All About Mary Elizabeth - Part 1

This blog will be all about the power of the genealogy community and DNA. To start, I must take you back to the beginning...

My 2x great grandmother's name was Mary Elizabeth Ferguson. What my family and I have always known was she married William Henry Jacobs in July 23, 1881 in Perry County, Pennsylvania. They went on to have 13 children before her untimely death on May 9, 1904. She was 8 months pregnant at the time and her skirts caught fire in the open hearth she was cooking over. Both her and the infant succombed to their injuries. This left several small children, one of whom was my great grandfather David Franklin, in an orphanage when William Jacobs remarried in 1906. And this is just the beginning.

About 25 years ago, my mother attempted to start doing genealogy research on her family tree. This being before the age of the internet and her having no real idea where to start, she didn't get far. She wrote to the Perry County Historical Society of Pennsylvania several times and came up with very few clues as to who Mary Elizabeth's family may have been. Armed with only her given name (Ferguson) and her marriage certificate with the maiden name of Sheesley as well as when and how she died, the only clue we were able to surface at that time was that she showed up in the 1880 census with the last name of Sheesley. Having no way to continue the research or clarify why Mary Elizabeth's last name was different, the research died away.

About 10 years ago, I began to pick up the trail where my mother had left off with the unexpected help of my mother herself. My mother and great uncle decided to take a trip back to where Mary Elizabeth and David Franklin at this time. Part of that trip was a cemetery search to find headstones of various family members. During a cemetery search of Restland Cemetery in Perry County, my mother stumbled upon the headstone of Mary Elizabeth. Her headstone is shared with William Jacobs as well as his second wife, Elizabeth Yohn. Nearby was another shared headstone bearing the names Sarah J. McKillips, Andrew McKillips, William F. Koch, and Malinda A. Koch. My great uncle remembered a cousin having photos of a woman with "Grandmother McKillips" written on the back and remembered having an Aunt Linn (Malinda).

Armed with all of this information, we finally had a small lead as to who Mary Elizabeth's mother was. Little did we know, this was only a small piece of a very large and complicated puzzle.