When I first started my genealogy journey back in the mid to late 1990s I made a conscious effort at the time not to work on my maternal grandmother’s paternal line. My great grandpa had left the family. Why would I care who his ancestors were?

But things changed in my thinking after my mom died in 2011. I began to do more than just find birth, marriage, and death records. Finding stories about family made them more real. The story of my great grandparents was far more complicated than just that great grandpa left.

My great great grandfather was John Ray Mohney. He was the son of Adam Mohney and Amanda Moyer. One thing I learned about the family is Adam died when John was only 3 years old. His mother remarried. When he was 18 he married Jennie Shingledecker, my great grandmother.

John made some pretty bad choices in his life. I won’t go into all of those. He definitely hurt people. But when I found out what likely instigated the final ending of the marriage it all started to make sense.

I am hoping it was a choice by all adults involved to have the relationship that they did. But when the poverty that they were living in with all of those children was found out, that must have been some sort of sign for my great grandmother to tell him to move on. Of course that is just a guess on my part. No matter how it went down it started to all make sense. It is no wonder he left. He was not providing enough for such a large family. The stigma for whatever their relationship was would have been too great.

No matter what went down between those adults, it is all starting to make more sense and my thinking about him and doing his family research has definitely changed. There isn’t much more left to find out about him besides hoping his other family has some pictures somewhere. Besides that, my focus on that line has been to learn about his ancestors. Because he may have chosen the second wife, that doesn’t mean the people who made him aren’t worth researching.