Seeing Double: 52 Ancestors 2024 Prompt “Changing Names”

 

Untangling the Married Names of Two Susan Mary Weirs

Susan Mary Weir: 1815-1897 (Maternal 2^nd Great-Grandaunt)
Susan Mary Weir: 1826-1879 (Maternal First Cousin 4x Removed)

I was very confused when I started working on Samuel Miller Weir’s daughter Susan Mary Weir. I was getting Ancestry hints showing two very different birthdates some ten-plus years apart, two husbands who lived in different states, and a variety of crazy death dates. I realized that there must be two Susan Mary Weirs, both born in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and born to two different Weir fathers who were related to one another. But teasing out which woman was which was still amazingly difficult, in part because several other trees on Ancestry had connected the wrong married name to the wrong woman, and in part because one Susan Mary seems to have disappeared without a death or burial record.

So who were the two women’s parents?

Susan Mary Weir #1 was born September 25, 1815 to Samuel Miller Weir and wife Elizabeth Vanlandingham. Susan Mary Weir #2 was born in 1826 to James Weir and wife Anna Cowman Rumsey. Samuel Miller Weir and James Weir were brothers, so the two Susan Mary Weirs were first cousins. Samuel Miller Weir was a farmer in Paradise, Kentucky, while his brother James lived fourteen miles away in Greenville, Kentucky and was a successful merchant.

Susan Mary Weir #1 was reasonably easy to track once I had determined her married name. Her life followed a traditional path of marriage to a man from her home county, raising several children with him, and dying in old age.

Susan married on Valentine’s Day 1838. She was 22 years old. Her husband, Thomas Jefferson Rice, was 34, twelve years her senior, and farmed in Muhlenberg County. This was his second marriage. His first wife, Lucinda, had died in 1836, leaving him to raise their little daughter, Lucy, alone.

Susan soon had more children to raise in addition to Lucy. Susan and Thomas had four daughters (Elizabeth, Nancy or Nannie, Frances or Fannie, and Susan) and one son (Samuel Ezekiel) over an 18 year period. Interestingly, and even more confusingly for me, two of their daughters, Elizabeth and Fannie, married Rice cousins, so both their maiden and married surnames were Rice.

Susan’s husband, Thomas Jefferson Rice, died April 7, 1856 at the young age of 51 years. I have been unable to find his cause of death. Susan never remarried, raising her children alone. In her later years, she lived with her children’s families. At the time of the 1870 census, she was living with Elizabeth and her husband James Rice, and at the time of the 1880 census, she was living with Fannie and Francis Rice and their children.

Susan Weir Rice died October 13, 1897 in Muhlenberg County, and was buried in the Rice Family Cemetery in Greenville. The only death record available is her headstone. She was 82 years old.

Susan Mary Weir #2 had a rather interesting life and a mysterious death. Susan was the youngest of James Weir’s five children with his first wife Anna Cowman Rumsey. Her mother died in 1838 when she was twelve years old. Her father remarried a year later, and then married a third time in 1844 when Susan was eighteen. Sadly, her father died the following year on August 9, 1845, and her stepmother gave birth later that year to Susan’s half-sister, Ruth, who seems to have died early in childhood.

Susan married August 27, 1846, a year and two weeks after her father’s death. She was twenty years old, and her husband, a teacher in Muhlenberg County named William Lewis Green, was also twenty. William’s father was a judge, and another Green relative, Rev. Joshua Green, performed Susan and William’s marriage.

William became a minister, and by the time of the 1860 census, he was serving a Presbyterian church in Dane County, Wisconsin. The following article suggests he had held a clergy position in Green Bay and then in Watertown, Wisconsin. He and Susan had two children, William, born June 15, 1849, and Harriet, born in October of 1848.

The 1870 census found them in a new state, Kansas, where William was working as a minister in the town of Stanger.

Between those two periods, I found a rather unsettling newspaper notice. Over the course of several days during the month of September 1866, the Louisville Daily Courier ran notices of a “Commissioner’s Sale of Valuable Town Property in Hopkinsville, Ky”. The notice stated that the sale was being held as the result of a judgment rendered in the Christian County Circuit Court in a lawsuit. The plaintiffs were “William L. Green, Matthew T. Scott, Guardian of Harriet and William L. Green, infants of William L. and Susan Green, and Harriet Green and William L. Green”. The defendant was Susan Green.

What could this lawsuit mean? It appears to have been an attempt by William to gain control of land Susan inherited from her father. James Weir had considerable real estate holdings over several counties in Kentucky, and gave these Hopkinsville, Kentucky lots to his daughter in his will. See the relevant passage below. Apparently William took his own wife to court to force her to sell her inheritance to support her own children. This seems a very un-Christian-like action by Rev. Green. Interestingly, the county Commissioner who would be handling the land sale resulting from the suit was a Thomas Green, probably another member of the Reverend’s family. I wonder just how fairly Susan was treated in this lawsuit, and how many members of the jury were related to her husband.

The Greens moved frequently during their marriage. I wonder how much this could be attributed to a very unhappy marriage. I can’t believe that Susan wasn’t deeply hurt by William’s lawsuit. She probably felt helpless with her only assets stripped from her, leaving her totally dependent on William. Or perhaps she was physically or mentally ill, and was unable to manage her affairs, which led William to proactively control her assets. I wish I could find the records of the lawsuit that would explain her husband’s reasons for suing her.

Poor Susan seems to just disappear after the family left Kansas. Apparently they relocated to Illinois where they appear in the 1880 census in Peoria. By that point, the power in the Green family appears to have shifted to Susan and William’s son, William. Then 29 years old, young William appears as the head of the household, which includes his wife Bertha. He is working as a “commission merchant”. Also in the household are his sister Harriet and his father William. While William Sr. is still listed as a minister, his marital status now shows him as a widower.

So apparently Susan died at some point during the 1870s. I could find no obituaries or death notices for her in any of the various states she had lived, which is odd. I would have expected her hometown newspaper to have printed some sort of notice given her family’s prominence and wealth. The only record I was able to find was a Findagrave entry. It lists a Susan Green born around 1825 who died in December 1879 and was buried in the Springdale Cemetery in Peoria, Illinois, the same town where the rest of her family were living the following year.

While at this point, I have no definitive proof the Springdale Cemetery Susan is the correct woman, I found some information that supports my hypothesis. The Findagrave entry notes that Susan Green was “removed from cemetery Feb 9, 1923, cremated and shipped to CA by Wiltons Mortuary.” Susan’s son William became a very successful businessman involved in banking. He and his wife Bertha moved to Pasadena, California a few years before 1910. They lived in handsome homes there, and William’s obituary states he was “one of Pasadena’s foremost wealthy men.” 

One of the Pasadena homes William Green lived in around 1910.

He died January 1, 1923, and was buried with his wife in Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena. I hypothesize that his will may have provided for his mother’s body to be disinterred, cremated and buried with his body in California. The timing of her removal just weeks after his death is persuasive. Perhaps someday I will be able to find his probate records and prove my hypothesis.

As for Susan’s husband and daughter, I found some fascinating information about their lives following Susan’s death. I will present that in another blog post.

In conclusion, names can be confusing things in genealogical research. Names can be repeated across generations in a single family, or be shared by unrelated families who live in the same general area, and of course women’s names offer additional challenges as they change upon marriage.  The two Susan Mary Weirs are perfect examples of how names can be puzzling. While these two women were related and had the same birth name, they had very different lives—as different as their married surnames were.

 

Sources:

James Weir Will. Muhlenberg County Kentucky Will Book III, pages 72-75. https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-9P3G-NK3?i=323&cc=1875188

Marriage record for William Green and Susan M Weir. Kentucky, U.S., county Marriage Records, 1783-1965. https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/61372/images/TH-1971-28953-22538-3?pId=901860963

Commissioners’ Sale. Louisville Daily Courier, Louisville, KY. September 10, 1866. Newspapers.com.

Findagrave entries for Susan Rice and Susan Green. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/138666564/susan-m-green