Hannah's Maiden Name Is Still Unknown — and "Hannah Lowe" Is Refuted

Hannah, wife of Jacob Lemasters, has no known maiden name — and "Hannah Lowe," the name carried by roughly 132 online trees, is refuted: the whole claim traces to a single unsourced field on one Find a Grave memorial, copied from tree to tree until repetition made it look like evidence.

The couple

Jacob Lemasters (born 21 March 1770 in Pennsylvania; died 21 September 1852 in Shelby County, Ohio) married Hannah (born 30 September 1778; died 16 June 1849) around 1794 — that marriage date is computed, not recorded; no record of the marriage has ever been found. The family was in Mason County, Virginia (now West Virginia) by 1806, moved to Champaign County, Ohio, about 1815, and settled in Shelby County. Jacob's 1852 Shelby County probate names no maiden name for her. Their children all died before Ohio began civil death registration in December 1908, so no child's death certificate exists that could name their mother's maiden name.

Where "Lowe" came from

The claim has exactly one root. Find a Grave memorial 13962384 — "Hannah Lemasters," Roberts Cemetery, Port Jefferson, Shelby County, Ohio — carries a user-entered "Maiden Name: Lowe" field. The memorial has no biography and cites no source for that field. From there, about 132 Ancestry trees repeat "Hannah Lowe," citing the memorial's index entry as their authority. Two of those trees, read in full, list her parents as "Unknown father / Unknown mother" and attach no source at all for "Lowe" — their sources are other trees, a mortality schedule, and the same Find a Grave index. One tree even renders her "Hannah (Lemasters) Lowe," a data-entry garble typical of copying. The trees cannot even agree on her birthplace — Maryland in some, Pennsylvania in others. That is not a paper trail; it is an echo. Grade: rejected — "Hannah Lowe" is refuted as circular.

Testing it in the records

If Hannah had been a Lowe, the counties where this family actually lived should show it. They do not.

• Kanawha County marriage ministers' returns, 1792–1813 (eye-read in full, October 2026): five Lemasters-variant brides married there — Mary, Annah, Agnes, Jane, and Charity — three of them to Boggs men. Jacob Lemasters appears as a groom nowhere, and no bride is a Hannah Lemasters. The one Low bride in the returns is Judy Low, who married Elias Fordham on 23 September 1811 — a Low family's presence in the county, nothing tying her to Hannah.
• Mason County marriage records: the general index's Lemaster entries are all late (1870s–1880s); the earliest pages of the 1806–1850 register show no Lemaster variant. No Jacob, no Hannah.
• Mason County deed indexes, L section (read by transcript, October 2026): the only Lemaster entries are for Isaac. No Jacob — and no Lowe or Low grantor or grantee appears at all.
• 1810 census: a Benjamin Low household exists in Kanawha County — the only Lowe/Low household found in either county. Nothing in it shows a daughter Hannah born about 1778, and nothing connects it to Jacob's family. Grade: unproven.
• Marriage searches: Ancestry's Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio marriage collections return no Jacob Lemasters (any spelling) marrying any Hannah in 1790–1796.

None of this proves Hannah was not born a Low — it proves that no record says she was, and that the only "source" for the name is one unsourced memorial field. Those are very different things, and the second one is what the trees are standing on.

The verdict

• "Hannah Lowe": rejected — circular, traced to a single unsourced Find a Grave field.
• Hannah's maiden name: unknown. No source names it. The "Walker" guess sometimes floated from a son's middle name has zero supporting evidence and is also rejected as a basis for naming her.
• The younger Hannah Lemasters — widow of Lemuel L. Lemasters, who died about 1843 — is a different woman; records about her are not records about Jacob's wife.

The next record

One record class in the right county is still unread: the Kanawha County deed indexes, I–M volumes (grantor index, FamilySearch film 524960; grantee index, film 460395). The L surnames fall in those volumes. A deed into Jacob, a dower release signed by Hannah, or a Low conveyance naming either of them would be the first actual evidence in this search. Kanawha's marriage bonds survive only as loose papers at the courthouse in Charleston — no film exists.

Until one of those surfaces, the honest entry for Jacob Lemasters's wife is the one the records support: Hannah, maiden name unknown.

A Pension File Settles It

A single government file settled this week, in one stroke, a question this blog has carried for years: was James Wesley Harris really the son of Miles W. Harris? It also handed me a second son nobody in my database had ever heard of, the bride’s maiden name in the clerk’s own hand, and my great-great-grandmother’s birth date in hers.

The file is the widow’s pension for Miles W. Harris — NARA Record Group 15, case WC 18474 (Application 30815, Certificate 14474). Miles enrolled 12 August 1862 in Monroe County and mustered in as a private in Company B, 67th Indiana, at Madison a week later. The July–August 1863 roll has him “absent sick in Hospital Millikens Bend La. since April 12th 1863.” He died 1 July 1863 at Jefferson Barracks General Hospital in St. Louis, of chronic diarrhoea — the Surgeon General’s report and his widow’s declaration agree.

James is proven Miles’s son

The key page is the 1869 “Affidavit as to Births of Minor Children.” Eusebius Stine of Stinesville, who was present at the birth, swore on 27 January 1869 that “James Wesley Harris born on the 21st day of August 1862 at Monroe County and state of Indiana,” the child of Miles W. Harris and Martha E. Harris. Martha’s own 1864 affidavit says the same, and the Pension Office’s 1869 increase brief lists the children as “proved by credible eyewitnesses.” James’s birth date and county are proven — his 1926 death certificate was right all along, and the census age scatter is superseded. One scribal slip to note: her increase declaration writes “31st August” once, against four records saying the 21st. And since the family’s post office was Stinesville throughout, “Stinesville” as his birthplace is now probable rather than unproven.

A second son, born after his father’s death

The same increase brief names a second child: William Henry Harris, born 14 March 1864 — eight months after Miles died. The proof is the attending physician’s affidavit: George W. Allen swore he was “present at the birth... in capacity of Physician.” William Henry’s fate is unknown; he is a new thread, and the 1870 household should now read Martha, James 7, William 6 — which may be why earlier searches missed it. (A small correction to my own premise: William Henry already has a WikiTree profile, Harris-64374, and was already linked as James’s brother and Miles and Martha’s son — so nothing new was created there.)

The marriage, and Martha’s name

The certified marriage license is in the file: license 23 October 1861, Monroe Circuit Court; married 24 October 1861 by Wade S. Walker, J.P. — and the bride is entered as “Miss Martha E. Vint.” Her maiden name now rests on a primary record, not just on James’s death certificate.

Martha, in her own hand

The file’s best pages are Martha’s own. She signed her 1863–1869 papers by mark; by 1916 she was writing her own letters, and in two of them — December 1916 and January 1917 — she states, “I was Born July 4. 1840.” She never remarried, drew Miles’s pension to her death, and in December 1916 was living at 1158 Kentucky Avenue in Indianapolis, where her grandson was, she wrote, “all the Help that I have.” She died 5 August 1918 at the Indiana Soldiers’ Home in Lafayette — the drop card says so, and her last checks were addressed to “SOLDIERS HOME IND.” One loose end the file opened rather than closed: in 1919 a C. M. Harris of Newport, Kentucky, pursued reimbursement of her accrued pension — unidentified, possibly the grandson.

What is still open

The 1870 census for James and Martha has never been found — but the pension file reframes that failure: with Martha 29, James 7, and William 6 in Monroe County, the miss is now more likely an indexing problem than an absence. Her Indiana death certificate (Tippecanoe County, 1918) is the next pull — it may name her parents and test the Stine connection, since Eusebius Stine of Stinesville witnessed James’s birth and may be kin rather than neighbor. And her birthplace is still an open question; WikiTree says Kentucky, and nothing in the file confirms or contradicts it. James’s three WikiTree profiles now carry the pension proof: his parentage note is upgraded from probable to proven, Miles has his service and death sourced, and Martha’s dates are corrected to the ones she wrote herself.

Sources: Widow’s pension file, Miles W. Harris, NARA RG 15, WC 18474 (54 images, reviewed 22 Oct 2026) — Stine birth affidavit 27 Jan 1869; Martha E. Harris affidavit 15 Mar 1864; increase brief passed 8 Feb 1869; George W. Allen physician’s affidavit 27 Jan 1869; certified marriage license, Monroe Circuit Court, Oct 1861; Martha’s letters, 17 Dec 1916 and 28 Jan 1917; pension drop card, 23 Aug 1918. Verdicts follow my research grades: proven, probable, possible, unproven, contradicted.

Grandma Bonnie’s Middle Name

 By working through the documentation process and verifying each of the facts in my database for my maternal grandmother, I discovered a minor discrepancy in her middle name.

I have always had her middle name listed as Bonnie Mae Lambertson, with her middle name being spelled M-A-E.  This is the spelling on her tombstone, death certificate and driver’s license.

However, when I re-examined her birth certificate, her middle name was spelled as M-A-Y.   

Now that isn’t much of a variation, but it has me wondering, was the spelling with the ‘e’ versus the ‘y’ simply a matter of preference?