Ancestry Magazine

What happens when there is no heir apparent, but the found item is just too good to dismiss?

It happens sometimes. I work on an orphan heirloom case in an attempt to locate the descendants of the original owner of a family treasure only to discover that there are no descendants. The line has died out—and possibly even the branches most closely associated with it. What then?

That’s what happened when I heard from Susan Roose of Virginia, although I didn’t know it when I received her tempting submission:

Basics: It’s a travel journal—from Paris to Rome in 1911/12—with a description and history of each city and museum they passed through. It contains a passport with his physical description dated 15 July 1911.

Names given: William Bradley Waller. The passport says he traveled with his wife, but there is no other name on the passport or that I can find in the journal.

Additional information: I found this book among the many hundreds of books left by my mother. My parents traveled a great deal and I’m sure that she was intrigued by this journal. This book was one of many that she bought at book sales and secondhand bookstores. It cost $.30. I would like to get it back to someone in the family because of the passport.

A travel journal from almost a century ago? What family member wouldn’t be delighted to receive this out of the blue? I was on the case.

What’s Your Full Name?

Normally when I begin a search, I enter just the first and last name, but over time I’ve come to learn that it’s often worth trying a person’s full name when using Ancestry.com. That’s exactly what I did with William Bradley Waller. Up popped a single hit, obviously a fraction of the content the site actually holds on him. But that one hit was a useful starting point.

It was an entry in the Presbyterian Ministerial Directory for 1898. From it, I learned that he was born in Berwick, Pennsylvania, on 24 June 1848 and resided in New Rochelle, New York, in 1898. Had I typed in just William Waller, I would have been inundated with thousands of possibilities, but now I was off to a running start.

A Traveling Man

Since this request stemmed from a travel journal that had been kept circa 1911–12, I decided to take a look at the William Waller listings in the Immigration Collection at Ancestry.com, limiting myself to 1912, plus or minus two years. There I found William Bradley Waller arriving home on 3 June 1912—definitely the same fellow because he was born in 1848 in Berwick, Pennsylvania. His wife, however, remained mysterious, listed only as Mrs. William B. Waller, although I learned that she was born in 1849 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Back to Basics

Now I returned to more conventional research focusing on trusty, workhorse census records. I bounced around the various years, and, through the 1910 census, I discovered that his New Jersey-born wife was named Jane. By 1910, they were living in Greenwich, Connecticut, so this couple apparently moved around a fair bit. This document also revealed that the couple had been married for 34 years but had no children.

I was well aware that a particular census entry can be misleading, but other years bore out the accuracy of the 1910 census. Now I knew that there were no direct-line descendants to seek out. Time to work backward and look for William’s birth family. Perhaps I could find a descendant of one of his siblings.

I waltzed back to the 1860 census to find William living in Washington, D.C. with his parents, William L. and Louisa, and his sisters, Harriet and Julia. I spent some time trying to get some traction on the sisters, but came up empty handed. Given that Julia was still single and living at home at age 33, I wasn’t especially optimistic on that front. I tried a variety of tactics, but nothing I did uncovered a married Harriet or Julia.

In the News

I turned to other resources, starting with Stories and Publications at Ancestry.com. I tried typing William’s full name again and was rewarded with a bio that sang his praises, but it told me little about the specifics of William’s life. A single article in The Indiana Gazette from Indiana, Pennsylvania, mentioned that William had preached from the pulpit of the local church while visiting his cousin, Dr. D.J. Waller Jr.

Who’s D. J.?

If I could pick up D.J.’s trail, maybe I could find someone researching the extended Waller family tree. But first I had to figure out who D.J. was, and then I had to confirm that he and William were first cousins.

It was the International Genealogical Index (IGI) that swiftly revealed D.J. stood for David Jewett. That struck me as a fairly distinctive name worth Googling. Sure enough, I discovered that he had pursued the family business—he was an ordained Presbyterian minister, although he was better known in the field of education because of his contributions to what is now Bloomsburg University.

I dug a little deeper into the Google results and stumbled across one of particular interest. Apparently the Presbyterian Historical Society (PHS) in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, had a collection called “Waller Family Papers, 1740–1912” that focused mostly on David Jewett Waller Jr. and his father, David Jewett Waller Sr.

Connecting the Dots

William Bradley Waller had no children and no nieces or nephews that I could find, so the PHS was quickly becoming my best solution for a permanent home for the travel journal. First I had to be sure of the relationship between D. J. Jr. and William. It was quite tricky to piece them together because their fathers turned out to be half-brothers who were hardly ever linked in readily available sources; however, through a combination of census records, online family trees, and books on the founding fathers of Pennsylvania, I was finally able to determine that the alleged cousins did indeed share the same Waller grandfather—Phineas.

Everyone Agreed?

The Presbyterian Historical Society seemed like a logical home for the travel journal and passport. William B. Waller had been a Presbyterian minister and the society already had a collection of Waller family papers. But it wasn’t my decision to make.

I contacted Sue to explain the situation and see if she would be willing to donate the materials to the PHS. That was fine with her, so the next step was to be sure that the donation would be welcome—the last thing you want to do is donate family treasures to a repository that doesn’t have capacity for them or simply isn’t interested. I e-mailed an inquiry describing the travel journal and referencing the society’s existing collection of Waller papers. The next day I received the following from the Deputy Executive Director of the PHS:

We are indeed grateful to you for drawing our attention to William Bradley Waller’s journal and would welcome it as a donation to our holdings. It appears from the entry about William B. in the Princeton Seminary directory that, after retiring from the ministry, he traveled from 1911 to 16, so this journal represents the start of that period in his life. 

Perfect—a home for the journal where it would be appreciated and preserved. And should it turn out that William B. did have nieces or nephews that I missed, their descendants would be much more likely to find the journal at the PHS than in the hands of a private individual not related to the family.

Orphaned Orphan Heirlooms

Even if a family has died out, stranded items belonging to the family shouldn’t just be thrown away. There are always collateral relatives, albeit possibly quite distant, and there’s the hope of an ideal repository (in a similar case, I donated 1890s photos of a professional roller skater to a skating museum). There’s almost always a good home for these orphans, as long as you’re creative in seeking potential caretakers.

Next Case

Do you have another family’s treasure that you’d like to return? If so, go to www.honoringourancestors.com, click on the “Submissions” menu, and select Orphan Heirlooms. Maybe yours will be the next item I return from sender.

Megan Smolenyak Smolenyak is a regular contributor to Ancestry Magazine and the Ancestry Weekly Journal. Reach her at www.honoringourancestors.com