An Overdue Update

You remember Arthur Conlin, don't you? I told you about him here, in a post on August 17, 2013. He was my mother's great uncle, and served in two different regiments of Ohio Volunteer Infantry (86th & 170th) during the Civil War. He'd gone missing after the war and I found him (well, his grave anyway) on the Internet near the end of 2012.

Part of his story was still missing when I published that post. At the time, I still thought that he never came home from the war. And, there was the picture of the three brothers (James, Thomas, and Arthur) whose relative ages seemed to be correct, but their apparent ages suggested that the picture was taken a fair bit later than 1864. That discrepancy had yet to be explained.

In September 2013 I visited relatives in Ohio and my cousin, Don Furey, provided me some further information about Arthur Conlin's odyssey that, if nothing else, suggested an explanation for the conundrum in that picture of the Conlin brothers. What adds to the intrigue, is that Don is fairly certain that he received the "new" information from my mother. Perhaps she was just testing me.

Probate records for his father's estate, filed in Columbiana County in 1884, show that Arthur left Ohio in 1864 for Missouri. He settled initially in Chillicothe, MO and for six years he maintained a regular correspondence of letters with family members. When last heard from, in 1870, he was unmarried and living in St Joseph, MO. From then till his father's death in 1884 he was not heard from by his family and the probate court found that Arthur died "intestate and without issue".

James, Arthur, and Thomas Conlin.

In 1884 Arthur would have been 44 years old, James and Thomas 50 and 49, respectively. The brothers in the picture (above) seem to be very close to this age bracket and it suggests to me that perhaps Arthur, on hearing of his father's demise, returned to Ohio (after being declared dead?) for one last visit (and a picture) with his family before disappearing again into the American West.

That still leaves some questions unanswered about how he came to surface years later in Boise, Idaho, how he made his living, etc. At this point, however, it's unlikely that we'll learn any more on the subject. I have briefly related his story here, on his cemetery memorial page.

There was one coincidence of perhaps minor note in all this that I haven't mentioned anywhere else. Arthur was my mother's great uncle. He lived for a while in Chillicothe, MO about 1865. Thirty years later, in 1895, my dad's mother was born in Dawn, Mo. . . less than 10 miles from Chillicothe.