Elizabeth Mary Hockman – The Next Step

I started doing a genealogy happy dance a few weeks ago when I had a breakthrough.  I have posted a couple of times (here and here) about the questions I have for my great grandmother and who her biological parents were.  I have become fairly certain that she was not born to the John and Margaret Earhart family where she was raised, and that she was not related to either of them.  Although I have looked many times, I haven’t yet found a birth record for her (although it was before Ohio required the registration of births).

In broadening the kinds of records and information I was using, I went back to her marriage record from 1873 and noted that she and Alex Boothby had been married by Rev. William Brooks, a Minister of the Gospel (although she used the Earhart last name for the license).  Curious about Rev. Brooks, I did an online search for him and for churches in vicinity, and found that William Brooks was a Baptist minister in Brown County, Ohio.  The search also showed he was married to Abigail Rounds, so he was already connected to a Maine family in my database that had migrated to southwestern Ohio.  I looked for census records to begin the search for a possible connection to Elizabeth Mary.  These records showed me the children of William and Abigail who I added and started following.  When I looked on ancestry.com to see what records they had, I found that one of their daughters, Maramis, had married a Michael Hockman.  Could these be my Elizabeth Mary Hockman’s parents?  Their marriage date of 1852 in Brown County, Ohio made it possible.  My feet started twitching in a  happy dance.

The piece of the puzzle that convinces me is the probate record I saw referenced on ancestry.com for William Brooks.  I moved on to searching on familysearch.org, and found the marriage record for Maramis and Michael as well as William’s will and probate records.  The very first page of the court record was the application to probate William’s will which listed his widow Abigail and his next of kin by relationship and where in Ohio each lived.  Third and fourth on the list were Henry Hawkman, Grandson and Elizabeth Boothby, Grand Daughter!  The other living children were listed, daughters by married name.  Two children presumably had died, neither referred to directly in the will:  Maramis mother of the Hockman children, and Joseph who died as a child.

There is more I have learned – which leads to more questions and so far no answers.  MIchael Hockman remarried in March of 1856, which leads me to believe (without any evidence so far) that his first wife, Maramis, died between the birth of Elizabeth Mary in Jun 1855 and March of 1856.  Michael and Minerva appear in the 1860 census with three children, including Henry and 2 younger children but not Elizabeth Mary.  We know that by that time she was living in the household of John and Margaret Earhart not too far away.  By 1870 the Michael Hockman household had increased by several more children and moved out of Brown County to Clinton County.  It is possible that Michael served in the Civil War but I haven’t yet seen any records beyond indexes for that.  Possibly his pension record will answer some questions.

I am left wanting to know why Elizabeth Mary didn’t live with Michael and Minerva, at least for very long.  And why did she not go to her Brooks grandparents or to another one of her mother’s relatives?  Why did Henry live with Michael and Minerva for a longer time, and when did he leave their household?  At what point did Elizabeth Mary find out about her Brooks and Rounds relatives or did she always know?  Did she know that the minister who married her and Alex Boothby was her grandfather or did she only find out later?