Wesley Johnston     
Apr 28, 2020

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I am going to attach the Ohio marriage record of Minnie Bowden, age 48, 
daughter of Robert Harrison and Mary Ward, which Daniel Ward is one of the
five images Daniel Ward included in his e-mail. I am hoping that sending
the images separately will allow them to go through Google Groups limitations.

But this marriage of Minnie, showing her parents as Robert Harrison and 
Mary Ward, brings back a problem that I have set aside: several trees show
Minnie as their daughter, but I am not yet convinced. I strongly suspect that
Minnie was in fact the natural child of one of Robert and Mary's unmarried
daughters and that the grandparents then raised the child as their own to
remove any cloud over their daughter.

The dates just do not fit for Minnie to be the child of Robert and Mary. At 
this 1903 marriage, she gave her age as 48, thus born about 1855. This was
when Mary Ward was about 54 years old and had borne her last previously
known child about 8 years earlier when she was about 46. And that 1846-7
birth (Caroline Ward) was 8-9 years after the last previous birth so that
I suspect Caroline may have been a similar natural child.

Mary Ward Harrison's daughters were born about 1829-1835. Harriet (about 
1829) would have been 18 in 1846-7 when Caroline was born (1861 census has
Caroline age 14). The 1861 census shows Harriet's marriage explicitly as
1846. But I have found no marriage record yet to verify that. My suspicion is
that Caroline was really the daughter of Harriet. DNA of some of Harriet's
descendants would show -- on average -- half the expected amount of DNA if
this is correct.

In the 1910 Ohio census, Minnie is shown as having been married 3 times. So 
Mr. Bowden was not her first husband and so far I have not researched her
enough to identify her first husband. In the 1910 census, she said she was
53 years old (putting her birth about 1856-7, though women tended to age
less than 10 years between census years). She said she was the mother of
two children, both of whom were living but were not in the household. She
said she came to the US in 1885, thus at about age 28-30, though with what
surname is not yet known.

Mary Ward's daughters Harriet and Sarah had married well before Minnie's 
birth, so that the candidates left to be Minnie's birth mother are Mary 
Ward's daughters Mary Jane and Amarilla. Once again, the DNA if half the
expected value would indicate that Mary Ward was the grandmother and not
the mother of Minnie.

We have no DNA tests yet from descendants of either Caroline or Minnie.

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