#101--James Hannah—Looking for James in All the Wrong Places

            James Hannah is my 4th great grandfather.  For all my direct line ancestors, I like to have documentation of their births, marriages, and deaths.  While I have been pretty successful in doing that, I have not been able to find any documentation about James’s death.  I did, however, have a clue—a letter written in 1929 describing how when James Hannah came down the Ohio River from western Pennsylvania, he settled in Cincinnati.  Then when he died, the writer’s grandfather went to Cincinnati and brought James’s wife Nancy back to their home in Brown County, Ohio.  So when I was looking for documentation, I looked at death and cemetery records for Hamilton County and Cincinnati with no success.

           Last year I found a book entitled Brown County Court Records, 1818-1850 by Patricia Donaldson.  Most of the book listed those who died with a will, but in the back there was a listing of those who died intestate.  As I checked to see if there were any Hannahs listed, I was both surprised and delighted to find James Hannah.  The date of his death fit and the administrator, Joseph Mckee, made sense as Joseph was his son-in-law.

Last month I contacted the Probate Court in Brown County and was able to get all the documents in James’s file.  Once I looked at them, I knew that I had the correct James Hannah.  I learned a couple of lessons from this.  One is that no matter how convincing a memory of event is, the event may not be true.  In this case, I suspect the writer was thinking of another grandparent.  Second, when you cannot find a record, look in nearby counties.  Had I done that, I would have found those estate documents much sooner.


           Right now I am trying to make sense of about 50 pages of bills, receipts, inventories, etc.  Stay tuned for an analysis.