage, making them most likely daughters of Elizabeth.
On Elizabeth Wilson Brown Routh's 1892 probate record, all of her surviving heirs are named, including several grandchildren from her deceased children, and one surviving daughter: Mary Ernest. By that time, Mary E. Brown Armstrong had remarried to a man named Albert Ernst. Unfortunately, the names of Mary's children are not listed in Elizabeth's probate record.
And just today, I took another look at Mary's death certificate, and do you know what? It doesn't say Nelson at all! Right there on the document are a plethora of W's which I or anyone else could have compared with the name at any time in the last 114 years, and seen that it has been Wilson all along. We all just took for granted that the original transcription was correct.
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