1815 Tax List for Winchester…. 3
Thank you, C.,
I find your information very interesting, especially the listing about Robert Kerlin in Will Book. No. 12, page 77. I find this interesting for 2 reasons : why did it take 11 years to record the list of buyers and the fact that mason tools were sold.
I have no idea what Robert Kerlin did for a living, except that I am pretty sure that he was not a farmer. I don’t know why he had land in Winchester and Cedar Creek . The street names have changed in Winchester over time so I cannot track down the location of his property there. And at least his oldest surviving son was- according to a family bible- born in Cedar Creek. Sounds like a long commute to me, given the time ( early 1800′s) and place.
But many of Robert Kerlin’s descendents were masons, in both senses of the the word, you know, bricks and secret handshakes.
I can place his family in VA in 1817 ( his youngest- surviving- son was born there), by the 1820 census, he is in Ohio. And in 1823, he is dead leaving a mass of debts.
I have been to the family plot in Mount Pleasant, Ohio. Two of his daughters are buried there, his wife ( Hannah Brooks ) and a grand daughter. And yet, even though Robert Kerlin died the same year as one of his daughters ( the first to die), he is not there. I spent so long at that cemetery looking confused and stupid that the grounds keeper actually came up to me and chatted for a very long time.
How I wish that I could know what happened to him, that Kerlin who all say never existed.
Thank you, once more,
Sue