The mystery of Meinrad Bushue's wife Mary

Who was Myrod Bushue's first wife?

It would appear from some of the comments on this blog that there are a few folks out there who would like more information about Mary Ann Bushue, first wife of Myrod (Meinrad in French records) Bourgeois 1803. When Lester Bushue (Myrod and Mary are his direct ancestors) did his research on the family, he was unable to learn anything more about Mary, so recently he asked me to see what I could learn. While people may want to do their own searches, for those who may not want to go over old ground, here is a summary of what I did and learned.

My searches

I searched the records indexed in The Barquilla  for St. Joseph and Holy Trinity churches and found no record of a marriage between Myrod and Mary nor the baptism of their only son Jonas, born ~1829.

However, Mary's birth name is in 2 baptisms for which she is a sponsor:

     24 Mar 1834 Mary Anna of Wendelin Tol (?) and Mary Anna Stuter; sponsors, Mynrad Boujour and Mary Mourite.

     5 Jan 1840 Conditionally John Henry, son of M. Burcheau and Mary A. Miller. Spons Minerad Burcheau and Mary Burcheau (nee Moretz).

So we have a name. The variety of spellings I've seen that resemble Moretz/Mourite suggests to me that Mary Ann was either an immigrant herself or that her parents were. I also surmise she was German-speaking, simply because German-speaking immigrant marrying German-speaking immigrant is far more likely than anything else. But obviously, the unlikely is always possible. I just didn't pursue that line of inquiry; instead I limited myself to finding a recent immigrant.

Tim Fisher's Perry County site does not have a marriage for Myrod and Mary Ann, nor Jonas' birth. It does list two Morrises, George and Jessee, but no Moritz, Moretz, etc. Mary Ann could be a sister or daughter of one of them, but I doubt it. I don't see too many priests or officials mispelling Morris as Moretz; the reverse is more llikely.

Because the Bourgeois family's immigration record is confusing (see my Bourgeois immigration post for more details), I considered that Myrod may have married Mary in France. So I checked the Mertzen and Strueth marriages from 1824-1827. (It would be highly unlikely that Myrod would have married any younger than 18 and the family was gone by mid 1827.) No marriage.

I also considered that Mary Ann may have been from one of the little communities surrounding Mertzen and Strueth and that she emigrated with her own family. In this scenario, she could have known Myrod before he left or met him in Somerset. This search was more complex.

In the hours and hours I've spent ruining my eyesight reading the French records of Mertzen and Strueth, I've never seen a name similar to Moretz. So I tackled the question from two other angles. First, I checked for the name, using lots of wildcard characters, at the CRHF, a private, non-profit French (mainly Haut Rhin) record depository. Nothing.

Then I checked at geneanet.net, a site that hosts lots of French family trees. I limited the search to the area 20 km around Strueth. Again, using lots of spellings and wildcards, nothing came up.

I have not done an exhaustive search of immigration records. Too many possible arrival dates, name spellings, ports.

My final effort was to write a genealogist, Sue Saylor, who works at the Perry County chapter of the Ohio Genealogical Society. Her report follows.

From Sue Saylor, reseacher, Perry County genie society
July 12, 2016

Well, I tried.......... but I'm afraid I couldn't find any definite answers to what Mary's maiden name might have been.  I checked as many sources that I have available to me for Moreitz, Morris, & Mautz, etc.
Some of the things I checked are:
Ohio Marriages Jan. 1, 1821 - 31 Dec. 1830
Fairfield Co. early marriages
Index to Wills and Estates of Fairfield Co. 1803-1900 (There was an Alvah S. Bushee, but no Morris / Mautz, Moreitz that matched)
Perry County Wills and other court cases
Family Histories and our genealogy collection in general

In 2003 our Chapter published the Pioneers of Perry County by 1830 with the 1820 census. I did not find any biographies pertaining to your families or the Morris, etc. Nor did the census for this county list any Morris. (Of course this was one person's interpretation of our census for 1820.)
Some other surnames that appear in her abstraction of the Reading Twp. area are:
Moirs, John
Montz, Jacob and John
Muntz, Jacob
Means, George, Jacob and Patrick
Moultz, Leonard
Meek, Frederick, George and John

I found two early Wills in our Probate. One for Huldah Morris in 1852 and Conrad Mautz in 1847. I found Huldah's Will on familysearch, but it didn't mention family other than her husband, Jesse? If you want to view the Conrad Mautz Will, go to familysearch--Ohio --Probate Records - Wills for the time appropriate time. Unfortunately, these Wills are not indexed, and the page numbering isn't ideal, but it's doable. Just look for his name in the index.
The first 3500 (actual) Probate cases here have been moved to the archives, and it almost takes an act of Congress to get someone to make copies or even get access. :-(

Sorry, I couldn't help this time. If anything else comes to mind, I'd be happy to check it out if possible.
Thanks
Sue

My own musings at this point

I don't think her name was Morris. The two spellings we have of her name suggest it was one that made scribes guess about the spelling (maybe because a German accent was involved). Names from The Barq that seem reasonable include Moretz, Moritz, Mautz, Mourite, and Moutz.

Saylor didn't look at land records, but I don't see how those would help unless there's a land sale in which Mary gives up her dower rights.

Where to go from here
If I were asked, I'd suggest that her descendants keep searching Ancestry and FamilySearch; as more records get indexed and added online, her marriage or the birth of her son may appear. Those records could have been recorded far from Somerset; I found Johannes Muller-Anna Hierholzer's marriage in Chillicothe, Ohio. They weren't married there; it's just where the itinerant priest's records ended up.

The US didn't require passenger records until after 1829, and given we don't know precisely what the name was nor her origin, that doesn't seem promising to me. But it wouldn't hurt to run some searches at eastern ports (Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia) between the years 1820 and 1829 on variations of her name.

And someone with some time on her hands could log onto newspapers.com (a paid site, but they offer one week trials for free) and see if she has an obituary in 1846. That's a long shot.

Finally, I'd keep returning to The Barquilla de Santa Maria (coldios.org). The current editor, Don Schlegel covers more than records in each newsletter, publishing journals, brief histories, news tidbits. Who knows what might show up?

I hope someone keeps looking. We may not know much about Mary, but we do know this: She married young, bore one son when she was 18, and 16 years after his birth she died, Aug 21, 1845, at age 34. Five months after her death, Myrod married again (Feb 3, 1846) and in July of 1846, Myrod's second wife, Rachel Musselman (who already had a daughter, Jane, father unnamed, born in 1842) gave birth to Mary Ann. It's easy to imagine that Jane's unnamed father was Myrod Bushue and probable that Rachel was pregnant with Mary Ann when she married. I have no clue what was in the hearts and minds of any of the involved parties, but it could well be that Mary Ann's life was not a happy one.

Bourgeois Immigration Tangle

When I first started looking for the Bushu immigrant ancestors, I went to the local library and searched all the volumes (20+) of PILI, Tepper's Passenger and Immigrant Lists Index. I found exactly one family that bore any resemblance to the family I knew had settled in Somerset Ohio in late 1827. There were, and are, multitudinous problems with the record.

First, the name is spelled Boursioe. That doesn't seem improbable now, given our knowledge of the correct name, but at the time I was looking, none of the 40+ spelling variations in the various US records included anything like this. Lester was adamant it wasn't our family. He was the expert and while I argued, I had to admit he knew lots more than I did. Still, the names and ages of the family members had enough similarity to ours that I didn't let go. And ultimately we determined that, imperfect as the record was, it was our family.

But Oh! those imperfections! They leave too many questions unanswered.

• Tepper's PILI is an index to passenger lists. In this case, however, the list's origin is a transcription of a passenger list, not from the original, which appears to be gone. 
• This list of passengers, available now on FamilySearch, was built from cards, one per passenger. Those cards are also on FamilySearch. But neither the list nor the cards provide information about departure port, or ship name. The cards are dated Sep 1, 1827, but I don't know if that's the arrival date or the date the card was completed. The list itself covers July 1 to Sept 30, 1827 and the Bourgeois family is on the 10th page of about 30 pages. If the list was compiled in order of arrival, the family arrived in late July, early August.
• The names and ages of the family members are garbled.

          Michael, 44, farmer and Anna M., 46 are fine.
          But Michael, 20, is wrong. Michael was 24 in 1827.
          Mary, 18, is also wrong. She was born in 1813, baptized Anne, and was 14 in 1827.
          Noma, 13 is probably Morand who in 1827 was 17.
          Anna M. 10, was born Marie Anne in 1819 so was 8 in 1827.
           Joseph, 9, was actually 12.

• These errors create some problems for us because one child is missing and it isn't clear who. The logical absent one is Meinrod (Myrod) who doesn't appear to be named here and who actually applied to emigrate with his family in France. That application doesn't give a departure date. 
• We assume that one of the sons left early and found land to buy; hence the extremely rapid trip from Baltimore to Somerset. (Michael Bourgeois bought land in Somerset Oct. 31, 1827.)
• In general, the oldest son would be the one to leave, in this case, Michael. Later family records suggest that Michael was challenged in some way, and if he suffered from something from childhood, departing on his own for the US would have been a bad idea. But we don't know what was wrong or when it started; we only know that he never married and needed some looking after. Given the inaccuracies of names and ages, perhaps Michael of the list was really Meinrad who was 21. [There is a Bourgeois male, 18,  who arrives in New Orleans on The Cecilia in 1822. Is this Michael, who then makes his way north, finds Somerset congenial, and sends for the family?] 
• I thought perhaps there was some advantage to mis-reporting ages, but there is no pattern to the age discrepencies: Joseph, Michael, and Morand's ages are too low while the girls are too high. It is the reported age for Mary that led Lester and I to consider that she was Meinrad's wife (in which case we'd be missing a little girl as well as an adult son). This is, of course, a possibility, although I'm reluctant to accept that somehow a little girl got missed. 
• There are 427 pages of images in this FamilySearch file. I would have to search all 427 to determine if one or two children from the family were listed elsewhere (or to determine if there were others from the Mertzen-Strueth area on board or to determine of Meinrad's wife -- future or otherwise -- was on the same ship).  I have searched from 273 to 317, covering April to September. I think it's unlikely anyone in the family came later, but earlier is a possibility. 

What I can say is that Meinrad Bourgeois applied to leave France with his family in 1827, destination "Sommerselle, near New York." I don't know why he applied rather than his father, but it does suggest he didn't leave before 1827. I can also say that seven of the eight (or nine, if you include a possible wife of Meinrad's) family members arrived in Baltimore, Maryland in the second half of 1827. Beyond that, it's all conjecture.