In one of my recent blogs, “Sweet Oregon: An Enigma and A Song,” the story ended with the unexpected discovery that the famous DeMoss Family Bards were a part of my family tree. But it seemed I had failed in my initial quest to link Josie DeMoss, already married into the Starr Family and related to me, to that famous branch of DeMoss’s. Josie remained an enigma.
I couldn’t let it go, posted my story to a variety of other sites, people got curious and began their own searches for her, and suddenly, small whispers of Josie began to surface. People sent census records, a newspaper article showed her as a member of the Lady’s Coronet Band in Prairie City, and they shared their ideas. Two people surfaced who I had never met, yet found them also connected to my family tree: Art Deardorff who has researched so much of Grant Co., Oregon history, and Joshua DeMoss of Virginia, who’d set a goal to record every DeMoss born in this country (he’s researched nearly 10K people).
A critical piece of the puzzle surfaced when Art sent me an 1881 Grant Co. probate record concerning the estate of James T. DeMoss (1848), who I had already assumed, wrongly, to be Josie’s father. The probate record confirmed that James was the guardian and described Josie as his “niece.”.
It confirmed the tie to his father John DeMoss (1805-1890) of Baltimore, Maryland who raised 16 children. One of those children, John DeMoss (1834), was identified with the middle initial “S.” This finding was key, as in all prior Baltimore records, John’s middle name/initial was never recorded. Joshua was able to confirm that John S. DeMoss (1834) survived his brother and may have accompanied him on a migration westward after 1860.
Additional clues in the records of John S. DeMoss and Josie DeMoss provided enough evidence to reasonably conclude John S. DeMoss was the father of Josie, as all of his other siblings could effectively be ruled out. The collaboration with Art and Joshua could not have been a more fruitful family connection and I am grateful to them both.
There are still fragments of Josie’s life, particularly her early life, that are still unknown. As a little girl she’d lost her mother, her father put her under the guardianship of other family members who immigrated to Oregon, James’s death forced new changes and family members to care for her at age 14, and then at age 20 she wed William Starr. She died young, at age 40, and the cause of that early death is still unknown.
But Josie has family now. My family, in fact. The lineage of her father and grandfather goes back in time to the DeMoss’s whose lineages led to the DeMoss Musical Family. Along both those DeMoss family lines my family joined theirs through marriage. The mystery of Josie DeMoss was essentially resolved, and it feels as if we truly brought her into the arms of this amazing web of family.
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A fine example of how Probate Records can offer so many unexpected clues: Probate Estate File of James T. DeMoss, 1881
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A special nod to Georga Foster for digging up hints out of The Grant County News, 1888 and other insight she provided.
