Elizabeth "Bertha" Pitman

My favorite ancestor on my husband’s side of the family is Elizabeth “Bertha” Pitman.  You would never guess her story from her obituary:

Elizabeth was born Oct. 7, 1826 in Harrison County, Indiana.  Her father, Isaac Noah Pitman, was born in Virginia.  Isaac’s parents were some of the first settlers in the Indiana Territory and his father filed a land claim when Indiana became a state in 1812.  Her mother, Mary Elizabeth Grant, was from Kentucky, born around 1807. They married in Harrison County, Indiana in 1825.  Elizabeth was the oldest of seven children and the only girl.

Isaac Pitman was of German descent and must have had a persuasive nature.  Around 1849 he took his family to California during the Gold Rush.  On the 1850 census they are one of only a very few families in an area full of miners.  Elizabeth married one of those miners, Robert Morrow, and had her first child in 1852.  "Family tradition says they returned home to Iowa by ship to the isthmus of Panama, crossing the gulf of Mexico by ship to the port of New Orleans, where his [Isaac’s] oldest son and son-in-law [Robert] died of cholera. Traveled by boat up the Mississippi river to Iowa..." (attributed to Margaret Pitman Guinney).

Within a year Elizabeth had married a widower, Jacob Noah Combs. Though Jacob's first wife, Sarah, had ten or eleven children, not all were living when he married Elizabeth. Nine years later Elizabeth was 36 years old and had six more children.  It was 1862 and her father again led his family, many associated families (including Elizabeth and Jacob’s) and friends across the country, now to Oregon.  This was during the Civil War and they may have gone to Oregon because they followed the Dunkard religion and were pacifists, or because they were originally from the south and did not want to fight against former neighbors, or because they wanted to see mountains and rain.

While in Oregon, Elizabeth had two more children.  There are quite a few stories about the trail crossings in the book Ancestors,descendants and other relatives of Joseph Henry Ring and Sarah Ann Combs.  Yes, crossings, because within four years the families returned to the Midwest, first to Iowa then settling in Wea, Miami, Kansas.  Two more daughters were born.  The second youngest, Elma Meloda Combs married Joseph Riley Whitaker.  Their daughter Bessie Whitaker married Clarence Walton Carter, and their son James Walton Carter is my husband’s father.  As much as you might think that 20 or 21 children may be a few too many for one man, my husband’s line comes from the tail end of that list of children.  

Elizabeth and Jacob moved a few more times, but never so far as before.  They died within a few months of each other in 1907 and are buried in McPherson County, Kansas.  Part of me is in awe of a woman who managed to raise so many children while traveling so many times to places so far from home…at a time before trains and when states were still being formed.  I hope she had some fun.

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  A page from Ancestors,descendants and other relatives of Joseph Henry Ring and Sarah Ann Combs

Some of the places that Elizabeth lived:

1) Born in 1826 in Harrison County, Indiana
2) Lived for two years in Illinois 
3) Returned to Indiana 
4) In Eldorado County, California by 1850
5) Returned to Midwest and settled in Marion County, Iowa
6) Moved to Madison County
7) Gone to Oregon in 1862 
8) Back to Iowa then Miami County, Kansas
9) 1895 in Coffey County 
10) Back to Miami County
11) Died in McPherson County, Kansas in 1907 at the age of 80