It was disconcerting how little evidence I could dig up for my mother’s direct line, so I bought a subscription to the American Ancestors site by the New England Historic Genealogical Society. They have a searchable database, which is nice and have indexed some books that turned out to be very helpful. In particular, they had an indexed copy of the Families of Old Fairfield which is where my maternal line leads.

Sometimes I got really lucky finding a listing for someone directly. Other times, my family seemed to be in the notes rather than listed outright. I had some luck searching for others and then finding them in the smaller print.

Walking back from Catherine Cable, I wanted to see some connection outside an ancestry family tree to Wheeler Cable, who is married to Anna Odell for a short time before he dies. Below Catherine Cable is listed as a granddaughter of Andrew Cable along with her sister Rebecca, both attributed to Wheeler.

The text above is not sure about Wheeler’s wife listing that it is possibly Huldah Fairchild. The best evidence I have tying Anna Odell to daughter Catherine Cable and Wheeler Cable is Anna’s headstone. It may be a replacement stone. I’m not sure.

Anna later married Hezekiah Meeker and named on of their sons John Odell Meeker. That is really the only connection I have at the moment for the ancestry family trees that connect her to John Odell. I couldn’t find Anna in the old Fairfield Families book. So Anna back to John remains a leap of faith.

John’s listing is rather stunted, seeming to contain only one child Isaac, who has his own daughter named Anna, but no more. The Ancestry trees list several children of John, including Isaac.

If the ancestry trees are to be believed then both John Odell and his wife Hannah Jackson died in Ohio. I can’t find any references for either of those deaths either.

If that connection were made somewhere outside of Ancestry, then I could jump back to this book to connect Hannah Jackson to Isaac Jackson and his wife Rachel Nichols.

Daniel Nichols, Rachel’s father is associated with Hannah Peat in Ancestry Family trees and I can see a listing for him and Hannah under the Peats in the old families of Fairfield.

Assuming I can get past Anna Odell the trail ends with Hannah Peat. I’m not sure I can get past Anna though. It would be nice to find some form of paper trail for her. Because Catherine is Wheeler’s daughter and they are in Fairfield Connecticut, I think it’s safe to say that Anna is related to the Odells there but tracking Mitochondrial ancestors requires an unbroken line like Y DNA does. So I have to be reasonably sure of Anna Odell’s mother to make the connection, which in our culture means being reasonably sure of her father.