Wavetops: Hannah Jane Tice (1832 - 1919)
The top of my ladder is the bottom of another
Abe Witter (1859-1918) was my 2nd-great-grandfather - one of My Sixteen. After I added his profile to WikiTree in 2019, another WikiTreer connected it to the profile of Abe’s father, Adam Piper Witter (1829-1909). I have since taken on the Profile manager role for Adam and his father, Abe’s namesake.
But, in connecting to Abe’s parents, I found myself looking “up” along his maternal line at connections to a Tice family that originated in Germany in the 1500s. Here’s Abe’s ancestry going back to Johann Matthias Theiss, born in a German principality in 1704.
Of course, I’ve only done the work to verify Hannah’s biographical details, so far. I have my work cut out for me if I want to trust the skeletal, unsourced connections above her in the family tree. The profile for Johann Matthias Theiss, for example, was improved by several contributors through the Palatine Migration project - but the two generations between him and Hannah are placeholder profiles for Peter Tice and Johann Heinrich Tice.
The profiles for Johann Matthias Theiss’s ancestors are slightly more developed:
Profiles for his grandfather and great-grandfather appear to be well-sourced, but I will have to do a lot of homework before I am comfortable relying on them.
That homework begins with Hannah. Her biography resembles that of the typical prairie farm wife. She married Adam Witter in Fulton County, Pennsylvania - just beyond the western edge of Pennsylvania Dutch Country. They migrated to Kansas between 1860 and 1865 - just after the years known as “Bleeding Kansas” - and raised their five children there.
Hannah survived her husband by a decade and went to live with her children in her old age. She spent her last few years in Boise living with her daughter, Mary (Witter) Arnold. Her Idaho death record from 1919 names her parents as Peter Tice and Mary Hower.
She was 20 when she married in 1852, and 18-year-old Hannah is listed in her parents’ home on the 1850 Census. So building from there, I’m confident we can start building up the profiles of Peter and Mary.
If you’re interested in this Tice/Theiss line, I’ll post updates as I learn more, and link back to this post. If you drop a note, I’m sure it will motivate me to keep working on this branch: