Success at Last!

To organize information about the Yingling family ( see my last post), I started a new family tree on Ancestry.com with Christian Yingling as the home person. I then began filling in the tree, little by little, with information I found about Christian and his descendants.

One of my main sources for information about this family was “The Yingling Genealogy,” a family history written in 1958 by one of Christian’s descendants, Claude J. Rahn. A free digital copy of the book is available here: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005787843   The book is also available on Ancestry.com if you have a subscription.

Through the Yingling genealogy, Ancestry.com, and FamilySearch.org (a free genealogy website, which I will discuss in another blog), I was able to get a pretty good picture of Christian and his family. For instance, I learned that Christian had 8 children, 4 sons and 4 daughters.

Because Eve Dorothy Yingling was born in 1751, I surmised that she must have been Christian’s granddaughter, the daughter of one of his 4 sons. (She was born too late to be one of his daughters and too early to be a great-granddaughter.)

The question, of course, was, “Which son?” Once I had entered the information about the 4 sons and their families into my tree, I began to analyze the information to see if I could eliminate any of them as a possible father for Eve Dorothy.

John Yingling, Christian’s second son, had 14 children, all of whom were named in his will. Since Eve Dorothy was not among the children listed, I could eliminate him as a potential father.

Christian’s third son, Andrew Yingling, remained in Pennsylvania his entire life. He only had 2 known children, both sons, so it’s unlikely that he was Eve Dorothy’s father.

That left only 2 sons: Abraham Yingling and Christian Yingling, Jr. Abraham had 6 known children, 5 sons and a daughter Rachel. All 6 children are named in the will of Abraham’s wife, Mary. There is no mention of a daughter named Eve Dorothy.

In my opinion, therefore, Christian, Jr., was the mostly likely candidate for Eve Dorothy’s father. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to prove the connection with documentary evidence alone.

Baptismal records exist for 6 children born to Christian Yingling, Jr., and Susannah Lehman between 1748 and 1762. Unfortunately, Eve Dorothy was not among those in the records.

However, there are some gaps in the dates, including a gap between February of 1750 and January of 1753. Since Eve Dorothy was born in October of 1751, it’s very possible that she was born to these parents, but was missing from the baptismal records.

I still couldn’t prove Eve Dorothy’s parentage conclusively. I was stumped for several days, until I suddenly had a brainstorm.

I went back to my DNA results, only this time I searched my matches for the Lehman surname. If any of my matches descended from one of Susannah Leman’s siblings, I could prove that Christian and Susannah were indeed the parents of Eve Dorothy.

I anxiously searched through my Lehman matches and was thrilled to find not just one, but 8 matches: 4 who descended from Susannah Lehman’s brother, Johan Jacob, and 4 from their sister, Eve Dorothy! At last I had conclusive proof that Eve Dorothy’s parents were Christian Yingling, Jr., and Susannah Lehman!