Those elusive women. They seem to have dropped into the family line from an alien spaceship or popped into existence like a magician’s assistant. Who are they and where did they come from?

I’ve been working on my husband’s mother’s genealogy and had hit a brick wall at one of her great-grandmothers. I had great-granny’s full married name, of course, even her date of death, and a good guess at her birth date and birth state, but no luck finding her maiden name using online resources.

This is what I knew: Mrs. Abraham Lantzer (Susan) was born around 30 July 1814 in Maryland (or possibly Pennsylvania), was probably married about 1838, probably in Ohio, had eight children from 1839 to 1855, all in Stark County, Ohio, and lived in Stark County until her death in 1902. This is a lot of information and it is usually helpful if the woman being researched lived in the same place a long time and had a lot of children.

The gold standard record would be the marriage license for Abraham and Susan, but searching both Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org got me zilch, even using various misspellings of the names.  The second record of choice would be Susan’s death certificate, but unfortunately Ohio did not require deaths to be reported at the state level until 1908. She should appear in the death records for Stark County, but no online index exists, which would mean making a request from one of the few available sources and waiting, and I’m not sure how much information a death certificate that old will contain anyway. An obituary for Susan would be my next choice, but again, no luck in any online sources. What to do, what to do?

Death certificates in the modern era include the deceased’s mother’s maiden name. Susan and Abraham’s child, who my husband is directly descended from, is their daughter, Susan Candice Lantzer Gottshall. And as luck would have it, she too, died before Ohio required state death reporting. However, she had at least seven siblings. It seemed likely that one or more of them died after 1908 and their mother’s maiden name would be listed on their death certificates. Right! On to that lateral research.

I won’t go into the details, but the results were that of the eight siblings, only three lived past 1908.  A sister, Catherine Lantzer Shriver died in 1916, but her death certificate listed ‘Unknown’ as the mother’s maiden name. One brother, Israel Lantzer, died in 1932, but his death certificate listed only ‘Susan’ as the mother’s maiden name.  The final possible sibling was Solomon Lantzer but no Ohio death certificate could be found for him.  After further research, I discovered that he moved to Indiana and died in Whitley County. An index to Whitley County obituaries listed him in 1925. Without much hope, I emailed a request to the Peabody Public Library for a digital copy.

I was shocked and very pleased to receive a copy the very next day (thank you, Deb Lowrance). In the obituary, Solomon’s mother was named as Susan Wurstler Lantzer. Voila. The lesson is that my mother is also my brother’s mother.

As a postscript, once I had Susan’s maiden name, I re-searched Ohio marriage records. I found the record, but instead of Abraham Lantzer, it listed Abraham Lautzer (which apparently doesn’t match in fuzzy searches). And instead of Susan Wurstler, it lists Sussanna Wershler (which apparently does match in fuzzy searches). So lesson number two might be to say the name to your seven year old child or grandchild and then search based on whatever spelling he or she comes up with.