Doubts about Thomas and Joseph Chew’s ancestry

I stumbled upon a serious flaw with my article about Andrew and Anna Chew’s children, and updated the article accordingly.

In David and Nancy McBride’s Marriage Records of Highland County, Ohio (1805-1880), I discovered the source of the commonly listed 20 March 1820 marriage date. Much to my surprise, Joseph’s wife Amelia/Emilie was a Chew before she got married.

While it’s fairly unlikely that both Joseph Chew and Emilie Chew had mothers named Anna M., but if this were the case, there’s no reason why the Anna Chew living with Joseph’s wife and children couldn’t be Joseph’s mother-in-law, and that his mother passed away before the 1850 census, or perhaps even remarried after Andrew passed away in 1830.

Additionally, in the same volume, I stumbled upon a marriage record between a Nathan Overman and a Nancy Chew–probably 21 July 1821, though the index–spanning 1817 to 1821–didn’t actually list a date. Thomas Chew was named the guardian of Nancy Chew Overman’s two children, Zebulon and Luisa, after Nancy passed away between 1841 and 1846. Typically, people name close relatives such as brothers and sisters as the guardians of their children, which raises the question of how Thomas and Nancy were related. And both Joseph and Thomas were mentioned in earlier records associated with Nancy Overman.

I already have lock-solid documentation proving that Nancy Chew Bishop was a daughter of Andrew and Anna Chew, and it’s pretty unlikely that they would name two of their daughters Nancy.

Comments are closed.