The ancestors have been kind of quiet lately. The mailman isn’t helping things out either. He hasn’t brought requested information to help open doors, so I turned to flipping through the family tree again. For some unknown reason I went up the Davis line, picked out Wesley W Davis and did a search on ancestry. Wesley was the son of Daniel E and Margaret Bush Davis. Daniel was my 3rd great grandfather and Wesley would have been a multi great uncle. What I knew from the census was that Wesley had a wife named Lydia, but I didn’t have Lydia’s last name.
In the new search I found that someone had Lydia’s last name as Witt. Now I had something new to search on. Rapidly typing in Lydia Witt, the census brought her family up in Somerset, Pennsylvania, the same area that the Davis’ were living in. Her father’s name was John Landis Witt and her mother was Mary Nedrow. There was information on John and his father John, who also lived in Somerset, Pennsylvania. The first John was pretty well known in the area, had been a surveyor and helped define the county and property lines. He had married Catherine Davis. Both John and Catherine were born in 1784-1785 in Pennsylvania.
The more I looked at Catherine the more I wondered if she was related to the rest of my Davis line. Daniel Davis’ father was John Davis; he is the last of that line that I have found so far. Daniel is the only name I have of the children that John had. There are 2 other sons and two daughters. John was born in 1770 and I do not have his parents or siblings, but the age could be correct if Catherine and John were siblings or even cousins. It is an interesting thought and could make Wesley and Lydia related in some fashion.
I sit here typing, staring out at the ocean, the evening air still warm off the water, the smell of fried fish from the local restaurant tickling my nose. Some of my relatives had moved to Florida in the late 1800’s. Unfortunately not to the Destin area in the Florida panhandle where I am sitting and enjoying a well earned vacation, but on the east coast miles more from here. The dead will have to rest this trip, at least as far as I know, they aren’t here.