Holbrook line: Christopher Myers 1776-1856, revisited

One of the things I just love about genealogy is that one is never done with the search, or with an ancestor.  When I first wrote about Christopher Myers, back in June of 2014, there was still much to learn about him.  There is still much to learn about him, five years later.  In fact, until today, I had not found one new piece of information.  However, on a recent day trip we drove through the town of Goshen, county seat of Elkhart County, Indiana, and that reminded me that I had never found a will for this man. 

It took about ten seconds on Ancestry to locate his estate.  It was a good news bad news kind of find.  The good news was that there were 283 pages in his file.  The bad news is that not everything was included, as far as I can tell.  I didn't find the will, for instance, which one would think was rather important.  But I did find enough to deduce that each of his nine children were to receive equal shares, which amounted to about $1500 over the course of several years. and that if a child was deceased, the parent's share was to be divided among the parent's children, so the grandchildren of Christopher Myers.  There were a lot of heirs and a lot of payments, so the whole thing gets rather complicated. 

However, the main thing is that I have concluded that our ancestor was not a poor man.  If he lived in a cabin at first, it seems probable that either he added on to it or he built a new house at some point.  He owned, at his death, five different tracts of land, all in Elkhart County and totaling about 417 acres.  Even at the age of 80, he had a respectable number of farm animals-2 mares with colts, cows, calves and yearling bulls, eighteen head of hogs- plus farm wagons and feed, a number of farm tools, plus certificates of deposit at the Goshen bank, and notes held from 29 different individuals, for sums ranging from $9.50 to $200.  Many, if not all, of these were to family members, including $200 loaned to our own Adam Brown. 

I'd like to give a very late shout out to Christopher's son Gideon Myers, who was the executor of Christopher's will.  He worked to settle the estate for at least eight years, with at least three separate times that he had to obtain receipts from each and every one of the heirs, stretching geographically from Preble County, Ohio to Iowa.  Much of the estate papers are taken up with that paperwork.  There's also a bill, apparently the only one outstanding, of $330 for "nursing the old gentleman during his last sickness for six weeks and the trouble and expense incident to entertainment of friends of the old man"; "nursing the old gentleman during a spell of sickness in 1855", and "washing for the old man from 13th December 1854 till time of his death", due to Lucus McCumsey.  It's possible that he was a family member, but I haven't yet identified him.  At any rate, Gideon did a great job of keeping track of all the details, submitting reports to the court, asking for extra time to sell land, and so on and on and on. 

There is much more to be gleaned from these estate papers, but this will help us understand Christopher and his final years, after the death of his wife Elizabeth Nation in 1852.  I'd love to find the will, but for now, this tells us so much more than we knew before, about Christopher's life in Elkhart County, Indiana.  What will we learn from our next discovery?

The line of descent is:

Christopher Myers-Elizabeth Nation
Phoebe Myers-Adam Brown
Phoebe Brown-Fremont Holbrook
Loren Holbrook-Etta Stanard
Gladys Holbrook-Richard Allen