VII. Rickabaugh – Crooks

If we thought the Zink family was replete with puzzles and frustrations, it was only a warm-up for the family of Anabel {Zink} Vanderpool's mother, Sarah Elizabeth {Rickabaugh} Zink. The Rickabaugh family is probably the most difficult one I have worked on. The section that follows has been totally rewritten, with different assumptions and conclusions, time and time again, and it is still full of mysteries and questions. It is the best we can do, though, so let us forge ahead.

The first mystery we encounter is where Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh herself is in 1850, when she should appear on the census in Indiana as a girl aged about 4 to 6 years old. (This range is based on the ages she reports on three later censuses, which taken together indicate that her birth could have occurred anytime from about 1843 to about 1845, and the date of birth inscribed on her headstone: December 20, 1844.) The index for the 1850 census for Indiana has just two entries for Rickabaugh or its obvious variants,¹ and both are in Greene County. One of them is Amanda Rickabaugh (age 14 years) in Washington Township, who has two brothers: Lewis (19 years old) and Seth (17 years old). These three teenagers are living with a couple the census identifies as Daniel Shepherd and his wife Elizabeth, both of whom are 26 years old. Elizabeth's family name was Rickabaugh, though, and she is in fact the sister of the three younger Rickabaughs – which explains why three teenaged children are living with two adults only slightly older than they are.² In any case, there is no sign of Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh here.

The other Rickabaugh listed in the 1850 census index lives in adjacent Stafford Township. He is a man named Henry Rickabaugh, 29 years old, whose wife, Sarah J., is 17 years old. There are no children listed in their household, which probably is in fact the household of an older man named Washington Willard: Indiana marriage records tell us that Henry Rickebough married Sarah Jane Willard on January 2,³ 1848, and it seems most likely that this married couple is residing in the household of the bride's parents.⁴ It is natural to assume that Henry is the older brother of Amanda, her two brothers, and Elizabeth {Rickabaugh} Shepherd, but the Rickabaugh researcher who knows the most about Elizabeth and her siblings says that he is not. More to the point, is Henry – evidently the only adult male Rickabaugh in Indiana that year – the father of Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh? If so, where is she? Since the age of Henry's wife Sarah Jane {Willard} Rickabaugh shows that she cannot be Sarah's mother, who is Sarah Elizabeth herself?

Looking again at marriage records, we find that Henry Rickabaugh married Mary Crooks in Greene County, Indiana, on February 13, 1838.⁵ Thus Sarah J. is Henry's second wife, not the mother of Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh (assuming Henry is the father). This conclusion is confirmed by the 1840 census, which shows Henry, 20 to 30 years old, living (and, evidently, farming) in Greene County with a wife described as 15 to 20 years old.⁶ This woman obviously cannot be the one (only 17 years old) who is Henry's wife in 1850, so she must be the Mary {Crooks} Rickabaugh he married in 1838. Mary apparently died between 1840 and 1848, when Henry married again – this time, Sarah Jane Willard. If Henry is the father of Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh, then, her mother is Mary {Crooks} Rickabaugh.

But is Henry Sarah's father? Are there any other candidates? The database of Indiana marriages shows marriages of four Rickabaugh females and two Rickabaugh males in Greene County, Indiana, between 1835 and 1844, as well as that of another Rickabaugh female in Marion County (Indianapolis) in 1845. Henry's marriage to Mary Crooks in 1838 is one of the two of Rickabaugh males. The other is that of a David Rickabaugh to Elizabeth Childers in 1843.⁷ David merits a close look.

By the time of the 1850 census, David has left Indiana for Iowa. There is no Sarah Elizabeth in his household. He does have a daughter, born in Indiana about 1844, but her name is Tabitha – and she can be accounted for in 1860 when the Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh we are seeking is married to William Rogers Zink.⁸ If Sarah is living in Indiana in 1850, then, the fact is that Henry Rickabaugh is the only known, plausible candidate to be her father.⁹ He was the classic "only bull in the pasture," in the evocative phrase of one genealogist.

Having learned that Sarah Elizabeth's mother was named Crooks, our attention turns to a couple who in 1850 live in Greene County, Indiana, near all the various Rickabaughs we have just met, including Henry. They are John and Sarah Crooks, ages 57 and 50 years old, respectively. In their household is a girl named Sarah Crooks who is described as being 10 years old. At first, it seems a reasonable supposition that John and Sarah Crooks are the parents of Henry's first wife, Mary, who we are presuming died between 1840 and 1848. In 1830, a John Crooks 40-50 years old is the only Crooks/Crook/Crooke male in Greene County, Indiana, so he is almost certainly Mary's father – although there are other candidates in other counties.¹⁰ We are surer of this conclusion when we learn that John and Mary Crooks gave property to their daughter Mary just before her 1838 marriage to Henry Rickabaugh – property that Henry almost immediately sold, apparently with the approval of John Crooks.¹¹ It also seems reasonable to suppose that the young Sarah in the household of John Crooks is the Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh we are looking for, even though based on later censuses and other information we have the latter should be shown as only 5 to 7 years of age rather than 10 years old in 1850. Thus Sarah appears to be residing with her maternal grandparents in 1850 rather than with her father and step-mother.

This hypothesis finds strength in the fact that John and Sarah Crooks did not have a daughter named Sarah (although some Crooks researchers have erroneously concluded they did, citing this 1850 census listing), for they had been married only in 1849: Sarah is, in actuality, John's third wife. Nor is a daughter named Sarah included among the children John Crooks had with his second wife, as those children were identified in a deed dated 1848. Also, the children listed in John Crooks's household in 1850 generally match, category by category, the children who were listed there in 1840 – except for this Sarah Crooks who is found there in 1850.¹² Young Sarah does not appear to be the daughter of John Crooks, therefore.

Why would young Sarah be living in the Crooks household instead of that of Henry Rickabaugh? Since the 1860 census states that Henry and Sarah Jane {Willard} Rickabaugh had a child born in 1851, Sarah Jane may well have been pregnant at the time the 1850 census information was collected. Perhaps the Crooks couple is caring for Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh during her stepmother's pregnancy. Or perhaps Henry and Sarah Jane could not afford to support his earlier daughter, so John Crooks (who, judging from what the census says, is relatively well off) is helping out economically by caring for her. Perhaps Henry's second wife, or the Willard family with whom Henry and Sarah Jane are living in 1850, did not wish – for any number of reasons – to have Sarah Elizabeth around, and so she went to live with her grandfather, John Crooks. Perhaps she was simply staying in his home over the summer, and the census happened to be taken while she was there. Perhaps Sarah Elizabeth's father did not intend to send her to school and John Crooks took custody of her to make sure that she got an education. Any of these reasons could be the correct one, or there could be another reason we cannot imagine all these years later.¹³

It is a bit troubling to see the apparent discrepancy in ages between the Sarah Crooks who is shown as 10 years old in 1850 and the Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh we are seeking. On the other hand, her early marriage just nine years later when she was still in her mid-teens and a first child born just seven and one-half months after that suggests that Sarah was physically rather mature for her chronological age of almost six in 1850. (This assumes that the date on her headstone is correct, and it may be off by two years or even more.) In addition, it may very well be that her new step-grandmother did not know young Sarah's true age. In view of the fact that there may have been some confusion in the household – John Crooks actually was recently deceased when the census enumerator visited in late August – an erroneous guess by someone seems like the best possibility for Sarah's reported age.

It is also troubling to see that Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh is identified as Sarah "Crooks" on the 1850 census, but maybe the census taker mistakenly assumed that was her name because she was in the Crooks household; alternatively, perhaps Sarah had been virtually adopted by the Crooks family – maybe even answered to the name of Crooks. Looking ahead a bit, we will find that when Henry Rickabaugh leaves Indiana for Iowa sometime between 1851 and 1853 or 1854, his presumed daughter Sarah Elizabeth does not accompany him but, we can suppose, continued to live in the Crooks household until she married William Rogers Zink in 1859. It may be that she never again lived with Henry after he remarried in 1848, or after her mother (Henry's first wife) died sometime between 1840 and 1848. It is hardly unknown, after all, for the children of a first marriage to be unwelcome after the surviving parent remarries. The fact that as an adult Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh dropped her first name and used Elizabeth instead may confirm that there was some kind of ill will between her and her stepmother, Sarah {Willard} Rickabaugh.

(Although Sarah may have been mature physically for her age, an early marriage and pregnancy might indicate a young woman who was emotionally immature. Certainly she had an unusual and perhaps even traumatic childhood, and being left totally alone in Indiana – with no mother, grandparents, or siblings to fill the vacuum – after her father and his new family moved to Iowa between 1851 and 1853 or 1854 may have made Sarah more vulnerable than usual at that age. Perhaps, therefore, she was eager to seek a permanent relationship before she ordinarily would have. One wonders if such a circumstance would lead to the later troubles and divorce we have learned about, divorce being quite an uncommon event in 19th-century Indiana.)

We should conclude, I think, that if Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh is living in Indiana (consistently reported to be her state of birth) in 1850, she is almost certainly the Sarah Crooks we see living with John and Sarah Crooks. But might Sarah Elizabeth be living in another state, along with her parents whose name we do not know? I checked the most obvious states without success. The most likely of them is Iowa, where there is a large colony of Rickabaughs formerly from Indiana.¹⁴ Although the various Rickabaughs (most of whom live in Marion County, Iowa) have a number of children who were born in Indiana, none of them has a daughter named Sarah or Elizabeth who is approximately the age of the Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh we are seeking. Alternatively, might Sarah Elizabeth's parents have died or departed Indiana without her, leaving her in the care of a relative whose name we do not know? If that was the case, it was not a relative living in Greene County, where I could not find Sarah Elizabeth even after a thorough, line-by-line search. Nor is she living with any other Rickabaughs in Indiana that we know about, or with any other family we can imagine housing her.¹⁵

The most plausible explanation for Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh's whereabouts in 1850, then, is that she is the female described as being 10 years old who is living with John and Sarah Crooks. Although we cannot be certain without definitely locating Sarah Elizabeth in 1850, it seems probable that she was the daughter of HENRY RICKABAUGH and his first wife, MARY {CROOKS} RICKABAUGH. Let us now resume our study of these two lines, beginning with the Crooks family.

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As we have seen, Mary's father John Crooks had married Sarah – his third wife – in 1849. Mary was the product of the first marriage of JOHN R. CROOKS, who wed SUSANNA {WINAND} CROOKS in Jefferson County, Kentucky, on August 10, 1815.¹⁶ Information contributed to the LDS estimates a birth year of 1793 for John Crooks, with Jefferson County, Kentucky, as his birthplace. This estimate matches the ages for him shown by censuses in 1830, 1840, and 1850. Susanna Winand was probably born between 1784 and 1794, since her age on the 1820 census (the only one we have for her) is said to be between 16 and 26 years of age.

Our information about Susanna Winand's family is sparse. Her father was a man named G. PHILIP WINAND and her mother was named MARGARETHA. Unfortunately, there is no solid information about this family in any census index for Ohio, Kentucky, or Indiana, but the history of early Greene County states that the Winand family came from Morgan County, Ohio. There are hints that Philip Winand was born about 1754 in Pennsylvania, which suggests that he might have been a Palatine German. One of his signatures in Kentucky suggests that his name might have been Weinand or Weiner originally. In Kentucky, the Winands lived on Beargrass Creek near Pope Lick, where Philip purchased 150 1/2 acres in June 1795. He was still alive as late as 1834, when he seems to have sold most of his Beargrass Creek property. Philip Winand died sometime in late 1842 (one source says December 10), for the appraisal of his property was filed two days before the year's end. Beyond that, we know little about the Winands, except that Philip was involved in a land claim case in 1818. As we shall see, the Crooks family lived on Pope Lick, so there is no mystery about how John Crooks and Susanna Winand met.

It is possible that John Crooks served in the War of 1812, although we cannot be sure of this.¹⁷ He became a man of some prominence in Greene County, Indiana: he was elected county justice in November 1827 (evidently for a two-year term of office) and served as sheriff between 1830 and 1834. John Crooks is also sometimes described as a pioneer physician, but I have found no evidence that he graduated from medical college. In addition, although the 1840 census indicates that John Crooks can read and write, both it and the 1850 census describe him as engaged in agriculture.

According to Crooks family researchers, John and Susanna had three children before she died – most likely in 1822 since he married Mary Stafford, his second wife, on January 9, 1823.¹⁸ In order to be listed as 15 to 20 years of age on the 1840 census, John and Susanna's daughter Mary would have been born sometime between 1820 and 1825. Because John married his second wife in Jefferson County, Kentucky, it seems possible that John and Susanna had continued to live there during the early 1820s, but we know nothing more about their lives in Kentucky. The Jefferson County tax rolls at first appear to confirm this: a John Crooks was living there at least from 1817 (the 1815 and 1816 lists are missing) and at least until 1825 except for three years: 1820, 1821, and 1824.

But the absence of John Crooks on the 1820 census in Jefferson County, and then on the 1820 and 1821 tax lists there, give rise to some doubts about where he and his family were living. I believe that in 1820 he is living with his father, Michael Crooks, in Knox County, Indiana.¹⁹ This county adjoins Greene County, where John would ultimately settle. Michael's household in 1820 has adults and children in the right categories to include both his and his son John's families. Assuming the estimate that John was born in 1793 is correct, he could be in either of two age categories on the census (which used August 1 as a date of demarcation). He is listed the lower age category (16 to 26 years old) instead of the next higher one (26 to 45 years old), which – assuming the census enumerator recorded John properly in 1820 – suggests his birth came after August 1793. Among the children in Michael's household are four females under 10 years old, one of whom could very well be John's daughter (and Henry Rickabaugh's first wife) Mary, depending on whether or not she had been born at the time of the 1820 census. The woman shown as 16 to 26 years old is undoubtedly Susanna, John's first wife.

In 1822, however, a John Crooks is listed on the Jefferson County tax rolls again, but the situation after that is unclear: there are two men named John Crook(s) on these rolls in 1823, and they live in different parts of the county. Neither of them is listed in 1824, and then just one John Crooks is shown again in 1825 and in most other years through 1835. Since – as we shall see shortly – the John Crooks we are interested in is living in Indiana in 1830 (and almost certainly arrived there years before then though we have no documentary record to substantiate this belief), the John Crooks who continues to reside in Jefferson County, Kentucky, from 1825 onward is very probably a false lead.

In my opinion this evidence suggests a scenario something like this. John, the father of Mary Crooks, evidently left Jefferson County for Indiana about the time his father Michael did, in 1818 or 1819, and remained in Indiana at least through the time of the 1820 census. John presumably returned to Jefferson County in 1821 or 1822 (probably after Susanna died), since he was married there in January 1823 and seems to appear on that county's tax list for 1823. John then went back to Indiana – this time, to Greene County and with his second wife, Mary Stafford, some of whose family lived in that county – in 1824 or 1825 and remained there the rest of his life. It seems very likely that these several moves were connected to the death of John's first wife and to his second marriage, but without more evidence we cannot satisfactorily resolve this matter and must move ahead.

John and his second wife, Mary, are listed in Greene County, Indiana, on the 1830 census. Both are shown as 30 to 40 years old, which is correct for him but not for her.²⁰ In their household in 1830 there are two females who are 5 to 10 years of age and two more who are 10 to 15 years old; Mary Crooks, born between 1820 and 1822, is probably in the first of these categories. Ten years later, the 1840 census properly shows John to be 40 to 50 years of age; his daughter Mary, having married Henry Rickabaugh in 1838, is no longer in his household. John's second wife having died sometime during the 1840s, he married Sarah {Huffman} Crooks, a widow, on May 29, 1849. This is the woman on the 1850 census.²¹

About a year later, it would seem, John Crooks died in Washington Township of Greene County, Indiana. The date of his death is often given as January 6, 1850, but the fact that he is listed in the 1850 census (which included only those persons alive as of June 1, 1850) and his absence from the Indiana mortality index for 1850 (which showed only those who had died during the twelve months before June 1, 1850) suggests that he actually died on June 6, 1850, a date easily mistaken for January 6. John Crooks is buried in Stafford Cemetery, located near Marco in Greene County, Indiana. ²²

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Operating on the hypotheses that Henry Rickabaugh and Mary {Crooks} Rickabaugh were Sarah Elizabeth's parents and that John Crooks was her maternal grandfather, we will now take a closer look at the Crooks family. Information contributed to the LDS suggesting that John Crooks was born in Kentucky about 1793 identifies his parents as a Michael Crooks and an unnamed wife who, the information also says, were married in Jefferson County, Kentucky, about 1791. Other evidence, which we will consider in due course in this section, confirms that John was the son of Michael Crooks.

The identity of John Crooks's mother is unknown. Some researchers believe that Michael married a woman named Elizabeth Nonemaker in Shepherdstown, Virginia (now West Virginia), about 1785, but the records for Berkeley County, Virginia, where Shepherdstown was located in 1785, do not show such a marriage. Kentucky records, however, show that Michael Crooks married an Eliza Nunnemacher in Jefferson County on August 20, 1799. These two are surely the same woman, but Michael married her well after some of his children were born and so he must have had an earlier wife.

This conclusion is confirmed by the censuses of 1810 through 1830, which indicate that Michael Crooks had a wife who was about a decade younger than he was (1760 to 1765 for him and 1775 to 1780 for her), as well as young children in his household later than one would normally expect for a man his age. My guess is that Michael was married either in Virginia (but not in Shepherdstown)or in Kentucky sometime around 1790, which would make this unknown woman the mother of John Crooks, who was born about 1793. We have no idea whatsoever about this woman's name, but based on what we know about Michael's children and the date of his second marriage that first wife must have died in 1797 or 1798. Elizabeth Nunnemacher is therefore probably the name of Michael's second wife, whom he indeed married in 1799, and with whom he had a second set of children.

We have no information about when Michael Crooks arrived in Kentucky. The fact that he is not shown on Kentucky's tax lists in 1790 is not conclusive evidence he does not reside in that state, only that Michael did not pay taxes there. He is listed for the first time, in Washington County (some distance southeast of Jefferson County and Louisville), in 1795. Michael, now listed under the name Crook, is living in Jefferson County, Kentucky, in 1800 (he paid taxes there on September 3 of that year) and in 1810, when he is 45 years old or older (and so born before 1765). Michael Crooks has in his household in 1810 two males 10 to 16 years old but none who are 16 to 26 years old. As in 1820, John was placed in the lower age category, which reinforces our supposition based on the 1820 census that he was born in late 1793. This means he had not yet celebrated his seventeenth birthday by August 1, 1810. Michael's wife is shown as 26 to 45 years of age.

The tax records for Jefferson County show Michael Crooks in 1812, 1814, 1817, and 1818. (The records for 1815 and 1816 are missing.) Michael owns no land when the first roll was made, but on the other three he is taxed for either 148 or 150 acres on Pope Lick and for three or four horses.²³ His absence from these tax rolls after 1818 suggests that he moved to Indiana in that year or the following one.

The 1820 census confirms that Michael Crooks has left Kentucky; in that year and again in 1830 he is found in Knox County, Indiana, which adjoins Greene County where John Crooks eventually settles.²⁴ On the former census he is said to be a farmer 45 years old or older (and so born before 1775); on the latter census, which lists him as 60 to 70 years of age, his birth year works out to be 1760 to 1770. When all these censuses are compared, we can calculate that he was probably born between 1760 and 1765.²⁵ (Although John evidently was living with his father in 1820, as we have seen, by 1830 he is listed as the head of his own household.) Michael's wife is shown as 45 years old or older in 1820 and as 50 to 60 years of age in 1830.

We do not know exactly where in Knox County Michael Crooks lives, but we may get a clue about this from the records of the Church of Christ of Bruceville, in Washington Township. A Michael Crooks was among those who organized the church in the town of Bruceville on March 11, 1832 (in part over dissatisfaction with the stance of the Baptist church, to which they had belonged, on the issue of slavery). There are two other men named Michael Crooks in Knox County at about this time, however, and so we cannot be certain that it was John's father who helped to found this church.

Michael Crooks is not listed by name on the 1840 census, but a tally of Revolutionary War pensioners taken that year states that Michael Crooks, age 80 years, is living in the household of a James Harland in Jackson Township of Clay County, Indiana. Harland is a son-in-law. Sure enough, the census for 1840 not only shows a man 80 to 90 years of age living in that household but also lists him by name in the space on the second sheet where such veterans were to be named. (There is no older woman in the household, and it is probably safe to conclude that MIchael's second wife, Eliza, has died since 1830.) Since Michael Crooks is not listed on the census ten years later, in 1850, we are probably correct in concluding that he is deceased by then. According to a survey of graves of Revolutionary War veterans, Michael Crooks is buried in Cottage Hill Cemetery in Brazil, Clay County, Indiana.²⁶

Despite some small inconsistencies in what we know about MICHAEL CROOKS (primarily the age categories in which he is listed on some censuses), I believe that he should be regarded as the father of John Crooks. The identity of John's mother is not known.

Given the migration patterns that populated Kentucky, the Michael Crooks we are seeking probably came there from North Carolina, Virginia, or Pennsylvania. Information contributed to the LDS suggests two candidates. He could be the Michael Crook born in Franklin County, Virginia, about 1770, but the evidence is clear that he is instead the Michael Crooks born near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, about 1760; it was this man – then living in Knox County, Indiana – who on September 13, 1838, applied for a pension for his service during the Revolutionary War. He was not enumerated on a special census of such veterans taken in 1835; perhaps it was this census, though, that gave Michael Crooks the idea of applying for a pension.²⁷

From Michael's application in 1838 we learn a considerable amount. After mentioning that he was born near Philadelphia in 1760 (which is consistent with the birth dates shown for him on the censuses), Michael Crooks states that he moved with his parents to Loudoun County, Virginia, and then Berkeley County, Virginia. The latter, part of Virginia's Frederick County until 1772, is now located in West Virginia's eastern panhandle. Taking a literal interpretation of the application's statement, he and his parents evidently moved to Berkeley County in that same year.

Michael Crooks's application goes on to say that he enlisted in the Continental Army for three years at Shepherdstown, Virginia (now West Virginia), in January of 1781. Michael states that he was enlisted by Captain Henry Betinger and served in General Peter Muhlenberg's army under a Major William (?) Gray and a Captain James Kirkpatrick. Muhlenberg was one of the most well-known officers of the Continental Army. Less well-known was a German-American Continental Army officer named Henry Betinger, who commanded militia forces in the Shepherdstown area at this phase of the war. I have been unable to identify the other two officers, Gray and Kirkpatrick. Betinger's journal does not mention a Michael Crooks but does list as a member of his unit a private named Henry Crook. This Henry Crook was born in Frederick, Maryland, but, like Michael Crooks, resided in Berkeley County, Virginia, at the time of his enlistment.

Michael's application also states that he spent the next six months in Winchester, Virginia, where he guarded Hessian prisoners. Many of the 1,600 Hessian prisoners there were (literally) farmed out to families in the Shenandoah Valley who used their labor in the fields, but other Hessians were housed in a barracks on the farm of a family named Bush near Round Hill about four miles west of the town of Winchester. (Some of the Hessians had been taken captive at the Battle of Saratoga in New York in 1777 but were held in Charlottesville, Virginia, until late 1780; others had been captured at the Battle of Cowpens in South Carolina during the first month of 1781.) In mid-1781, when British cavalry forces seemed headed to Winchester to rescue the prisoners, they were marched north to Frederick, Maryland, by way of Shepherdstown. At that point General Daniel Morgan assembled a force to march to aid General Lafayette in the climactic battle of the war at Yorktown. All of this is broadly consistent with what Michael Crooks describes in his application.²⁸

In early October of 1781, Michael continues in that application, he was among the troops marched toward Yorktown to reinforce General George Washington's forces in their showdown with the British General, Lord Cornwallis. This, too, corresponds with what we know a unit from Berkeley County did at this stage of the conflict.²⁹ When Michael and the other militia had gotten as far as the Point of the James River,³⁰ they received the news of Cornwallis's surrender and were instructed to cast lots to see which soldiers would continue in uniform and which ones would be sent home. Crooks was among the lucky ones to be discharged, had his discharge paper signed by General Muhlenberg, and went home. His application notes that he gave the discharge paper to his mother but that she lost it.

Unfortunately for Michael Crooks, the War Department rejected his request for a pension on the grounds that as a militiaman he had not served the requisite six months, although the period from January to October is longer than that. Does the fact that he is listed on the 1840 census of veterans indicate that he got the decision overturned, or simply that he said he was a veteran of the Revolutionary War even though he was judged not eligible for an annual payment? I think the latter is the explanation.

But perhaps there is another, more basic reason for the War Department's rejection of Michael's petition. Although the experiences Michael describes in his application are broadly consistent with what we know actually occurred, there is no evidence whatsoever that Michael ever served in a military unit during the Revolutionary War – not just for the nine months he claimed but for any period of time. An interesting angle on this question comes from our knowledge that Henry Crook – judging from his birthplace and residence, a man who was probably Michael's younger brother – did serve under Captain Henry Betinger. We also know that the experiences of Henry's unit were similar to those Michael cites in his application. Did some or all of Michael's wartime service simply fail to get recorded, perhaps because his unit was only an informal militia unit? Did Michael actually serve alongside Henry only to have his records go missing? Or did Michael fabricate a record in an unsuccessful effort to secure a pension?

It is impossible to answer such questions now, but there is no getting around the fact that nothing documents Michael Crooks or his military service except his own application. Nor can we ignore the reality that the War Department rejected that application, even though he claimed to have served more than the minimum length of time. Does this indicate that the War Department was skeptical about the validity of his service but used the diplomatic response that he did not serve long enough to be eligible? (Michael's lack of a discharge paper cannot be overlooked, either.) It seems possible that a half-century after the War of Independence, Michael "borrowed" some of his brother's experiences in order to obtain a pension for himself, or at least used them to make his own meager record look better. (He may have heard them told so often for so long that Michael came to believe he was actually there too.) We cannot escape the possibility, though, that Michael Crooks never served at all. In any case our task is not to judge or censure him, just to understand what actually happened.

Before we leave the later Crooks generations in search of their antecedents, we will pause to consider a bit of family tradition about their movements during the years immediately after 1815. The tradition is that John's older brother, Jacob Crooks, met and married his wife in Ohio while he was visiting family members there soon after the War of 1812 ended and later moved his family to the vicinity of Terre Haute, Indiana. My research has established a definite connection between Michael and his sons and the Crooks families in Muskingum County, Ohio – families that were headed by Michael's five brothers, who had moved to Ohio beginning in 1797. A Jacob Crooks who married in that county in December 1816 is not, however, the son of any of these five brothers. In fact, a contemporary marriage notice and other information in Muskingum County verifies that Jacob was, like our John Crooks, the son of Michael Crooks of Kentucky.

Muskingum County was in the midst of the Revolutionary War bounty lands located in Ohio, and one wonders if Jacob might have gone to inspect or even settle upon land his father, Michael, hoped to claim for his service during the war; if so, might John have accompanied him? Or did the two brothers serve in this part of Ohio during the War of 1812 and return to see if they could find good land there? (Neither brother filed for public land in Ohio.) Perhaps they just wanted to visit their Crooks relatives in Ohio – a supposition strengthened by the tradition that Jacob did not get along with his stepmother. The family story also suggests that Michael went to Ohio with his two sons, but there is no evidence to confirm this. The absence of tax records for Jefferson County, Kentucky, for 1815 and 1816 leaves us wondering who went to Ohio, and when, but it is clear that this brief sojourn in Ohio had to have taken place during those two years because both Michael and John Crooks are found on the rolls in Jefferson County from 1817 forward.

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We now turn to the hunt for the parents of Michael Crooks. From his application for a pension and other sources, we know that this couple lived first in the Philadelphia area (which would include such counties as Bucks, Berks, and Lancaster in addition to Philadelphia itself) around 1760, then later in Loudoun and Berkeley Counties of Virginia (the latter now in West Virginia). There is also reason to think that they lived in Frederick County, Maryland, for a time.

We begin in Berkeley County, where we find the will of a Jacob Kruck, Sr., a carpenter who died in 1795. This man's will was written on July 24, 1795, and was filed less than two months later, on September 22 of that same year. It names a wife, Elenore, and seven "surviving children," who include a married daughter, Molly Spring, and six sons named Jacob, Jr., John, Michael, Henry, Andrew, and Peter. This man is the only Kruck or Crooks who lived in Berkeley County at that time who could be Michael's father. The five brothers of the Michael named in Jacob's will are in fact the five Crooks males living in Muskingum County, Ohio, so it is clear that we have found the father of Michael Crooks: JACOB KRUCK. We do not know Jacob's date of birth, but it was no later than the early 1730s, which as we shall see indicates that he was born in Germany.

The wife Jacob calls Elenore in his will was identified in other contemporary documents as ANNA CLARA NOLLIN.³¹ Some documents in Berkeley County identify her as Anna Clara and others use the name Elenore. Since the names are used interchangeably during the same time period, it is clear they all refer to the same woman, who from other evidence we know is Anna Clara Nollin. We can only estimate – the 1730s, perhaps? – when Anna Clara was born, but her birthplace was almost certainly Pennsylvania. She died sometime between October 5, 1804, when she attended a sale of Jacob's effects (some of them described as "old") – tools, farm equipment, animals, and crops "in the barn" – and December 21, 1807, when Peter and his wife sold property that Anna Clara and Peter had received from Jacob. Late 1805 is a good guess as to Anna Clara's date of death, as another sale disposed of crops standing in the fields (evidently located at the couple's farm near Shepherdstown) took place then.

Jacob Kruck was a man whose name was in transition while he lived in Berkeley County, and even after his death: some of the county records refer to him as Jacob Crook or Crooks, and his will is cross-referenced as Crooks in the clerk's index. (In one instance a document calls him Crook but is found in the K section.) It is clear, then, that our Jacob "Crooks" was a German originally named Kruck who found his name Anglicized to Crook or Crooks and who chose to use the original spelling of his name when it came to settling his affairs. (The German origins of Michael Crooks help to explain why he would be selected to guard Hessian prisoners.)

Although Jacob Kruck does not appear to be on the Berkeley County list of tithables for 1774, tax and other records document his presence there from at least the early 1780s onward. He is not found as either a grantor or a grantee in the county's early deed books but is shown in the land books from 1785 through 1789 as the owner of 67 acres – not a large property, but probably an adequate amount for a skilled tradesman like a carpenter. He does not appear again in the land books, making one wonder if he was relieved of the tax levy after 1789 because of his age or an infirmity. The land books make it clear that Jacob's 67 acres was in the eastern section of the county, in the portion that is now Jefferson County, West Virginia, which accords with the statement in the pension application of Michael Crooks that his family lived in that county.

Records of the Lutheran church in Martinsburg show a Jacob Krug family active in that church as early as 1782. Jacob, Jacob, Jr., and Peter Krug are listed as members in that year; Jacob, Jr., Elizabeth, Peter ("filus"), and Anna are shown as communicants in 1794 or 1795. This may be our Jacob Kruck and family, but the ages do not seem quite right, there is no Elizabeth that we know of in Jacob Kruck's family, and all the other sons – Andrew, John, Henry, and Michael – are not mentioned. In addition, this church would be some distance from the eastern part of the county. On the other hand, I have not found any evidence of a Krug family in Berkeley County at this time. The evidence thus is inconclusive, but I am inclined to think this is in fact our Jacob Kruck and his family.

Berkeley county's personal property rolls from 1782 (the first year for which they exist) through 1795 show Jacob Kruck with anywhere from one to six horses and four to eleven head of cattle. Thus although we cannot be specific about when Jacob moved to Berkeley County, we can document his presence there as early as 1782. Jacob is not found in any records in Frederick County, Virginia, from which Berkeley County was created in 1772.

Toward the end of his life, on April 29, 1795, Jacob Kruck paid off a bond to the trustees of the town of Martinsburg, in Berkeley County, for the purchase of Lot 160 in that town. He died a few months later. This property, mentioned in his will, was confirmed to Anna Clara and the couple's youngest son, Peter, by the trustees on October 25, 1795 – provided they would build a residence on it. My guess is that Jacob and his wife had moved from the 67 acres into a rented property in Martinsburg: his administration account shows he had been paying rent when he died, and the second sale mentioned above, a decade after his death, shows that "old" household goods had been left behind at a working farm. Perhaps Jacob and his wife had been renting the farm out, which might account for the final sale – of crops in the field – at the end of the 1805 growing season. Jacob made Peter the sole heir of his property after Anna Clara died, and so Jacob may have deeded his property to Peter in return for the latter's promise to care for his mother after his father's death. This conclusion is supported by the fact that after selling the town lot on December 21, 1807 (unlike 1795, Anna Clara is not a party to the transaction), Peter and his wife followed the other Crook brothers to Ohio.³²

Returning to how the Crooks – then Krucks – got to Berkeley County, we know from Michael's pension application to look next in Loudoun County, Virginia. The Virginia tax rolls from about 1750 onward reveal several men bearing the Crooks name in Loudoun County. Of prime interest to us is the Jacob Crook found on the tax lists in Shelburne Parish of Loudoun County from 1771 through at least 1774. This parish is in the northwest corner of that county, where it abuts the portion of Frederick County, Virginia, that became Berkeley County in 1772; Shepherdstown is not far from where the two counties touched. It seems quite plausible, then, that this is the Crooks family we are seeking. Although the listings are for Crook and not Kruck, we must keep in mind that Jacob's name may have been Anglicized in Loudoun County, which had fewer German inhabitants than Berkeley County did. The fact that the name is Crook and not Crooks actually should strengthen our conviction that the man in question is Jacob Kruck.³³

Can we determine when Jacob Kruck came to Loudoun County? We know that Michael's presumed brother Henry Crook was residing in Berkeley County when he enlisted during the winter of 1782-83 but was born, he said, in Frederick County, Maryland.³⁴ His approximate date of birth would have been during the 1760s. Is there any other evidence that Jacob Crook and his family lived in Maryland? Several things attract our attention. First, in 1763 a Jacob Crook was a witness in a naturalization of several Germans, but the apparent location of this event – in northern Frederick County close to the Pennsylvania border – and the continuing presence of another Crooks family in that area both argue against this witness being our man. In addition, a Jacob Crook reported a stray animal on his property in Frederick County in January 1770, but that county is quite large and there is no indication of where this man lived.³⁵

More encouraging are the records of baptism at the Lutheran church in Frederick, Maryland, which included baptisms not only at the church in the Monocacy area of Maryland but throughout the region. Seven times between April 1772 and October 1783, Jacob and Anna Clara Krug (as it is spelled here), either together or separately, were sponsors or the parents in these baptismal records. Anna Clara is sometimes listed as Gloria or Anna Gloria, but it is clear she is Jacob's wife. Does this mean that this couple lived in Maryland during this period? In view of the close proximity of northwest Loudoun County, Virginia, and southern Frederick County, Maryland, we cannot say on which side of the Potomac River the Krugs were actually residing at any particular time. The whole area on both sides of the river functioned as a single community.

My guess is that Jacob and his family lived on the Maryland side during the late 1760s, moved to Virginia during the early 1770s, and then migrated west to eastern Berkeley County (now Jefferson County) by the mid-1770s. The fact that Jacob is not on the Maryland state censuses in 1776 and 1778, or on the list of those signing oaths of fidelity in Maryland during the late 1770s, supports the idea that the family is then in Virginia. It may be noteworthy that Jacob and Anna Clara were sponsors at baptisms at the Reformed Church in Shepherdstown, Virginia, in June and July of 1783.³⁶

Looking earlier, we turn our attention to Pennsylvania. Here we find a Johan Jacob Krug (as it is spelled here) who, on August 17, 1755, married a Clara Nollin at Augustus Evangelical Lutheran Church at Trappe, then in Philadelphia County (now Montgomery County), Pennsylvania.³⁷ The fact that Clara's father was named Michael helps to confirm that we have the right couple. Strangely, although Jacob and Clara appear twice more in the records of the New Hanover Lutheran Church nearby (in 1761 and 1762), and although they had a daughter (not Molly but Catharina) baptized in Trappe in November 1762, the records of neither church show the baptism of any male children.

Assuming that Jacob has listed his sons in birth order in his will, as it would seem he did from what we do know of their sequence, Jacob, Jr., and John ought to have been born and baptized by 1760, and Michael should have been baptized in that year or the next; certainly it is unrealistic to expect that Jacob and Anna Clara did not have their first child until 1762, seven years into their marriage. In addition, the Krucks were evidently churchgoers, so it seems strange that these baptisms were not recorded. Did they attend a church other than the two we have mentioned between 1755 and 1761, so that the first three children (Michael and his elder brothers) were baptized there? It seems more likely that the three boys were not baptized for some reason until 1762 or later, probably because the Krucks had moved on to a place (further south or west in Pennsylvania or in Maryland?) we do not know about.

Confirmation for this theory comes from a baptismal record in the papers of Rev. Jacob Lischy, a Reformed Church pastor who served at least a dozen congregations in York County, Pennsylvania (which then included what is now Adams County as well). Lischy's records show that Michael Krug, the son of Jacob and Anna Clara {Noll} Krug, was baptized on December 27, 1765. Thus we can propose a scenario something like this: Michael was born close to Philadelphia in 1760 or soon afterwards, during the period (about 1755 to about 1762) his parents were living somewhere near Trappe or Gilbertsville (home of New Hanover Church, ten miles from Trappe); that the Kruck family moved to the southwest frontier (either to York County, Pennsylvania, or to Frederick County in adjacent Maryland) not long after Catharina was baptized in November 1762 but before Henry was born in 1765; and that the family took the opportunity to have Michael – and perhaps other children – baptized by Rev. Lischy, who probably served the faithful on both sides of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. It would come as no surprise, I believe, if we were to learn that the Krug property was in the area disputed by the two colonies, but a final decision on that issue must await further evidence.

As a final note on Michael Crooks, we should express the caution that his statement about his year of birth cannot be fully trusted. It is possible that he fibbed a bit to inflate his age when he enlisted in 1781 (he would not have been the only one to do so) and maintained the fiction when he applied for a pension. It is also possible that Michael was only guessing when he was born, or remembered the year incorrectly in 1838. Thus it is possible, too, that he was born in either York County, Pennsylvania, or Frederick County, Maryland. My own hunch is that Michael Crooks was born close to Philadelphia during the early 1760s, but we may never know the truth.

Before we search for the antecedents of Jacob Kruck, we will pause to consider Anna Clara's parents. She was the daughter of JOHAN MICHAEL NOLLIN³⁸ and a woman whose name is shown as ANNA BARBARA in the Augustus Evangelical Lutheran Church's records in 1755. In Rev. Lischy's records in 1765, the female sponsor of the young Michael Krug whose name appears with that of Michael "Noll" is a woman named Anna Margaret Fischborn. We cannot be sure that this second sponsor is actually Michael Nollin's wife, but the similarity of her given names in the two original records suggests that either " Barbara" or "Margaret" could be an error in one of the documents. Because she is identified as Fischborn rather than Noll, it seems more likely that she is not Michael Noll's wife but a relative or friend. A study of these records shows, too, that the Krugs and the Nollins were not only closely associated but intermarried. That relationship will help us to tie Jacob Kruck or Krug to a man of that name who was among the Palatine immigrants.

German naming traditions strongly suggest that Jacob's father was named Johannes. Looking at extant ship records for Palatine immigrants, we find that a Johannes Krück arrived in Philadelphia from Rotterdam and Cowes on September 1, 1736, aboard the Harle, whose captain was Ralph Harle. Johannes, the ship register shows, was born in 1707. Another passenger aboard the Harle was Johan Michael Nollin, age 17, almost certainly the Michael Nollin who is listed in church records as the father of Anna Clara. Jacob Kruck, who given his likely age in 1755 probably had been born by 1736, must have accompanied his parents on the voyage. He and Michael Nollin were probably about the same age.

This circumstantial evidence is strong enough, I think, that we should accept JOHANNES KRÜCK as the father of Jacob Kruck (Crooks). We do not know the name of his wife, Jacob's mother, who presumably was born in Germany and died in Pennsylvania.³⁹

And so we can finally link the mother of Sarah Elizabeth [Rickabaugh} Zink, Mary {Crooks} Rickabaugh, through John Crooks and Michael Crooks and Jacob Kruck – the first of her Crooks/Kruck family to arrive in America, in 1736. It is time to tackle the Rickabaugh line itself, and so we turn to Mary's presumed father, Henry Rickabaugh.

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As we have seen, Henry Rickabaugh is living in Greene County, Indiana, in both 1840 and 1850. By 1860, however, the census reveals that he has moved to Des Moines, Polk County, Iowa.⁴⁰ Henry evidently made this move after 1851, when he had a son born in Indiana, but before 1853 or 1854, when he had a daughter born in Iowa. Why Henry Rickabaugh moved to Iowa is not known. Although it was a rapidly developing new area and he may simply have sought opportunity in that state, it was also already home to a growing colony of Rickabaughs and some of Henry's immediate family had moved there as early as the mid-1840s. On the 1860 census Henry now describes himself as a teamster (he was a farmer in 1850), which is confirmed by the fact that he has personal property worth $500 but no real estate.⁴¹

At first we wonder if we have the right Henry Rickabaugh: on the 1860 census his age is listed as 46 years old, whereas the Henry we have previously met in Indiana in 1850 (29 years old that year) should be 39 years old in 1860. But the Henry in Iowa does have a wife named Sarah J. who is exactly ten years older than the Sarah Jane {Willard} Rickabaugh we have also met earlier, and it is noteworthy that both men named Henry employ the distinctive spelling of Rickebaugh for the family name. It seems almost certain this is the same Henry Rickabaugh, whose age is simply overstated in 1860.⁴² This conclusion will be confirmed when we move ahead to the following two censuses.

The Des Moines city directory of 1866-67 shows Henry, again described as a teamster, living on Second Street between Raccoon and Allen Streets, just east of the Des Moines River. This area contained most of the city's businesses, and many of the residences in the river bottoms along the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers were cabins that had been built for soldiers during the 1840s when Des Moines was an isolated western fort. He is not listed in the 1869 edition of the directory, nor in subsequent directories for Des Moines through 1881-82, and so it seems likely that he has moved on sometime during the latter part of the 1860s. The fact that Henry Rickabaugh is not found in Iowa at all on the 1870 census seems to confirm this conclusion.

Only after years of searching – and with the aid of other Rickabaugh researchers – did I finally locate him on the census in 1870. He is living in the town of Plattsmouth, Nebraska, which is situated in Cass County just across the Missouri River from western Iowa. Described again as a teamster, Henry is shown as 52 years old in 1870, which is at variance with his listed ages on the previous two censuses. Judging from what we already know, it would seem that he and his family moved to Nebraska sometime during the late 1860s. Unfortunately, there are no land records showing that Henry Rickabaugh owned property in Cass County, and it seems likely that he remained a workman of some sort who rented a place in town. It bears mentioning that Plattsmouth enjoyed boom years from about 1868 through about 1875 because it was competing with Omaha to be the terminus of the western railroad. It may have been this boom that attracted Henry to the town.⁴³

By 1880, though, Henry Rickabaugh is back in Iowa, perhaps because Plattsmouth was no longer thriving but perhaps, too, because some of his Rickabaugh relatives – including his brother, Samuel – had now arrived there. (Since the Cass County, Nebraska, censuses in 1875 and 1876 do not list Henry, it is likely that he had left Nebraska by then.) The 1880 census shows Henry Rickabaugh living in Bartlett, in Fremont County, Iowa. This county, in the southwest corner of the state, partially adjoins Cass County across the Missouri River. Now described as a 53-year-old common laborer, Henry is thus said to be only a year older than he was in 1870. Despite this inconsistency, and the absence for the first time of Henry's second wife Sarah (who presumably died between 1870 and 1880), we can be confident we have the right man: the children listed in his household, along with their ages and birthplaces, match very nicely those who are listed in 1860 and 1870.⁴⁴ (Henry – or perhaps the members of his family who supplied census data – evidently did not put much stock in how old he was, or how old they said he was, having reported on five censuses birth years for Henry ranging from 1814 to 1827.) Again there are no land records with Henry Rickabaugh's name on them, from which we surmise that he was renting here as well.

The 1880 census also describes Henry Rickabaugh as being both blind and maimed, crippled, bedridden or otherwise incapacitated, and yet it also states that he worked eight of the twelve months of the previous year as a common laborer. Is it possible that he has just recently encountered these physical problems, or was his work during the previous year only nominal in nature? Henry's listing states that his father and mother were both born in Kentucky, which is correct only for his mother, and states that he is a widower – which confirms why Henry Rickabaugh's second wife is not listed with him on this census.

The absence of a census for 1890 means that we cannot determine whether or not Henry Rickabaugh was still alive in that year. We do know that he is not listed in the most likely Iowa counties for 1885 or 1895, when that state had its own censuses, and that he is not listed in the national census of 1900 in either Iowa or Nebraska. But neither is Henry found in any obituaries, death records, or cemetery listings for the two most likely Iowa counties. We know that he had wanderlust; could he have moved again, perhaps down into Indian Territory or west with the railroad? At least two of Henry's brothers who moved to western Iowa before 1880 are on that state's census in 1885, but Henry could have been taken in by a child or other relative who went west.⁴⁵ In my opinion, unless we can find him elsewhere in Iowa on the 1885 or 1895 state censuses we probably should conclude that Henry Rickabaugh – not in very good health in 1880 – probably died sometime between 1880 and 1885. But we cannot be sure of this, and so it is not yet possible to close the book on the life of Henry Rickabaugh.

The 1880 census sheet for Henry Rickabaugh contains a piece of information that turns out to have unusual significance. The sheet reveals that he has residing in his household a man named Samuel Rickabaugh, who is described as his brother, along with that man's wife and children. This clue was the key that unlocked the mystery of the identity of Henry's father and mother, to which we now turn. In order to understand the importance of this clue, which is the only information that links Henry to a set of parents, we must review the mystery in its entirety. It makes a fascinating case study of how one must sometimes sort through various candidates before finding a person's actual parents.

There is nothing about Henry Rickabaugh in the information that has been contributed to the LDS. The censuses on which he appears tell us only that he was born in Ohio between about 1814 and about 1821. In view of the fact that he married Mary Crooks in early 1838, my guess is that he was born about 1818 to 1820 – and no later than 1821.⁴⁶ Thus it behooves us to look at Rickabaugh males who were living in Ohio at that time, who appear on later censuses with at least one boy Henry's approximate age, or who should be considered as candidates for other reasons.

According to various census indexes, there are four men named Rickabaugh who are heads of household in Ohio in 1820. Three of them reside in Gallia County, home to a sizable Rickabaugh contingent that arrived between 1800 and 1803.⁴⁷ These three are John (26-45 years old), Adam (45 years old or older), and Henry (16-26 years old).⁴⁸ The fourth Rickabaugh, Reuben (26-45 years old), lives in adjacent Jackson County, which had been formed out of Gallia County just a few years before. Here then are four candidates to be Henry's father.

Three of these men have in their respective households in 1820 at least one male under the age of 10 years old where Henry most likely would have been enumerated. In fact, John has two, Adam has three, and Reuben has four such males. Unfortunately, since young Henry could have been born before 1820 but as late as 1821, the number of male children listed for each of these potential fathers at census time in 1820 is not conclusive evidence. But the adult Henry Rickabaugh listed in Gallia County that year also does not have any male children ten years later in 1830, when young Henry should still be in his father's household, so we should be able eliminate that man out of hand.

Complicating things, though, two of these four Ohio Rickabaughs in 1820 have other males living with them who would be old enough themselves to be Henry's father: Adam Rickabaugh has a pair of males 16 to 26 years old in his household, and Henry Rickabaugh – described as being 16 to 26 years old himself in 1820 – has in his household yet another male in that same age column. These three unnamed males must also be considered candidates for Henry's father, if we can figure out who they are.

Our list of candidates known to be in Ohio when young Henry Rickabaugh was born thus would seem to have a total of seven men on it (assuming that if he was not born until 1821 all of them had remained in the state during that year), but we can immediately eliminate one of them – the Henry in Gallia County – because there is no evidence he had a son the right age in either 1810 or 1820.⁴⁹ Our next step is to repeat that process for Rickabaugh males listed in 1830: which of them living in Ohio and Indiana in 1830 have in their households boys who would have been born when we think Henry was born (1818 to 1821)? We must include Indiana in 1830 because we do not know exactly when Henry arrived there, though we do know that he was there by 1838 – when he was married the first time. There are five such Rickabaugh males for 1830, and it seems highly likely that Henry's father is among them unless the census did not capture him at all that year.⁵⁰ Let us look closely at each one to see what we learn.

The strongest of these candidates would appear to be a John Rickabaugh, who lives in Greene County, Indiana – the same county where Henry himself is known to have lived. John is 30 to 40 years old in 1830 (and so would have been about 20 to 30 years of age when Henry was born). He has one boy 5 to 10 years old and two others 10 to 15 years old. John is one of only two adult Rickabaughs other than Henry himself who ever lived in Indiana, and he is the only one who is listed there with children in 1830. Moreover, based on the profile of his family John Rickabaugh seems to be the same man of that name who was living in Gallia County, Ohio, in 1820, when he had two sons in the age column in which Henry might appear had he been born between 1818 and the time of the census. He and Henry, who began his own household in 1838, live near one another (again in Greene County, Indiana) in 1840; in that year, the age columns for males born between 1815 and 1830 on John Rickabaugh's census sheet are empty, which they should be if Henry has left John's household in 1838 to begin his own.

What this seems to tell us is that if Henry Rickabaugh moved to Indiana with his parents before 1830, this John Rickabaugh in Greene County is the only obvious candidate in our search for his father. (Although it is possible that Henry went to Indiana on his own or with a relative this seems an improbable action for a teenager, which would seem to argue that Henry's father was most likely a candidate who lived in Greene County, Indiana, in 1840.) It is peculiar that John Rickabaugh disappears after we see him on the 1840 census, and even the Rickabaugh researcher who knows the most about him has no idea what happened to him. If this John was Henry's father, did Henry pull up stakes for Iowa during the early 1850s because his father moved on or died sometime between 1840 and 1850?

All of this circumstantial evidence – particularly the proximity of John and Henry in Greene County, Indiana, in 1840 – had me convinced, once upon a time, that John Rickabaugh was Henry's father. But according to the Rickabaugh researcher referred to, John and his wife, Tabitha {Shelton} Rickabaugh, had neither a son named Henry nor any other sons born about 1820 who are unaccounted for. Her evidence about the composition of John and Tabitha's family seems very strong, and so we must rule out John Rickabaugh as Henry's father.⁵¹

The second Rickabaugh listed on an Ohio or Indiana census in 1830 whose household has at least one male the right age to be Henry is Adam Rickabaugh, a man 60 to 70 years of age who lives in Gallia County, Ohio, that year. This is presumably the same man we saw listed there ten years earlier. In 1830 he has two males 10 to 15 years old in his household and none who are younger, which means that Henry would have to have been born in 1820 or 1821 to be his son. This Adam Rickabaugh's family has been very well-researched, however, and so we know that Adam himself fathered the three boys between 1810 and 1818 in his second marriage – and that Henry is not among them. We can also eliminate this Adam Rickabaugh as a candidate, therefore.

Next on our list is Reuben Rickabaugh in Jackson County, Ohio, whom we have also seen in 1820. In 1830 he is 40 to 50 years of age, has two males in his household who are 5 to 10 years old, and has two more who are 10 to 15 years of age; there is also an unknown male who is 30 to 40 years of age. We know little about Reuben Rickabaugh, and nothing for certain about how he fits into the overall Rickabaugh family, but a reliable list of his male children accounts for all four of the youngsters listed in 1830.⁵² (One of them was a David Henry, but from his later history we can be sure he was not the man known to us as Henry Rickabaugh.) We have now eliminated all of the named Rickabaughs we identified on the 1820 Ohio census: John, Adam, Henry, and Reuben.

Our next candidate, based on the 1830 Ohio census, is someone we have not met before. He is David Rickabaugh, who in 1830 lives in Hardy Township of Holmes County – a county located some distance from Gallia County toward the northeastern part of Ohio. David is 40 to 50 years old that year; his wife, Elizabeth {Plank} Rickabaugh, is 30 to 40 years of age. This household has one boy 5 to 10 years old, another who is 10 to 15 years old, and five young females. Henry Rickabaugh could be either of the two boys, depending on exactly when he was born.

David Rickabaugh does not appear to be on the census in Holmes County in 1820. Our first sign of him there comes with his purchase of land east of Millersburg, Ohio, in June 1824. David and his wife sold their land here in 1835, and we presume they moved a few counties southwest to Fairfield County, Ohio, where they bought land in January 1839. The 1840 census index does not show a David Rickabaugh anywhere in Ohio, but a line-by-line search of Fairfield County turned up a man named David Rinebaugh whose family matches very closely what David and Elizabeth Rickabaugh's should look like in that year: David is 50 to 60 years old, his wife is 40 to 50 years old, and there is a large number of children who closely correspond to the ones seen in 1830.⁵³

In October 1846, a David Rickabaugh purchased (from John Rickabaugh, a relative) 80 acres in Pike County, Ohio, still further to the southwest and just west of Gallia County. The 1850 and 1860 censuses show a man named David Rickabaugh living in Beaver Township of Pike County. He is 62 years of age in 1850 and 72 years of age in 1860, and he gives his place of birth as Pennsylvania. David's wife, 57 and 67 years of age respectively on the two censuses, and also born in Pennsylvania, is shown with the name of Elizabeth. David Rickabaugh died in Beaver Township sometime before December 3, 1864, the date his will was probated. Elizabeth died in Pike County on April 22, 1875.

Are all these sightings of the same couple? The migration pattern seems to make sense, and the ages of David and his wife on the censuses from 1830 through 1860 match up quite nicely. One difficulty is that David's will names only one child born before 1830, a girl born in 1829, whereas the 1830 census shows six children in his household that year. Have these children – who would include Henry, of course, if these are his parents – simply grown and moved away (or perhaps died), so that his will takes no notice of them? Or are we confusing two men named David Rickabaugh who happen to be living in Ohio at the same time?

As it happens, the David Rickabaugh in Ohio might be either of two men of that name, born in Pennsylvania at about the same time, who might have gone to Ohio during the first half of the 19th century. A source book on the Amish and Amish Mennonites of Pennsylvania, to which we will refer (as "Gingerich," the name of one of its co-editors) in this section, shows the births and parents of both Davids but has no further information about when and where they lived and died: we are on our own in figuring this puzzle out. We can imagine a scenario in which both of these men migrated to Ohio, of course a popular destination for those leaving Pennsylvania. Fortunately, though, I determined from other sources that one of the two men named David Rickabaugh stayed in Pennsylvania, where he died in 1847, so we can now eliminate him from consideration.⁵⁴

To complicate matters, however, there is at this time yet a third David Rickabaugh whom we discover on the Stark County, Ohio, census in 1830. In that year he is 30 to 40 years old and has three sons 5 years old or younger and so is not Henry Rickabaugh's father. But another male in his household, 15 to 20 years old, may be a relative or a hired hand. Could this teenager be the Henry we are seeking? According to a Rickabaugh researcher, this third David Rickabaugh was only 31 years old in 1830 – too young to have a son 15-20 years old that year. Furthermore, this David Rickabaugh came to Ohio in 1827, after Henry was born there. This man moved from Stark County to Seneca County, Ohio, in 1833, and we do find him in the latter county in 1840 and in 1850. In 1840 there are now four sons, plus the other male – who is now 20 to 30 years old. In 1850 the four sons are still in David's household, and none of them is named Henry. Because we can account for all four of the sons this David Rickabaugh is known to have had, along with the other male in his household, we can eliminate him as Henry's possible father.⁵⁵

Unless we discover some other evidence that sheds new light on the problem we have been examining, we have now eliminated two of the three David Rickabaughs we find in Ohio. Doing so means that the remaining man bearing that name – the one who appears in Holmes County no later than 1824 – is the other David Rickabaugh shown in Gingerich's source book on the Amish and Amish Mennonites, a man born in Pennsylvania in 1789. In addition, we can say that this David Rickabaugh is almost surely the same man who, as outlined above, migrated through Fairfield County to Pike County, Ohio, where he died in 1864.

This David Rickabaugh was born in Berks County, Pennsylvania, on August 27, 1789. He married Elizabeth {Plank} Rickabaugh sometime before 1820; her date of birth was December 19, 1793. Gingerich's source book shows David Rickabaugh living in Berks County as late as the 1820 census, and the census that year confirms that a man named David Rickebach resides in Caernarvon Township of Berks County. He and his wife are the right ages (26 to 45 years old) to be the couple we later meet in Ohio. On the 1790, 1800, and 1810 censuses, David seems to appear – the right age each time – in the household of his father in Heidelberg Township and Bern Township of Berks County, Pennsylvania.⁵⁶

For David and Elizabeth's whereabouts between 1820 and 1824, we have to speculate a bit. If we accept as accurate the census evidence that Henry was born in Ohio as late as 1820 or 1821, we must accept a timeline that has them move from Pennsylvania to Ohio sometime after the census was taken in the former state. It is also possible that David and Elizabeth's Pennsylvania relatives reported them in that state, as they were supposed to, even though they had already departed for Ohio, and that they arrived in Ohio too late to be listed in duplicate on that state's census for 1820.

Between 1820 and 1824, it is possible that David and his family lived in Gallia County: a man with his name is listed in several land transactions there from 1817 to 1823, though there is no firm evidence that such a man actually resided in Gallia County then. Possibly David Rickabaugh came to Gallia County to scout land, returned to Pennsylvania to marry Elizabeth, then led the family's migration to Ohio in 1820. It is also possible that there was another David Rickabaugh involved in these transactions, that someone filed the claims for David, or even that a relative used David's name to claim land that the relative himself later obtained when the fictitious claim was not validated by David. We can only guess.

I think it is more likely that in 1820 or 1821 David and Elizabeth moved directly to Holmes County, a center for Amish and Amish Mennonite migration from Pennsylvania beginning in 1809, or that before the couple moved on to Holmes County they lived in one of several other counties in northern and eastern Ohio that were attracting the Amish and Amish Mennonites.⁵⁷ It is probable that they moved to Ohio with other members of their families. I doubt that David obtained 160 acres of bounty land as a reward for military service during the War of 1812, since there is no record that he served in that conflict. He probably bought the land from a speculator.⁵⁸

For reasons unknown to us, David and Elizabeth did not stay in Holmes County but moved at least twice more before settling permanently in Pike County. Why did they move so often? It is possible they had disagreements over doctrine with other Amish and Amish Mennonites in Holmes County, since such doctrinal disputes are known to have occurred in that community. Possibly they had relatives who had moved on to Fairfield County or to Pike County and they wished to join them. Perhaps they heard land was better in southern Ohio. Again we can only guess.

There are many more questions about David and Elizabeth Rickabaugh, but the issue that concerns us here is whether they are plausible candidates to be Henry Rickabaugh's parents. I think the answer is yes, but just barely. To consider them candidates, we have to believe: that David and Elizabeth came to Ohio soon enough after the 1820 census for Henry to be born there during the 1818 to 1821 "window" we have identified; that Henry is one of the several unnamed children shown on the 1830 Ohio census; and that young Henry left home to head off to Indiana, on his own, as a teenager, while his parents remained in Ohio. For a long time I was compelled by the lack of a good alternative to David Rickabaugh to accept such a hypothesis, or rather three hypotheses – each of which is something of a long shot. Only the discovery of the man described as Henry's brother on the 1880 census resolved this issue and enabled me to put David Rickabaugh among the also-rans.

Before we can finally unlock the mystery of Henry Rickabaugh's parentage, we must digress to consider yet another surprise candidate to be his father, a man about the right age to have sired Henry who cannot be ignored because he lives immediately next door to Henry in Des Moines in 1860. This is another John Rickabaugh – not, of course, the man of that name who was our first candidate, whom we met in Indiana in 1830 and 1840; instead, Henry's 1860 neighbor was the son of our second candidate, Adam Rickabaugh. This John Rickabaugh in Iowa was reportedly born in Lincoln County, North Carolina, in 1794. He served in the Ohio militia during the War of 1812 and continued to reside in Ohio until after 1850: he is listed on the census there in 1830, 1840, and 1850, but not in 1820. Since he is named on tax lists in Gallia County both before and after the 1820 census – in 1819, 1821, and 1822 – it is likely that he was simply overlooked when the 1820 census was taken or perhaps was living in his father's household. Indeed, as we have seen Adam Rickabaugh does have two unnamed males 16 to 26 years old in his household in 1820, and they match up nicely with the two older sons we know Adam had: John and Peter, both of whom would have been in that age column in that year.⁵⁹

After John's father, Adam, died in 1836, there was a protracted disagreement among his heirs over the estate, for which John was the executor. It was this John Rickabaugh who in 1846 sold David Rickabaugh of Pennsylvania the property (perhaps some of Adam's estate) in Pike County, Ohio. This inheritance dispute was settled only in 1850. In 1859, John's wife (Phebe {White} Rickabaugh) died, and almost immediately – in time for the 1860 census, at any rate – John Rickabaugh relocated to Iowa, where as we gave seen he and his remaining children are found living next to Henry in Des Moines. It would be natural for a father to join a son in this manner. Later John lived near the town of Van Meter in Dallas County, Iowa, evidently on land that he had obtained (through legislation the Congress passed in 1850) by virtue of his service during the War of 1812. He died on December 15, 1872.

Does the proximity of Henry and John in Iowa indicate that they were father and son? We know that John Rickabaugh married Phebe White on December 2, 1821, evidently too late for them to be Henry's parents even if he was born in 1821, though it is possible that Henry was born to them out of wedlock. I think it would be more likely, judging from John's age in 1821 (27 years old, rather advanced for a first marriage), that he had been married earlier and that Henry would be the product of that first, unknown marriage.

Such a circumstance might help to explain Henry's early departure from John and Phebe's household: perhaps he did not get along with his stepmother and took a welcome opportunity to get away by moving to Indiana with one or both of his uncles, the "other" John Rickabaugh and Adam Rickabaugh. Another possible explanation is more benign: perhaps Henry's father John, anticipating that he himself would be moving to Indiana once the matter of his father's estate was unsnarled, sent Henry on ahead with his uncles in order to scout out and file for good land. In the end John was unable to join Henry in Indiana, owing to the continuing legal mess, to an illness that struck Phebe, or to some other matter that held him in Ohio until the late 1850s but did join Henry in Iowa later on but before the 1860 census.

Thus we can make a good case for John being Henry's father, providing we assume an earlier marriage for him, but the astute reader will remember that this John Rickabaugh was not among the five men living in Ohio and Indiana in 1830 who had boys the right age to be Henry living in their households. Unless we find a definite first marriage for John Rickabaugh and unless we are prepared to set aside the 1830 census information, we should eliminate John Rickabaugh as Henry's possible father.

We can now turn our final candidate, another late entry. We first learn of him from the 1840 Indiana census, where he is listed fairly near to Henry Rickabaugh and the Willard family in Greene County of that state. He escaped our notice for a long time because the misspelling of his last name is not one of the obvious variations on Rickabaugh. This is another Adam Rickabaugh, 40 to 50 years of age in that year. Born in Virginia in 1790, he was the brother of the John Rickabaugh who was our first candidate and a cousin of the other John Rickabaugh we just considered. Although we cannot find a matching Adam Rickabaugh on the Ohio or Indiana censuses for 1820⁶⁰ and 1830,⁶¹ a little research about him reveals that he probably lived in Ohio from about 1800 until as late as the early 1820s: information about the birthplaces of his children on later censuses and tax lists in that county place him in Ohio during the period at least from 1819 through early 1824. Thus he would have been residing in Ohio when Henry was born during the first part of that five-year period. Adam Rickabaugh, like so many others in this family history, was a farmer.

The lack of more definite information about this Adam Rickabaugh did not enable me either to pursue him as a candidate to be Henry's father or else eliminate him. Only discovering the 1880 Iowa census information showing Samuel Rickabaugh as Henry's brother settled the matter. Luckily for us, the Samuel who is described as Henry Rickabaugh's brother in that year can be positively identified as the son of this Adam Rickabaugh. He is Samuel E. Rickabaugh, who married Susan Osborn (or Osborne). The 1880 census information matches what we know about Samuel and his family: his wife and children (Worth, Katy, and Bernice) all are listed, and at the right ages. Samuel and his family lived in Marion County, Iowa, in 1870, when his (hence, Henry's) mother, Catherine McCoy Rickabaugh, was living with them. When she died, they joined Henry in Fremont County, Iowa, near where we know at least two other sons of Adam and Catherine Rickabaugh (Peter and I. Perry) also lived. ⁶² The presence of all these sons of Adam and Catherine here at this time reinforces the conclusion that Henry has the same parents as these several other Rickabaughs.

It must be said that the most comprehensive list of Adam's children, also in the possession of the Rickabaugh researcher mentioned earlier, does not include a Henry. This list may well be incomplete, however, and it is interesting to observe that it could be expanded to include a child born in Ohio during the period 1818 to 1821 without distorting the existing sequence of birth places and dates. Nor do Adam and Henry live as immediate neighbors in Indiana, as we might expect a father and son to do. In addition, when Henry moves to Iowa years after Adam does, in 1845, he chooses to live not near Adam's farm west of Red Rocks and north of Knoxville in Marion County but in Des Moines. (This is probably Henry is now working as a teamster and needed an urban setting.)⁶³

Barring the discovery of a reason to disbelieve the 1880 census data, the presence of a brother named Samuel in Henry Rickabaugh's household in 1880 enables us to establish a positive link between Henry and his parents, Adam and Catherine Rickabaugh, and the presence nearby of at least two other children of that couple help to substantiate it. The discovery of this link brought to a close my seven-year search for any evidence at all that would positively identify Henry's parents. Perhaps further evidence will upset this apple cart once again, but for now it seems clear that we can accept ADAM RICKABAUGH and CATHERINE {MCCOY] RICKABAUGH as the father and mother of Henry Rickabaugh.

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rev. 7/26/10

Notes

¹This name is spelled in various ways, including half a dozen or so among the Rickabaughs in Indiana during this time period, but I use the spelling of Rickabaugh for the sake of consistency. We will examine the origins of the name later. It is noteworthy, though, that Sarah's presumed father, Henry Rickabaugh, is the only member of the family whose name is often spelled Rickebaugh.

²Elizabeth Rickabaugh married Daniel Shepherd in Greene County, Indiana, in 1843. The evidence is not conclusive, but Lewis Rickabaugh apparently was the "Lou Rickabaugh" who was later Wyatt Earp's partner in several gambling ventures in Arizona. Return to text

³The couple was married by a justice of the peace named William Norris.

⁴There is a minor mystery with the Willards, too. Washington Willard's wife, Margaret, is shown as 30 years old on the 1850 census, which would make her only 13 years old when Sarah Jane (17 years of age in 1850) was born. That census shows Washington Willard as 40 years old in 1850. The Indiana marriage records, though, show a marriage between George W. Willard and Margaret Purkhiser in 1831 – just right for Sarah's birth, and so the age shown for Margaret on the census in 1850 is clearly incorrect. Oddly, although Henry Rickabaugh and family presumably are living with the Willards in 1850, the census not only lists Henry first but shows him and not Willard as the owner of the real estate, which is valued at $400. The census enumerator may have been confused about who was living with whom, but we cannot exclude the possibility that the Willards were in fact living with Henry and their daughter. The fact that there is no sign that George Willard owned property in Greene County supports this idea; on the other hand, neither did Henry Rickabaugh own property there at that time. Return to text

⁵The justice of the peace for this marriage was J. Coffee.

⁶This couple has a male child not yet 5 years old. It is possible this child died before the 1850 census, unless he went to live with a relative and we lose sight of him. Return to text

⁷It seems probable that all these Rickabaughs would be related somehow, and in fact most of them seem to be siblings or cousins. The only one whose exact relationship to the others is not obvious is Henry Rickabaugh. Return to text

⁹For the sake of completeness, we must mention two less-plausible candidates. One is Jacob Rickabaugh, listed with his family on the Monroe County, Missouri, census in 1850. That census shows Jacob and his wife with a daughter named Sarah, born about 1845, but her birthplace is described as Missouri rather than Indiana, where Sarah Elizabeth {Rickabaugh} Zink says she was born. (Most of the other children of this couple were born in Kentucky, so Missouri is probably correct.) This Sarah never married. In addition, a Lewis Rickabaugh patented land in Greene County, Indiana, in 1840. We know nothing more about him, except that he may have been related to a John Rickabaugh we will examine later since their land adjoined. We have no evidence Lewis was married, though if he was he could have fathered Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh during the middle of the 1840s. More argues for Henry being her father, I think: a known marriage and, as we shall soon see, evidence suggesting that Sarah Elizabeth was living with Henry's in-laws. We probably can disregard a Sarah Ridenbark, 15 to 20 years of age, listed (with an older male) on the same census sheet as Henry Rickabaugh in 1840. An older Justus Ridenbark is just a page or two away, so this is probably an altogether different family, though one cannot be positive in view of how the name Rickabaugh was mangled by those who tried to write it. Return to text

¹⁰They include two men named Michael Crooks, both in Knox County; James Crooks, in Martin County; Enoch Crooke, in Lawrence County; Jeremiah Crook, in Sullivan County; and Zasel Crook, also in Sullivan County. All these men have females between 5 and 10 years of age in their households. Michael Crooks, also in Knox County, and John R. Crooks, in Lawrence County, have females between 10 and 15 years of age in theirs. The age shown for Sarah's grandfather, John Crooks, in 1850 (57) conflicts with our reasoning, based on the 1810 and 1820 censuses, that he was born in late 1793, unless in the eyes of the 1850 enumerator this deceased man would have turned 57 before the enumerator made his visit in late August of that year.

¹¹The Crooks couple gave to Mary and to her sister, Nancy {Crooks} Hagerman, the west half of the north half of fractional Section 33 in Township 6 North, Range 6 West (68.13 acres), on November 22, 1838. (It was fractional because it adjoins the White River.) Henry Rickabaugh filed this deed on December 12, 1838, one day before he and Mary were wed. A week after the marriage, Henry and Mary sold their half of this property to Aaron Hagerman, Nancy's husband. This deed was filed on January 28, 1839. (Thus this was not the property where Henry and his second wife were living in 1840.) See slide 12056 for a 2006 view of the property in Section 33. Return to text

¹²Some researchers believe that John Crooks did have a daughter of his own named Sarah, but that she died before 1850 – in fact, before the deed written in 1848. Return to text

¹³It is worth remembering that although Henry Rickabaugh and his daughter, though separated and in different townships of Greene County (Stafford and Washington, respectively), lived only a few miles apart. Return to text

¹⁴How I stumbled on this colony is an interesting lesson. I originally looked at Iowa because of the information, evidently erroneous, on the 1880 census that William R. and Sarah {Rickabaugh} Zink had a child born in Iowa. I thought it might indicate that they had met in that state. I probably would have found this colony anyhow, but it is worth remembering that serendipity sometimes pays off.

¹⁵Only two of the five Rickabaugh females who married in Indiana between 1835 and 1845 (see above) are still living in the state in 1850; a third, Elizabeth, is living in Iowa, as we have seen. None of them has Sarah Elizabeth living in her household. I also checked all the Crooks, Crook, and Crooke families in Greene and the surrounding Indiana counties, but none of them have a Sarah Elizabeth listed with them, either. Nor is Sarah Elizabeth Rickabaugh listed in 1850 with any of the Ohio Rickabaughs from whom the Indiana branch of that family apparently derived, as we shall see later. Return to text

¹⁶There is no documentation for a middle name for John Crooks, but his son John R. Crooks was called "Junior" and we have to assume from that reference that his father was also named John R. Crooks. Return to text

¹⁷He might be the John Crooks who was a private in Captain Samuel Kelley's Company of the 8th Regiment (Callaway's) of the Kentucky Mounted Volunteers between August 26 and November 9, 1813 (for which he was paid $19.87 and a horse allowance of $30.40). Or he might be the John Crooks who was a private in Captain William Quiray's Company of the 8th Regiment (Wilcox's) of the Kentucky Detached Militia from August 17 to December 28, 1812 (for which he was paid $19.75). Since the former unit was camped at Limestone and the latter at Louisville, the second seems more likely – unless he served in both of them. It bears noting that a Jacob Crooks also served in the first unit; as we shall see, a Jacob Crooks was a brother of John Crooks. There are also service records for a John Crook, but from his times of service and the spelling of his name it seems likely that he is another man and probably not of interest to us. Return to text

¹⁸The second wife of John Crooks was Mary {Stafford} Crooks, who lived between May 20, 1802, and sometime during the 1840s. She evidently was the daughter of Benjamin Stafford and Eva {Caress} Stafford, after whose family the township may have been named. Return to text

¹⁹We should take note, however, that there are other possibilities. There is a John Crook in Lawrence County, Indiana, in 1820 who is 16 to 26 years old, although Lawrence County is east of Greene County (whereas Knox is west of Greene) and so less likely to be where John is living in 1820. There are also men named John Crooks or Crook living in other parts of Kentucky and Ohio in that year, but the fact that John's likely father, Michael, has moved to Indiana by 1820 probably narrows the field to Indiana. Return to text

²⁰Ten years later, again in Greene County, Indiana, John is listed as 40 to 50 years old and Mary is listed for a second time as 30 to 40 years old, so the 1830 sheet must have her in the wrong age column: she was actually 20 to 30 years of age in 1830.

²¹The family name of John Crooks's third wife was probably Polston, possibly Andrews (sources differ). I have not tried to find out more about John Crooks's third wife, but I do know she was still alive as of 1860. Return to text

²²The 1850 census shows John Crooks having real property worth $500. At least some of his real property, apparently brought to their union by Sarah {Huffman} Crooks, was the west half of the southeast quarter of Section 22, Township 6 North, Range 6 West. This property, also a fractional section because it adjoins the White River, was a little less than 61 acres. (See slide 12057, taken in 2006.) Earlier, on February 12, 1835, John Crooks had purchased slightly over 68 acres in the west half of the north half of Section 33 in Township 6 North, Range 6 West, also in Greene County. This land, another fractional section and just downstream on the White River from the Huffman property, cost John $85.16; he received his patent for it on August 1, 1837. (See slide 12056, taken in 2006). It was this land that John and Mary Crooks sold to their daughters in 1838. Exactly two years later, Crooks received a patent for another 40 acres: the northwest quarter of the southeast quarter of Section 8, Township 6 North, Range 6 West. He had purchased this land on March 27, 1837, for $50. (See slide 12055, taken in 2006.) In addition, Benjamin Stafford, Mary's father, gave her the north half of the southwest quarter of that same Section 8 in 1832. Also see the USGS map for Lyons/Indiana for all three of the properties described here. See the USGS map for Sandborn/Indiana for the location of Stafford Cemetery; see slide 11970, taken in 2006, for the area of Stafford burials within the cemetery. See Appendix II for a description of how public lands were surveyed and sold by the United States government. Return to text

²³See the USGS map for Fisherville/Kentucky for Pope Lick and slides 12921-22 for how it looked in 2008. Return to text

²⁴This may explain why when a Michael Crook was granted 150 acres in Kentucky on November 23, 1818, no residence was listed for him: he was already residing in Indiana. Or, this may be another man with the same name.

²⁵In fact, there are four men named Michael Crooks living in Knox County in 1830, but only one of them is old enough to be the father of John Crooks. Return to text

²⁶Harland too is also gone in 1850, so it is possible (but unlikely, given Michael Crooks's advanced age) that they have moved to another state. Neither he nor Michael is on the 1850 census in any state. See the USGS map for Brazil West/Indiana for the location of Cottage Hill Cemetery. There is no grave marker for Michael Crooks, who presumably was buried in the oldest portion of this cemetery. For an overview of that portion of the cemetery in 2006, see slide 11953. Although one person in Harland's household in 1840 can read and write, it is not Michael Crooks: he could only make his mark on his application for a pension. Return to text

²⁷See the discussion of this pension act, passed by Congress on June 7, 1832, in the section relating to Matthew McCammon. The 1832 act was intended to recognize what was thought to be the handful of veterans still alive. The number of applicants far exceeded expectations, however, and this is what led to the special census in 1835. This latter census confirmed that the high response was legitimate. Return to text

²⁸See slide 10641 for a view of where the barracks stood at Round Hill, Virginia, in 2004. There are some indications that General Daniel Morgan, who commanded the forces in Winchester, used the Hessian prisoners to build his house, Saratoga, and possibly the Burwell-Morgan Mill (1782-85) where I was a volunteer miller. Both of these are in Millwood, Virginia. It is at least possible that Michael Crooks was detailed to guard them while they worked on these structures. The pension act required a testimonial from a clergyman, and Michael's includes one from a David Marford of Lawrence County, Illinois, just across the Wabash River from Clay County, Indiana. Perhaps this man had once been Michael's minister in Indiana. Return to text

²⁹In May 1781 an officer named George Betinger, possibly a relative of Henry Betinger, led a militia company from Berkeley County to the siege at Yorktown.

³⁰A military map of the time shows this was where the Rivenna joins the James, near Columbia, Virginia. Here on the extensive floodplain along the former river the American army had established a base for storage of supplies, encampments, and drilling. See digital images 00871-00873 for 2010 views of the joining of the two rivers and the floodplain areas the army used. They were used in a similar way during the Civil War. Return to text

³¹Anna Clara's original name may have been something else yet. Documents we will consider later called her "Annicolor," which makes one wonder if both Elenore and Anna Clara were Anglicizations of a German name. Return to text

³²Lot 160 is on the southwest corner of Martin and College Streets. See slides 10639 and 10640 for views of this lot in 2004. What happened to Jacob's 67 acres (and how he got that property in the first place) is not clear. I checked all the relevant deed books without success, including books of re-recorded deeds and books of unrecorded deeds discovered much later in pigeonholes, but some of the early deed books are missing and that may account for the absence of a deed of purchase by Jacob Crooks. The Berkeley County land books suggest that Peter Crooks may have owned the 67 acres as late as 1805, but there is no deed of sale for this property; perhaps Peter continued renting it or else simply abandoned it when he left for Ohio. Return to text

³³The elder Jacob Kruck's son Jacob and that son's wife evidently had lasting ties to the New Jerusalem Evangelical Lutheran Church in Lovettsville in Loudoun County, Virginia (they are in the records there in 1786 and in 1804), which strengthens the case that the Jacob Crook found in that county during the early 1770s is the one we are seeking. Return to text

³⁴Another Henry Crook from Frederick County is easily confused with Michael's brother with that name. The other Henry served in both Maryland and Virginia units during the Revolutionary War (after which he was awarded a pension by Maryland and land by both states). He was wounded severely enough (at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse in 1781, when his general was Daniel Morgan) that he was awarded a substantial U.S. pension as an invalid during the early 1800s. He later moved to Washington County, Virginia, and died there in 1819. Could he be the Henry Crooks who also enlisted in Shepherdstown during 1782-83? This is possible but improbable if he had been so severely wounded in 1781. Most likely there are two men named Henry Crooks, the second being Michael's brother, who served only briefly in Betinger's militia unit.

³⁵The Nonemakers (evidently a German family called Nunnemacher) can be found both in the Philadelphia and Frederick County, Maryland, areas where the Crooks family resided, so it is possible the two families had known each other for some time in America before 1799. There is no specific evidence, however, that they had met before Michael's marriage to Eliza in Kentucky in that year. Return to text

³⁶It is interesting that Jacob's youngest son, Peter, married his wife in Frederick County, Maryland, in 1801, so perhaps the family kept up its ties here as well. Return to text

³⁷The officiating minister was Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, father of the minister named Peter Muhlenberg under whom Michael Crooks would serve during the Revolutionary War. The presence of a large Spring family in the Augustus Evangelical Lutheran Church, which still stands, also supports the conclusion this is the right Kruck family: Jacob and Anna Clara's daughter Molly married a Spring, and the Springs moved on to Ohio with the five Crooks brothers. The Spring and Nollin families appear in the Maryland church records cited above, too, another indication that we have the right Crooks or Kruck family. Return to text

³⁸Often spelled Noll, which is its usual spelling today. Return to text

³⁹There remains a chance, small I think, that the Johannes Krück aboard the Harle was not Jacob's father. The only other plausible candidate is a Johan Jacob Krück who arrived in Philadelphia aboard the Pennsylvania Merchant on September 11, 1731. This man arrived with a Franz, of whom there is no record at Trappe – and whose name never appears among the given names in the Kruck/Crook family we are studying here. Descendants of this Franz Krück state that he moved to Berks County, that Johannes was his son, and that members of this Krück family also populated Lancaster County, which helps us to eliminate another Jacob Kruck who lived there; in addition, this Jacob Krug can be located in Lancaster County through the late 1770s. There is also another Johan Michael Nollin, who arrived in Philadelphia (from Dublin and Rotterdam) aboard the pink Mary on September 29, 1733. He was over 16 years of age, which rules out an earlier trip for the Michael Nollin who came three years later. All in all, I think the odds favor the Michael Nollin who arrived in 1736 as the father of Anna Clara Nollin, but we cannot be completely sure without additional evidence. Return to text

⁴⁰Unfortunately, the 1860 census does not give street addresses and the land ownership atlas for Polk County does not include property owners for the city of Des Moines, so we do not know exactly where Henry Rickabaugh lived in 1860 (but see the next paragraph in the text for his residence a few years later). Des Moines was only a small city at that time, but even at that it was larger than nearly all of the places in which the persons on the Neal side of our family ever had lived. In fact, very few of them had lived in any built-up place, other than Albany and New York City – though before either of those two places was very large.

⁴¹Iowa had virtually no white settlement until about 1830, but between 1833 and the end of the 1840s nearly all the present state was opened following a series of land acquisitions from the Indians. Iowa had nearly 200,000 settlers by 1850. Des Moines had jumped from 502 residents in 1850 to almost 4,000 ten years later, and Henry Rickabaugh and his family were part of that surge in population. Return to text

⁴²Alternatively, Henry's age might be understated in 1850 instead. This would make him born in 1814, rather than the 1820 or 1821 we would assume from his stated age in 1850. The 1840 listing does not help to resolve this little mystery: it shows him to be 20 to 30 years of age, where he probably would be listed whether he was born in 1818-1821 or in 1814. A birth as early as 1814, though, would widen the already significant gap between his age and that of Sarah J. Willard from about a dozen years to nineteen years, so 1818 to 1821 is probably the sounder bet here. It could be that for the 1860 census his much younger wife simply guessed at his age and was wildly off, or that someone else made such a guess in supplying census information about him. Return to text

⁴³Two newspaper articles relate that Henry and his horse fell through the ice in February 1870 and that almost exactly a year later Henry took a wagon trip southwest into territory where the Cherokee Indians were living (now the northcentral part of Oklahoma). Whether he was scouting the area as a possible new home or delivering cargo cannot be determined, but these articles do hint at the kind of work Henry did in Iowa and Nebraska. Return to text

⁴⁴A daughter, 23 years old, who is listed as Lydia in 1880, was identified as Maletna in 1860 and in 1870. One suspects that Maletna was her given name (as a later marriage record also suggests) but that she preferred a different name when she got older. Return to text

⁴⁵I have been able to check the 1885 state census for Mills County, Iowa (adjacent to Fremont County and the home of many Rickabaughs), but it is incomplete; some of Henry's children are listed there, but he is not. I hired a researcher to check the censuses for the following Iowa counties in 1885 and 1895: Fremont, Page, Mills, and Marion. Henry was not on them. Return to text

⁴⁶Henry certainly could not have been born as late as 1827 (he would have been just 11 years old at his marriage), and any age earlier than 17 years old in 1838 seems very unlikely. Return to text

⁴⁷Gallia County, then somewhat larger than it is today, is in southeastern Ohio, just over the Ohio River from what was Virginia and is now West Virginia. Gallia County's first inhabitants were several hundred French citizens who had been deceived into purchasing invalid land titles in Europe. They arrived at a site just below the mouth of the Great Kanawha River in 1790 thinking the land had already been cleared and built upon only to discover the truth: they had been swindled. Later, Gallia County was settled primarily by Southerners, though there were also Pennsylvanians who used water routes to migrate there. Gallipolis ("City of the French") was the second settlement in Ohio.

⁴⁸ It seems possible that Henry Rickabaugh's age has been recorded incorrectly in 1820, especially since the only female in the household is 45 years old or older. When we look ahead to 1830, we see that Henry is listed as being 40 to 50 years old then. My guess is that he is actually 26 to 45 years of age in 1820. Since this Henry has no male the right age in 1830 who could be the boy named Henry (Sarah Elizabeth's father, that is), his age in 1820 is a moot point. Return to text

⁴⁹ From later censuses we learn about three young Rickabaugh males, probably brothers, in Wayne County, Ohio. Two of them are in their teens in 1820, and the third is just 21 years old. This group evidently moved from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Ohio between 1830 and 1833, judging from the birthplaces of their children and of the wife of one of the males. Accepting the statement that Henry Rickabaugh was born in Ohio between 1818 and 1821, we can disregard this trio as we are assembling our list of his potential fathers.

⁵⁰In addition to disregarding the Henry Rickabaugh listed in 1820 (see above), we can also set aside a Jacob Rickabaugh (20 to 30 years of age) who lives in Johnson County, Indiana, in 1830: he has four female children but no male children in his household. In addition, the Indiana marriage index indicates that he married in 1824, too late for our purposes. In view of the fact that the name Rickabaugh was often badly garbled on censuses, we should not ignore the possibility that Henry's father is listed under what appears to be an altogether different name. For example, in Ohio in 1830 there are four men whose listed names might actually be Rickabaugh in disguise, as it were, and who have boys the age Henry would be in that year: James Reddinbaugh, William Revenaugh, Peter Rhodenbaugh, and John Ridebough. All might bear another look if our current conclusion about Henry's father is proven incorrect. Return to text

⁵¹There is a small chance that this researcher has incomplete information, and there is a gap in John and Tabitha's children between March of 1819 and March of 1821 into which Henry could conceivably fit. John and Tabitha's children were fairly regularly spaced every two years, however, and Henry's birth would have been out of phase with this spacing. Return to text

⁵²The second adult male in Reuben's household is thus probably not the father of any of the boys also listed there that year, and so we probably do not need to consider him a viable candidate to be Henry's father. Until we can positively identify this second male, however, we can not eliminate him altogether. Return to text

⁵³In the thought that David, a native of Pennsylvania, might have returned to that state before the 1840 census, I checked for him there. Neither David Rickabaugh in Pennsylvania matches up with the one we are discussing here. A young man named David Rickabaugh lives in Illinois in 1840; born in Ohio, he might well be the son of the David Rickabaugh we are considering. Return to text

⁵⁴This David Rickabaugh was the son of Henry and Anna {Gerber} Rickabaugh. Return to text

⁵⁵This David Rickabaugh was born in Maryland in 1799, the son of a Henry Rickabaugh who immigrated to Maryland from Switzerland in 1772. He does not appear to be directly connected to the Rickabaugh family in Pennsylvania that we will be studying next. Difficult as it may be to believe, there is yet another David Rickabaugh who suddenly appears in Stark County, Ohio, in 1850. He was born in Pennsylvania in 1803. How he fits into the Rickabaugh family is not clear, but he enters the stage too late to be a factor in our search for Henry's father. Return to text

⁵⁶There is some question about the information for 1790. There is no Jacob Rickabaugh in Pennsylvania that year, but there is a Jacob Redenbach. He may well be David's father, but his residence (Heidelberg Township) and distribution of children (he has the right number of males but only two of the four females Jacob Rickabaugh is believed to have had in 1790) raise questions about his identity. None of the other men in Pennsylvania with names even faintly similar to Rickabaugh have sufficient children, so Jacob Redenbach is our best – albeit less than ideal – candidate. It is also possible that David's father is simply not shown on the 1790 census. Return to text

⁵⁷Holmes County, Ohio, today has one of the largest concentrations of Amish and Amish Mennonites in the United States.

⁵⁸Ironically, the military district in Ohio became heavily populated with the pacifist Amish and Amish Mennonites. Return to text

⁵⁹The three young boys in Adam Rickabaugh's household in 1820, as we have seen, are all his sons with his second wife. It remains possible that Henry was born after the census, however, so his absence on the 1820 census again is not conclusive. Return to text

⁶⁰ It is possible Adam is one of the three 16- to 26-year-old unnamed males we saw listed in Gallia County, Ohio, in 1820. The two males in the household of the older Adam Rickabaugh who was our second candidate are very likely his sons Peter and John, however, which leaves the one in that of Henry Rickabaugh. The age of that Henry (also said to be 16 to 26 years old on the census) evidently is listed incorrectly, as other sources show that he is about 34 years of age in 1820. If the younger Adam (possibly Henry's brother) is the unnamed younger man in Henry's household, it is conceivable that Adam's age is also listed incorrectly: Adam would be 30 years old in 1820. The fact that the sole female in this household is 26 to 45 years of age undercuts the notion that both Rickabaugh men's ages are understated, because for this hypothesis to be correct this woman should be Adam's wife Catherine, who is about 21 years old in 1820 – not in the older age category. (Henry did not marry until June 1821.) Since Sarah Elizabeth's father Henry could have been born as late as 1821, after this census was taken, his absence from this household on the 1820 census is not conclusive. Who this woman is is not known.

⁶¹Adam Rickabaugh is not on the 1830 Ohio census. As we have just seen, that year Reuben has an extra male the right age, but as there is no family for this male and Adam Rickabaugh had a son born in Indiana in early 1827 he is probably not the Adam we are looking for. As we will learn in the next section, Adam is on the 1830 Indiana census – but not as Adam Rickabaugh. Return to text

⁶²According to his obituary, Peter Rickabaugh moved from Marion County to Glenwood in Mills County in 1870. Return to text

⁶³See the land-ownership information in my files and the USGS map for Knoxville N.W./Iowa for the location of the property of Adam and Catherine Rickabaugh. We know the couple owned the northeast fractional quarter of the northeast quarter of Section 5, Township 77 North, Range 20 West (39 acres purchased in 1851)and the south half of the southwest quarter of the adjacent Section 32, Township 76 North, Range 20 West (comprising 80 acres secured in 1852 under terms of an 1850 law providing land for military service and a purchase of 40 acres in 1853). Return to text

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