In late June 2007, I had to make a work-related drive to Wheeling, West Virginia.  I’d been sitting for several years on a clue to the late 1820s whereabouts of Andrew Marshall (1800-1832), first son of John Marshall and Catharina Truby Rohrer Marshall.  An enigmatic document posted online [see page 140] by the Library of Congress refers to an Andrew Marshall as postmaster of St. Clairsville, Belmont County, Ohio.  St. Clairsville is about eight miles from Wheeling, where Marshall and his family appeared in the 1830 census.  From Wheeling, he left in the winter of 1832 for his ill-fated business trip down the Ohio River—a trip from which he never returned.  He was presumed drowned.   That a Marshall would be appointed postmaster by the new Andrew Jackson administration makes sense: the Robinsons and the Marshalls were Jacksonian Democrats, and both his brother Samuel Marshall and his brother-in-law Elisha Robinson benefited from the patronage of the Jackson administration.

     I had no luck with the postmaster angle.  But the librarian in the public library’s genealogy and local history room gave me a printed booklet which indexed the probate files of Belmont County.  As I was scanning the list for the name Andrew Marshall, I saw an 1807 file which referenced Andrew, Samuel and John Marshall.   It took me only a moment to realize that these were the three orphaned sons of our Mystery Ancestor, John Marshall, and his wife Catharina.

     Since 1976, we’ve been against the proverbial “brick wall”—a term used by family history researchers to describe that one ancestor about whom you can find nothing more and/or whose parents you can't locate.  Our John Marshall has been that ancestor.  He is in Greensburg, Pennsylvania at least by 1799, when he and his new wife conceived their first child, the above-noted Andrew.  Our cousin Jane Cooper, a California attorney and careful genealogist, researched every John Marshall in Westmoreland County prior to 1799, and ruled them out as “our” John Marshall.

     Multiple Marshall or Robinson family lines recalled and repeated the tradition that he was a cousin of John Marshall, the Chief Justice of the United States.  In 1914, his great-grandson, Samuel Marshall Turk, reported that John Marshall was a native of northern Ireland.  His own son John reported on the 1870 Census that his father was of foreign birth.  Another great-grandson, William Carlton Phipps [see below], hints that Marshall was from Dublin.  And we’ve had absolutely no clue at all—none whatsoever—of any Marshall relative for this puzzling ancestor.

     But on the lucky day I drove to St. Clairsville, Ohio, I found the fragile piece of paper (click on link in header) which identifies four men as guarantors of a bond of $3000 for the orphaned Marshall boys—sons of the late John Marshall. 

And one of those men is Joseph Marshall.

     Joseph Marshall lies buried in the St. Clairsville Cemetery, and recorded dates for his stone (which I cannot locate) are 1767-1835.   He was our John Marshall’s younger brother, wasn’t he?  Or at the least, a close-enough Marshall relative to take responsibility for these Marshall orphans.  And the other men—were some of them uncles of the boys?  Married to sisters of John Marshall? 

     I already am on this fresh trail of John Marshall’s family and ancestors.  Now the real fun begins.

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