The Secrets We Find

Lori Olson White wrote an interesting article recently, “The Academics of Secrets” that made me think of the secrets I’d discovered while doing local research and genealogy. My grandparents would probably roll over in their graves if they knew I was writing about some of the things I’ve found, but to me, it just shows that things really haven’t changed so that much in the last two-hundred years.

While digging and tracking my own family, I’ve found that my great-great grandfather committed suicide. My grandmother would have been a teenager when it occurred, so one would think she would have known the circumstances. Evidently, it was never talked about, because less than 100 years later, none of the descendants I’ve talked to knew about it until we started doing genealogy research.

I found his death certificate first. After that startling cause of death - broken neck from hanging - I went in search of newspaper articles. I found them. Interestingly, my grandmother had saved his obituaries that appeared in the papers, and she gave those to me. No one saved the articles telling what had actually happened.

Feb 7, 1931 Zanesville newspaper

When I was growing up, our grandparents led us to believe that very few children were conceived out of wedlock. That was just unheard of!

Well, not so much.

My great-great-great grandmother, Mary (Vanhorn) Simeral had an older sister, Rachel. Rachel was born in 1803. Her family came to Belmont County as a child and lived on the corner of what is now Kinney Road and Beallsville-New Castle Road. Rachel had a son in 1839. She was not married. She never married. She passed when she was in her early 70s, around the year 1877. Her son, Clark, died during the Civil War. (We learned about him several articles ago.)

Just down the road, certainly within walking distance, Mary (Vanhorn) Simeral’s daughter Catherine (Simeral) Creighton married into a family with a similar circumstance. Catherine’s sister-in-law, Mary Ann Creighton, was born about 1845. She had a daughter, Elizabeth, our of wedlock in June 1871. Sadly, Mary Ann passed away in December 1872 leaving little Lizzie to be raised by her siblings, John and Sarah, still of the homeplace.

Neither John or Sarah Creighton ever married. They share the same tombstone at the cemetery, so many people over the years on findagrave.com and in cemetery transcripts have assumed they were husband and wife. Likewise, Lizzie never married and never moved from the original homeplace. She passed away in 1941.

In the same neighborhood, (almost the same plot of land!), Ida Kinney married George Powell January 4, 1899. Seven months later, their oldest son was born, August 3, 1899. This would have been my grandpa’s older brother. I can still remember the day my mom was transcribing something in an old Bible and realized the math on this one. She was a tad shocked!

My grandparents would have been mortified - unbelievably embarrassed. I can still remember them saying, “The world is going to hell in a handbasket.” Really? Is it really any different today? We just know more about everyone else’s business these days.

And I know more about what happened back then, too, thanks to the internet. A little ironic.

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What’s done is done. It’s in the past. Nothing I can do about it now. I’m not embarrassed by their lives. They were human, just like us.

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Thanks for joining me at The Creighton Cabin this week. We are in a drought in Ohio. The heat has been relentless. Enduring this kind of weather 150 years ago in the cabin would have been brutal. I can’t imagine cooking over a fire. Creeks are dry. Farming is difficult now - I can’t imagine back then. Farmers around here now have barely gotten a second cutting of hay, and it’s been a small cutting. It’s hard on livestock. So even though it’s rough now, we can be thankful we have deeper wells and air conditioning, among other things.

There is just so much to be thankful for.