I haven’t done any real research on my Lindley line yet.  I suppose I always thought they’re fairly well documented and it will all still be there when I’m ready.  Jonathan Lindley was my sixth great grandfather and my eighth great uncle.  I am descended from his daughter, Hannah, and his nephew, Owen.  My grandpa told me a story about Jonathan Lindley on more than one occasion.

In the spring of 1811, Jonathan Lindley and his wife, she was Deborah Dicks (or Dix), moved their whole family and a large number of freed slaves from North Carolina up here to Indiana, up in Orange County.  They were Quakers, see, and they didn’t believe that people should be slaves.  They wanted to make sure that these freed slaves got up here safely.  They also wanted to live in a state where slavery was illegal.  I don’t know exactly how many went or what all their names were, but one of them freed slaves was called Alexander Polecat.  He was a character.  Always crackin’ jokes.

When they got to the Ohio River, they had to camp a while on the Kentucky side.  The water was too high to cross, see.  So, they camped there the first night and everything was fine, but the next mornin’, Jonathan Lindley’s dog was missin’.  Well they looked around and they called for him but he never did come, so they figured he must’ve been scared off by an animal or somethin’.  Some time later, they got a letter from an old neighbor down in North Carolina sayin’ the dog come home.  Now, isn’t that somethin’, a dog findin’ his way back home all those miles?

In February of 2014, I went to Orange County, Indiana with my dad.  We stopped at Lick Creek Friends Cemetery to see Jonathan and Deborah Lindley’s memorial stone.

Jonathan and Deborah Lindley memorial stone with original tombstones on either side. Photo taken by Melissa Wiseheart, 28 Feb 2014.

I will get around to researching the Lindleys.  My focus, for the moment, is telling the stories of those ancestors whose lives are relatively unknown.