RLP 270: Anglicizing a Name and Discovering a Migration Path: John D. Isenhour

Nicole (1s):
This is Research Like a Pro episode 270 Anglicizing a Name and Discovering, a Migration Path John D Eisenhower Welcome to research Like a Pro a genealogy podcast about taking your research to the next level. Hosted by Nicole Dyer and Diana Elder accredited Genealogist professional Diana and Nicole are the mother daughter team at family Locket dot com and the authors of Research Like, a pro A Genealogist guide with Robin Wirthlin. They also co-authored the Companion Volume Research Like a Pro with D n a, Join, Diana, and Nicole as they discuss how to stay organized, make progress in their research and solve difficult cases.

Nicole (42s):
Let’s go the sponsor of today’s episode of Research Like a Pro is newspapers.com the largest online newspaper archive. Hi everyone Welcome to research Like a Pro.

Diana (54s):
Hi. Nicole, how are you today?

Nicole (56s):
Great. What’s going on?

Diana (58s):
Well, last week I did a whole course at the Brigham Young University Education Week on creating and sharing family history. So I shared some of my favorite presentations on that topic. And, it was fun to be in person and meet with family historians and talk about things like heirlooms and how to research and write about your skeletons in the family history closet, organizing your research So. it was a fun week and kind of something a little bit different than I usually do.

Nicole (1m 30s):
Wonderful. It is so important to write about our family history, what we’re learning and preserve that for the future.

Diana (1m 36s):
It is, and it’s really fun to sometimes think of a different angle. So, if you get tired of doing, you know, the research and things like land and tax records like we’ll talk about today, sometimes it’s fun just to go and research the history of an heirloom, you know, do something a little bit different, kind of reinvigorate yourself with a little bit different take on your research So. it was fun to give people some ideas about that. And of course, organizing all of the paper and your digital files is so important. I know I don’t feel like I’m doing real research unless I’m organized and have my process going. My Airtable going to do my research Log and timeline.

Diana (2m 18s):
It’s just good to have some things set in stone that you always do when you’re working on your research.

Nicole (2m 24s):
Absolutely, and the biggest thing for me is that I don’t repeat my work when I do it right the first time.

Diana (2m 31s):
Yeah, absolutely. We don’t wanna be clicking around and looking at things multiple times without recording those. Yeah. Well, speaking of Airtable We, have our Airtable quick reference guide available from the website, which can get you going if you’ve kind of been stumped on Airtable. Really great reference for you. And then coming up we have our September Webinar for our Research Like, a Pro Webinar series. And this will be on Saturday, September 23rd at 11:00 AM Mountain Time. And Heidi Mathis will be presenting Berkhart slag, a mid 19th Century German case with indirect evidence.

Diana (3m 13s):
And Heidi tells us who were the parents of Berkhart sch slag, a mid 19th Century German immigrant indirect documentary evidence points to parents. Does D N A evidence support this hypothesis? So this should be fun to see how Heidi has used D N A with some German research. And then we have coupons available from our newsletter occasionally, so we’ll make sure you are getting that each week so that you know when we are running a sale on any of our courses or other offerings. And then this autumn, we have some fun conferences. We’ve got the Utah Genealogical Association Summit of Excellence on the 22nd through the 23rd of September.

Diana (3m 58s):
And I’ll pre presenting two classes live there, problem solving with pre 1850 census and then using ethnicity and estimates in your D N A So. it would be fun to have you join me on those live Zoom classes. And there are also lots of other presenters and choices. That’s a fun experience. And then for those who are working on D N A, we’ve got the East Coast Genetic Genealogy Conference, which is in person but also has a virtual offering and Nicole and I are both presenting on demand lectures for that. And then we will be in person at the Professional Management Conference, which is sponsored or put on by the Association of Professional Genealogists in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Diana (4m 47s):
And there will also be a virtual element for that. So we would love to see you in person or online.

Nicole (4m 54s):
I’m looking forward to those. Today we have a listener spotlight from Colleen Kennedy. She commented on our YouTube podcast, episode 2 58. She said This was such a valuable podcast for me. Learning how to save Views in Airtable was exactly the step I was struggling to learn. I didn’t understand that all one has to do is duplicate a view and then rename it. I wanted to record not only how my known relatives matched unknown matches using the D N A match details table, but also how other unknown matches who were in the same genetic group matched each other. The system I developed was cumbersome because I added a new table called Genetic Group Checker just for my unknown D N A matches.

Nicole (5m 35s):
But alas then I couldn’t profit from the nifty Santa Morgan checker built into the D N A match details table nor easily view how my known relatives and unknown matches all match a specific D N A match. Given your excellent directions, I now understand that by using different Views I can incorporate my unknown D N A matches who are in a genetic group all within the D N A match details table and just code my known relatives as D N A match plus rei. And as you said, we all have to experiment with Airtable and then tweak it to fit our needs. Thank you for sharing your tips with us. Well Thank you Colleen, that was so fun to hear how you’re using Airtable for your D N A matches and I love how you’re calling your known relatives res.

Diana (6m 21s):
That is so fun. And I have to admit that Discovering, the Views and how we can rename those and save Views was so amazing. It’s fun when you Discover something that is just so helpful for your research. So thanks for writing in. Well, today we are going to talk about our ancestor John D Eisenhower and how he anglicized his name and his Migration path. So it’s kind of fun when we take an ancestor that’s known to have a specific origin and in this case, these Eisenhower Ancestors immigrated from the German region of Europe in the 17 hundreds and they retained that specific German spelling with the E i ss E N H A U E R.

Diana (7m 13s):
Tell my ancestor John Anglicize the spelling to Eisenhower spelled I SS E N H O U R. So I think it’s really fun to notice in our family history when those breaks happen and maybe hypothesize y. Now If, you haven’t heard me talk about Eisenhower’s before. I’ll just reiterate that. Yes, we are fourth cousins, five times removed with President Dwight d Eisenhower. And if you know how he spells his name, it’s sort of like the original German, he retains the e i and then changes the Hower part H O W E R. And of course we have seen almost every variation you can think of for this name.

Diana (7m 56s):
So it’s fun to look at those and see how different branches of the family change the spelling and then kind of just stick with that spelling. But previous research on the John D Eisenhower family had not gone back to his North Carolina origins, but we had focused on the Civil War. He had three sons that fought Valentine Moses and Josiah. And I knew about the family coming forward from his immigration location in Missouri, but really didn’t know much about why he immigrated to Cape Gerardo County Missouri and didn’t know exactly when he arrived, knew he was from, was from Lincoln County North Carolina.

Diana (8m 39s):
And so I really just wanted to focus on this whole idea of why did John migrate out to Missouri from North Carolina and when did he, and maybe I would be able to Discover more about that spelling of the name. So when we’re writing about our Ancestors and we have all these different spellings, what I like to do in my reports or in a blog post, wherever I’m writing, I like to acknowledge that there are all these different spelling variations and I often like to write them all out, but then I just settle on one spelling and I say, I’ll use the spelling I S E N H O U R unless quoting a record.

Diana (9m 20s):
And then if I’m doing a source citation or quoting a specific census or tax record, I’ll use the spelling as it is. But otherwise, as I’m talking about the family, I’ll just use that spelling that I’ve decided I will use. I think that all started because I wrote a report one time and this was at the very beginning of learning how to write reports and I didn’t do that and I was using all these different spellings. Somebody said that was kind of confusing. So I learned the

Nicole (9m 53s):
Name Eisenhower is just wonderful but difficult when researching. And I remember when we first started doing family history Discovering that the way it was spelled in records was different and there was even one record where it was indexed so weird that we couldn’t even find that record until we found like we accidentally found it. I feel like

Diana (10m 14s):
That was the one that it looks like goner, it looks like G O C H N O R. And whenever I use that in a presentation and ask people to say what they think it is, nobody ever gets it right because it is really difficult to see.

Nicole (10m 28s):
Yeah, and most people don’t think of the name Eisenhower spelled with an I because of President Eisenhower with the E. Right. Unless you know an Eisenhower with an I that name just gotta love it. Well let’s go back to the earliest Eisenhower’s to appear in North Carolina. So this is where they originated and the first time they appeared was when Johannes John Eisenhower was listed and he was born in Swara Dolphin Pennsylvania and died about 1821 in Conniver Kaaba North Carolina, and I dunno how to say those names. So by the age of 40 this John, who was the Elder John, he had moved from his birthplace of Pennsylvania to North Carolina.

Nicole (11m 11s):
And in 1792 North Carolina granted John Eisenhower 350 acres of land in Lincoln County on the branch of Lyle Creek. And I just love how these early grant records focus on where the land is by putting them near a creek.

Diana (11m 27s):
Well yes, because they needed to have water and access to water and so that’s where people settled first. you know, If, you had opportunity, that’s where you’re gonna go. And I do love how they always use those landmarks. Well creeks often will be more stationary than the old oak tree, which they often use in those kind of surveys.

Nicole (11m 47s):
Exactly. And those meets and bounds land surveys used all kinds of interesting landmarks. I’ve seen some funny ones, but yeah, the trees are pretty normal for that. So the deeded, well the grant described the land and meets and bounds and this was the same survey system of the original colonies. Then 15 years later, John Eisenhower senior divided this land parcel between John Eisenhower Jr. Philip Eisenhower and Daniel Eisenhower h deeded was dated October 13th, 1817. And it’s great because it mentioned that the land was adjoining that same creek, Lyle’s Creek.

Nicole (12m 27s):
So those kind of clues in land records can be so helpful. Now we can use this indirect evidence from the deeds that all those three Eisenhower were the son of John Eisenhower senior, while the 1810 census of Lincoln County North Carolina listed five Eisenhower men, George and Valentine, who were both over age 45 Daniel who was age 18 to 25, John Junior age 26 to 44, and John senior age over age 45. And the household of John Eisenhower Jr contained a few other people, but they were only noted as tick marks of course in the appropriate columns. So John Junior was probably that male age 26 through 44, the oldest male because the other males were all under 10.

Nicole (13m 13s):
So he was the head of household there. We can use the age range of 26 to 44 to calculate his possible birth year range. If, you subtract those ages from 1810, you get a range of 1766 to 1784. So we know about when he was born. So the household, like I said, included John Eisenhower Jr. And then four males under 10 and two females under 10 and one female aged 26 through 44, likely his wife by the 1820 census enumeration, John Eisenhower Jr. Had almost certainly moved from Lincoln County North Carolina because that census in Lincoln County named George who was over 45 and John over 45.

Nicole (13m 60s):
And then Philip and Daniel who were 26 through 44 and Joseph who was also 26 through 44. So there was no designation of junior or senior given for John age 45 plus. So he was the only John in the county in 1820. So was this John Junior or John Senior And. it seems probably more likely that it was John. So let’s see how we know that. Well some of our favorite records to help us in a case like this are tax records. They were taken yearly. So they really help us to understand when someone moved away or died in 1818, John Eisenhower senior paid taxes for John Eisenhower Jr. Because by law white males between 21 and 45 were to pay a poll tax.

Nicole (14m 43s):
And neither John Jr nor John Sr had paid poll tax. So we can guess that John Jr wasn’t living in the county anymore since John Senior paid the property tax for him. John Senior was too old to pay the poll tax. But what about the 1819 tax list Again, John Senior paid the tax for John Jr. This time though it looks like the writing says his on perhaps meaning his son.

Diana (15m 5s):
Yeah, it was exciting to see that tax list and see that we have got actually in writing something that looks like it’s his son and looking at the image again, I think that’s the only interpretation I can give to that, especially since he inherited this land or his father deeded the land on Lyle’s Creek. All this land is on Lyle’s Creek. And one fun thing about that tax list of 1818, this George Eisenhower, who was also an older gentleman over the age of 45, he’s on a totally different piece of water, he’s on long shoal, whatever that is. So that lets you know that perhaps he’s a cousin, maybe he’s a brother, but he’s not in this more immediate family of the John Eisenhower senior and the sons of his.

Diana (15m 55s):
So that’s why we love land and tax records when we’re this far back in these states. And then even earlier in the colony, sometimes it’s the only way that you can figure out family relationships.

Nicole (16m 7s):
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Nicole (16m 47s):
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Diana (16m 51s):
So where did John Eisenhower Jr go If he is not living in this land anymore in this area, he’s not paying taxes, something’s going on here. So I wanted to look more at the deeds and I did find that on August 24th, 1819, there was a deeded between John Eisenhower Jr. Of Green County, Tennessee and Daniel Moser of Lincoln County North Carolina. So I love this deed because it told us that John had begun his move westward and in 1819 he was in Green County, Tennessee, which If you look at the map, it’s just over the North Carolina Tennessee border.

Diana (17m 33s):
So he didn’t go that far yet and he had likely just moved west and his family knew right where he was and he’s still selling this land while in a new location So. it was really fun to find that notification of Green County, Tennessee because we had had no idea of that location before and now there’s a new place to research, but unfortunately East Tennessee is kind of difficult and those census returns for 1820 were lost. So John should have been there in the 1820 census. So I wanted to look at tax lists, see if we could see him in the tax list.

Diana (18m 15s):
But those tax lists also have not survived. So they had tax lists for 1809 to 1817, but he was still in North Carolina in 1817 and then they have 1828 to 1862. Those are all microfilmed, but a search for 18 16, 18, 17 and 1828 didn’t show him. So he probably was there in between those. So you know, another avenue for research is perhaps I could contact the county courthouse or Tennessee archives, see if maybe there’s some surviving tax list from that era.

Diana (18m 55s):
But I would imagine that they would’ve been microfilmed if they were there in that courthouse. So you know, sometimes we have a run of records and then we have a a gap and this appears to be a gap. So another possibility for research was the land since I knew he was interested in the land and I looked in the grantee index, didn’t show him receiving any land, but the grantor index had an item of interest. And, it was a deeded dated August 3rd, 1835, so this is like 15 years later. But it does mention a John Eisenhower and a Persis Eisenhower And.

Diana (19m 36s):
it named these two Eisenhower men as heirs of Philip Henkel, along with several other men, most of them Henkel. And they seemed like this was a German community. These people all had a German surname in common and I was really interested in this name of Persis Eisenhower who could be a previously unknown line of John. So that is another avenue for future research. I haven’t tackled the heirs of Philip Henkel or Perus yet to see if I can learn more about this brief time the Eisenhower family spent in Green County, Tennessee. But just that little mentioned in the land record gave me so much more information and gave me a new place to research.

Diana (20m 18s):
So that was really fun.

Nicole (20m 20s):
Yes. Well next John D Eisenhower and his family could have arrived in Cape Gerardo County Missouri as early as 1821. And that’s because their son Barnett reported his birth as being in Missouri. And the earliest mention of John on a record there was 1824 when he purchased land from the estate of Henrie Eker to pay the deceased debts. Although the deed was not issued until 1831, John was taxed for the the 80 acres in 1828. Then John’s land was described in the deed as the west half southeast quarter, section five township 30 north range 10 east, marked by the red star in the map So.

Nicole (21m 0s):
if you look in our blog post that goes along with this, you can see a red star showing where it’s located in the midst of all the different lots that were laid off. So in this case study we have two kinds of land records, right? We have meets and bounds, but then also the township range. While John joined a group of people also from Lincoln County, north Carolina of German origin and they settled in Lawrence Township with Marble Hill becoming the county seat when Bollinger County was formed from Cape Gerardo County in 1851. Well, why do we think John D Eisenhower went to Missouri? There is a historical article that described the land and perhaps that was the incentive.

Nicole (21m 42s):
The article says its lofty situation renders it not only picturesque, but what is probably of greater importance, very healthful and entirely free from malaria vapors that hang low over marshy lands located in the foothills of the Ozarks. The hilly land was heavily wooded with hickory ash, oak, walnut, pine and cottonwood. Although the soil was fairly rich, the land itself was not the best for farming. The country was good for growing fruit such as apples, pears, peaches, apricots, strawberries, and grapes. So who knows why he went to Cape Gerardo, but probably something about the land, maybe the idea of an orchard was enticing. So where did these settlers who came to Bollinger County originate settlers from North Carolina primarily settled the area with some exceptions.

Nicole (22m 25s):
The first settler in the area was George Frederick Bollinger, son of Henrie Bollinger of Lincoln County North Carolina and namesake for the county. Of course, Lawrence Township was named for John Lawrence, who traveled with Bollinger to the area in 1805 and settled along the big and little whitewater rivers. Well, news of this settlement likely traveled between Missouri and Lincoln County influencing John Eisenhower’s decision to move west. Eventually settlers usually sought similar land conditions and the hilly Ozarks offered very similar agricultural opportunities that Lincoln County North Carolina had. So did John’s German background affect his settlement choice of Cape Gerardo?

Nicole (23m 5s):
Well, as mentioned earlier, the early settler George Frederick Bollinger was among the first to settle the area watered by the Whitewater River in 1799. And he was joined by others from the North Carolina Piedmont. And that’s a term that’s given to Lincoln Burke, Rowan, and Cabarrus counties in North Carolina. These settlers actually became known as the whitewater Dutch and retained their language and customs for many years. In the early 19th, Century visitors to the region reported the settlers had preserved their language and traditions better than the Germans of Pennsylvania. And that’s really interesting and it’s probably because of their isolation. By the time John Eisenhower and his family arrived about 20 years later, the settlers could have started to mix with the settlers of Scotch Irish or English origins after John’s death in 1844 and his children’s dispersal to Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana.

Nicole (23m 57s):
The Eisenhower German Roots were probably just a memory, but it is neat to think about them preserving their traditions there.

Diana (24m 4s):
It really is. And I think it’s instructive for us to think about this idea of seeing if there was an ethnic group that stuck together as they were migrating west or south or north, you know, wherever they went. I think we too often just envision our Ancestors moving out all by themselves and not considering this community around them. So I really love learning all about this area and making those connections. How did John Eisenhower fare in this new home in Missouri? I think it’s so instructive to look at a topographical map and see what the land looks like. So when I went to Google Earth and pinned Lincoln County, north Carolina, green County, Tennessee and Cape Gerardo County Missouri, I saw that this was just similar land.

Diana (24m 56s):
They were all in the foothills of a larger mountain range. So John’s land was in the foothills of the Ozarks And, it resembled the north Carolina Piedmont with hills, plenty of water and trees. And although the soil may not have been as rich as that of the Mississippi floodplain, the settlers did look for creeks and rivers that supported the type of agriculture they knew. So the North Carolina Piedmont area where John had been born and actively worked to support his family was primarily made up of small holdings. These were not large cotton plantations, this was little farms where farmers raise their crops to feed their animals and their families and they barter for other goods.

Diana (25m 42s):
And this type of subsistence agriculture transferred out to the Ozark foothills of Missouri where John and his family ended up in the early 1820s. Now If, you are lucky enough to have a will. You can see what was important to the family’s lifestyle and the ancestors’ occupation. So when I looked closely at John Eisenhower’s will, and instead of looking so much at who inherited what, just to get the real idea of what his property was, you know, I saw so many interesting things. He had a large number of animals, especially hogs, which I learned were well suited to the hilly terrain of the Ozarks.

Diana (26m 30s):
And corn was an easy crop to grow and fed the hogs as well as the people. So we have a lot of hogs, we have sheep, which provided wool, we had cattle providing dairy products. And then he had all the basic tools, axes, handsaw, plow, wagon, windmill. And when I learned more about thematic, which was in his will, I learned that it was for cutting through Roots and keeping the land cleared. So I can just imagine in that very fertile soil with all the rain, we had trees that wanted to keep popping up everywhere and so clearing it wasn’t a one-time thing.

Diana (27m 12s):
He also valued his rifle, which he willed to one of his sons. And the rifle would have served him well in hunting wild game and defending his family and home against any intruders. And his orchard likely grew a variety of fruit and he would’ve raised grain to feed his stocks. So he was typical of the era, they were trying to be self-contained and grow or raise much of what they would actually need, but then also use the the extras to barter for other things they weren’t growing or to sell for things like cloth that they could, you know, not easily make So.

Diana (27m 55s):
It’s really fun to look at these wheels and and just imagine our Ancestors and all the things that went into them surviving, you know, out here in a new new piece of land.

Nicole (28m 8s):
Wonderful. I love all of that background information. Like a lot of other settlers of German origins, John Eisenhower Ingleside, his surname and like we mentioned earlier, he used the I, so he dropped the E and his name was starting with an I. So the records for the Eisenhower family in North Carolina, they reflect a mix of both spellings with the E and without. However, once John D Eisenhower arrived in Missouri, he completely dropped the E and changed the more German version of Eisenhower permanently to the more anglicized version with the I. And it’s interesting to see how census tax land and probate records all reflect the Anglicized version and his children’s records are the same.

Nicole (28m 55s):
The children scattered to various localities in Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky. And their German Roots were seemingly forgotten if their name was any indication. John’s granddaughter, Eliza and Eisenhower is our ancestor and she was even supposed to have been full-blooded Cherokee according to one family member. But Diana disproved that with a discovery that Eliza’s second husband, Jacob Meek was one quarter Choctaw and their children were one eighth Choctaw. So although Eliza had no Native American bloodlines, we found out where that family story originated. It was neat for Diana to Discover the name change and Migration of this family and studying this can lead to even more discoveries as shown by this case So.

Nicole (29m 44s):
if you have any interesting names in your family that maybe were anglicized or changed, then it can be an interesting project to research.

Diana (29m 52s):
That makes me think that I should do a similar project on my Maita name of Schultz because the same thing happened that you know, the original records in Germany and Pennsylvania where the traditional S C H U L T C, but then somewhere about mid 18 hundreds in Tennessee our branch changed to S H U L T Ss, which growing up everybody always spelled it wrong because it had been ized from the traditional German name. But even sometimes in within the branch of the family, it seemed like one ancestor would start using the Z at the end or change something a little bit. So names are fascinating to research and it’s fun to see what you can learn about your family.

Diana (30m 36s):
Well thanks everyone for listening and we hope you can go make more discoveries maybe on those interesting surnames you have. We will talk to you next time. Alright,

Nicole (30m 46s):
Bye everyone.

Diana (30m 47s):
Bye-bye.

Nicole (30m 49s):
Thank you for listening. We hope that something you heard today will help you make progress in your research. If you want to learn more, purchase our books, Research Like, a Pro and Research Like a Pro with d a on amazon.com and other booksellers. You can also register for our online courses or study groups of the same names. Learn more at family Locket dot com slash services. To share your progress and ask questions, join our private Facebook group by sending us your book receipt or joining our courses to get updates in your email inbox each Monday. Subscribe to our newsletter at FamilyLocket dot com slash newsletter. Please Subscribe rate and review our podcast. We read each review and are so thankful for them. We hope you’ll start now to Research Like a Pro.