The Family Copes with Death on the Ohio Frontier

Kelly Marshall

WEBSITE: http://www.genealogy.com/users/m/a/r/Kelly-Marshall/

SOURCE: This article appeared in the June 2006 edition of Family!--an occasional newsletter for descendants of Catharina Truby Marshall Rohrer and her husbands, Frederick Rohrer, Jr., and John Marshall. If you would like to receive a copy of this newsletter, please email me at marshallfamily@zoominternet.net.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION: The material on this site is under copyright by Gordon Kelly Marshall. Researchers, family members, libraries, or genealogical and/or historical societies are invited to use the information freely, for non-commercial purposes only, with proper credit to me and to this site. Please email me if you wish to reference it in any format: marshallfamily@zoominternet.net. You may not use it at all for commercial purposes.

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Two hundred years ago this summer, the six children of Catharina Truby Rohrer Marshall were orphaned in New Lancaster, Fairfield County, Ohio. Her second husband John Marshall died on Sunday, 27 July 1806. He was the father of the youngest four children (Andrew Marshall, Samuel Marshall, John Marshall and Mary Ann Marshall) and the stepfather of the oldest two—Elizabeth Rohrer and Frederick Augustus Rohrer; their father, Frederick Rohrer, Jr., had died in 1794. Their mother survived thirteen days, dying on Saturday, 9 August, of the same fever that killed her husband. Their children—our ancestors—lived.

Family memory recalls an amazing story—one which demonstrates the strong sense of family which firmly held them through this crisis: Catharina’s youngest sister, Mary Ann “Polly” Truby Hovey, journeyed to Ohio to bring the children home to Western Pennsylvania. Based on the indirect evidence of the naming customs of these “children” of the Hoveys, one premise is that Simeon and Polly Hovey played a most significant role in the upbringing of at least four of the six.

A second premise based on this indirect evidence is that these Rohrer and Marshall children considered each other close kin—brothers and sisters, in spite of having different fathers and having birth parents whom they hardly remembered or never knew at all. The fact that they are naming their own children after each other—sharing names—is telling, if we ask the question about how close these siblings remained as adults.

Had it not been for “Aunt Hovey”, our Truby, Rohrer and Marshall names and heritage may well have been lost forever, and the family scattered. Today the graves of Frederick Rohrer, Jr., John Marshall and Catharina Truby Rohrer Marshall are lost to us. But I can’t help thinking about them, every time I see the grave of Polly Hovey behind the Presbyterian Church in Parker, Pennsylvania. Thanks to her, the incredible tragedy of parents dying far from home was strongly addressed by family. And all of us—seven and more generations removed—can connect and can know each other as family, because of her.

Whether by birth, marriage or adoption, whether in a traditional or a blended arrangement—the sense of family has to do with a strange love and a deep attachment geography can’t break and time will not erase. Something to do with the abiding conviction that kinfolk should know each other and know their roots. Something to do with parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers, uncles, aunts, and cousins—close or distant. Family! No matter what.

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The Children

of Catharina Truby

by Frederick Rohrer, Jr.

Elizabeth Rohrer Robinson

1792-1881

Frederick Augustus Rohrer

1794-1882

by John Marshall

Andrew Marshall

1800-1832

Samuel Marshall

1801-1835

John Marshall

1803-1889

Mary Ann Marshall Bailey

1804-1895

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