Mightier Acorns

The family trees we find online are rickety things, unreliable and often unsupported by evidence. You climb them at your peril, and you should never blindly accept what they say without applying some basic critical thinking skills to evaluating what they claim. (If someone tells you they have evidence for a claim but just aren’t sharing it, that’s the same thing as not having any evidence, as far as your research should be concerned.)

You know this, but sometimes even your most careful research can lead you to a family that has been researched… let’s say “less carefully” than you might like. Whether you are curating a private tree on Ancestry or trying to help clean up a world tree at FamilySearch or WikiTree, everyone gets to a point where the only information you can find is missing sources and contradicts itself.

For me, the Piper family from Amberson Valley, Pennsylvania, is one such family. My 4th-great-grandfather and his (probable) sister both married Pipers, and I’ve had a struggle sorting out who was related to whom, and how.

Our Firm Foundation

I laid out the chain of evidence I have for my Witter ancestry on WikiTree:

• Great-grandfather, Howard Ray “Dick” Witter (1890-1963)
• 2nd-great, Abraham Howard Witter (1859-1918)
• 3rd-great, Adam Piper Witter (1829-1909)

My 4th-great-grandfather, Abraham Witter (1786-1882) married Catharine, “a daughter of Daniel Pipers, of Amberson’s Valley,” but even that evidence, taken from Abraham’s obituary, is unreliable. In 1968, Harry E. Foreman published “Conococheague Headwaters of Amberson Valley…” essentially a one-place study of Amberson Valley in Franklin County, PA.¹ According to Foreman (pg. 151, in the WITTER section):

Abraham Witter was married to Catharine Piper daughter of Adam Piper, Sr., and Mary Witter (1784-1865) was married to Daniel Piper (1777-1837), son of Adam Piper and brother of Catharine Piper Witter.

Abraham and Mary were children of John Witter.

If you want to review the evidence I have that Abraham is most likely the son of John Witter, you can take a look at the WikiTree profile for Johannis Witter. (If you’d like to revisit the process I went through to find and test that evidence, I talked about that process in Finding John Witter and Measuring Up to a Master.)

With all of that background in mind, I’m pretty sure that it would be appropriate to attach the WikiTree profile for Mary (Witter) Piper to Johannis (John), and the fact that Foreman arrived at that conclusion seems to corroborate that finding. However: we’re still not in territory where we have “proven” the relationships between Abraham and the people we think are probably his siblings (Mary Piper and Samuel Witter).

And I’m about to add another uncomfirmed name…

A Clue! A Clue!

Several weeks ago, Brad reached out to tell me he found something interesting in “Measuring Up to a Master;” I shared a newspaper item from The Franklin Repository (Chambersburg, PA) dated 16 October 1804, advertising John and Joseph Witter’s cloth processing business. In it, they advised customers to drop off the cloth they wanted to have processed at locations around Metal Township, including “Mr. Cridler’s tavern at the Burnt Cabbins.”

As it happens, Brad is descended from Mr. Cridler, Frederick Kridler (b. 16 Feb 1770), and the Kridler family has passed down an artifact labeled “Family Register” that lists Frederick’s wife and 12 children, and their birthdates. According to Brad’s evidence, Frederick was born in 1770 in Frederick County, married in 1795, and re-located to Franklin County, PA, in 1799, where he was a tavern keeper.

The family register provides the date of his marriage (April 4, 1795), and his wife’s name and DOB: “Elizabeth Weter born May 15, 1776.”

What Consitutes “Proof”?

This chain of evidence is thin; that spelling of Witter is phonetically closer than the name on some of John Witter’s documents (Wetter, Witters, Withers, etc.). And there are three unidentified females in the household of “John Withero [or “Withers”]” in Frederick, Maryland, on the 1790 U.S. Census – Elizabeth could be one of them. That puts the two families in the same county before Elizabeth and Frederick’s wedding date.

But nobody has been able to find any documents that state that the Elizabeth Weter in the Kridler Family Registry is the daughter of John Witter, and until we find something like that, this relationship should be treated like the hypothesis that it is. (n., “a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation.”)

The thing that I find maddening about all of this is that I lived in Frederick, Maryland, from 2003 to 2005, and had I known any of this information about the Witters then, I might have been able to pop in at The Maryland Room in the C. Burr Artz Public Library, and get some hands-on help! (I also lived in Baltimore County for 15 years, so that would have been an easy trip to make.)

For now, I’ve added Elizabeth to my Ancestry tree (The Nancy Witter Project), and I hope to find some clues that will either support or refute our hypothesis that she is the sister of Abraham, Samuel, and Mary Witter. If I find enough, and if it fits in the “support” column of the ledger, maybe we’ll build her a WikiTree page one of these days.

There may be some useful documents out there; I know of at least one Kridler will with some names that seem to match our folks. However, the Kridler family was large and there were several people in it with similar names, so until I’m more familiar with who was who, I am not ready to use that will as proof of anything.

Until we have proof, all of this is speculation and fantasy – and I hope that including her in my Ancestry tree doesn’t just add to the noise while I’m doing my homework!

1. Foreman, Harry E., Conococheague Headwaters of Amberson Valley, Volume 5 of Harry Foreman collection; Length: 155 pages, Publisher: Harry E. Foreman, 1968. ↩︎