Ancestors

Mary Gardner

Mary Gardner was born on 29 November 1803 in Maryland. She married Jehu Criswell in Baltimore County on or about 16 March 1820, by his sworn account, when she was sixteen. He had served in the Baltimore County militia in 1814 and stood at Bladensburg. She came west with him to Dover, in Tuscarawas County, Ohio, in the middle 1820s, bore ten children that can be counted, and died in the winter of 1876 at seventy two. She is buried at Dover.

The family came out of Maryland. Both parents were born there, and so was the eldest son, in 1822. Every child after him was born in Ohio, the first of them in 1826, which puts the crossing in the two or three years between. By 1829 the Tuscarawas County tax collector had Jehu Criswell on the Dover rolls, and he stayed on them year after year through the 1830s: 1829, 1830, 1831, 1832, 1833, 1834, 1837. A tax list is a thin record and a reliable one. It says a man was there, with something to tax, in a particular year, and seven of them in a row say he had come to stay.

Her maiden name is not a guess. It survives in three separate places: on the Maryland marriage entry, on her own stone, which reads Mary Gardner Criswell, and on the death certificate of a son who died at Dover in 1911 and whose informant gave his mother as Mary Gardner, born in Maryland. Three record types, thirty five years apart, agreeing on a woman's name before marriage. That is better than most women of her time get.

Her parents are not proved. Her Find a Grave memorial names Silas Gardner and Jemima Bull of Cuyahoga County, but they were a New York couple and cannot be the parents of a Maryland-born woman. Better candidates are James Gardner and Jemima Bull, who married at Baltimore on 11 August 1802, fifteen months before Mary was born. A Maryland-born Jemima Gardner lived at Dover in 1850 and 1860, and Mary gave the name Jemima to her second daughter. The census age of the Dover Jemima does not fit the 1802 wedding, so the link stays a probability.

Behind Jemima Bull there may be a family. John Bull Senior of Baltimore County made his will on 3 March 1816. He left his wife the plantation he lived on, called Taylor's Delight, sixty-seven and a half acres, for as long as she stayed single. The will calls her "Jemimey" and "Jenny" and "Jennie," and her bond as executrix in 1817 calls her Jemima. He named seven daughters, "Sarah Mary Rachel Agness Jenny Belinder and Rebecca." Mary's probable sisters were Rebecca, Rachel and Nancy, and Nancy was a common pet form of Agnes. A Jenny among his daughters would have been of an age to marry in 1802. William Johnson witnessed the will and went bond for the widow, and Mary's brother was named Johnsey. The will names no daughter's husband, and nothing yet calls any of them Mrs. Gardner, so the Bulls of Taylor's Delight are a possibility only.

Several Maryland-born Gardners of her generation came to Tuscarawas County too. Rebecca Ogg, Rachel Grove and Nancy Casebeer were most probably her sisters, and Johnsey Gardner, who went back to Baltimore County, most probably her brother.

If Mary Gardner is in your family, start your own tree.

Cite: Heirology, "Mary Gardner (1803-1876)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/mary-gardner-1803-1876-edc6fa.