Tracking down Elmer Nott

My pursuit of relatives and ancestors has led me to the hollows of southeastern Ohio and to Elmer Nott, a coal miner who died from an accident, leaving nine children. This was still a couple generations back, but it virtually guarantees that I have living relatives, and I've got a few observations about the process.

It started out that, if the story of two brothers stealing a pig, going to Northern Ireland, and from there to Pennsylvania is true, then my conclusion was that these two brothers were our Robert, who had ten kids in a house on Wallace Run in Beaver Falls, and his brother John Jr., who was eight years older, but was the only of the siblings anyone knew anything about. So I was curious what happened to John Jr., the older brother. Remember that Robert enlisted in the War of 1812 at the age of only sixteen, and at that time John Jr. would have been 24. His wife was from Pennsylvania and his daughter was born there, but he seems to have moved west to Morgan County Ohio where Pennsylvania relatives knew only his death date.

His daughter was an only child, and if my accounts are correct, her son was an only child, and so was his son, Elmer, who was born in Morgan County. But I'm not sure I trust these accounts, because sometimes they only mention the one that concerns them. Or they list only what they've found. It was the daughter that married Percival Nott; the Notts appear to be a big family with lots of members especially in Michigan and Minnesota.

These sites list John Jr.'s birthplace as Londonderry, as one source listed Robert's as simply Ireland. This leads to the question of how long these brothers were actually in Northern Ireland - more than a generation? Maybe they weren't the ones who stole the pig. They are the only two children of that generation that we know anything about.

There are variations in the story that comes out about Elmer. There are different birth dates for him, for example, which leads me to bellieve people may be confusing different Elmers. In some accounts the Nott family is spelled with a K. It's Find a Grave that lists nine children for him, and I trust it more than the others, which can be much more random. But even Find a Grave is not always right. It too is constructed by people who make assumptions, though when they find the graves themselves, the cold hard facts are sometimes etched right into them.

Elmer was born in 1876. The mine accident was in 1922, when he was 46. But he was virtually bed-ridden until his death in 1935, thirteen years, and who knows how those nine kids were supported. He reminds me of that old saw, "coal mine, moon shine, or walk on down the line," and of my father's advice, when we lived in coal country, to avoid those mines at all costs. Is it even possible? I'll investigate his descendants; I find it interesting what happened to people.