Mary Mellon Cloward's Parents

Mary Mellon Cloward's Parents 

In my research preparing for the YouTube episode on the Cloward sisters, I had done a very basic search on Full Text Search on the FamilySearch website. The only two things I put in my query was "Cloward" for name and "Delaware" for location. That's it. It brought up 921 results. And I looked through all of them. And what I found through that process was pretty exciting! I found Mary Mellon's parents (she is Catherine Ann, Mary Jane, and Matilda's mother.) At first I didn't think Archibald and Mary Mellon were Mary's parents, as I had found Archibald's will, and he left everything to his wife, Mary and if she didn't outlive him, everything was to go to his brother's son. I would love to know the back story there as to why Mary wasn't listed in her father's will, written in 1812, not long before he passed away. He listed his wife Mary as his executor. The 1800 Census shows Archibald having a daughter Mary's age, and she is the only child listed in the census. Interestingly, I found John Cloward listed in the probate records for James Jameson, and for some reason it spells out that John is the "executor d.b.n." of Archibald Mellon's will. Here's what I found out about what that means:

 d.b.n." stands for the Latin de bonis non administratis, meaning "of goods not administered." It means the person is a successor who takes over an estate that someone else started handling but didn't finish.

One of the reasons listed for this happening is if someone else started to administer the will, then ended up dying, and the court had to appoint someone else to finish carrying out the wishes of the will. So, could Archibald's wife, Mary have died? I'm looking into that. It's just interesting that in the middle of someone else's probate record from November 2014, would list John Cloward, giving us the piece of information we needed to tie these two families together! Just goes to show, you never know where you'll find that one piece of information that will make all the difference in your research!

John Cloward and Mary Mellon were married July 1, 1813, so they were husband and wife for a year and a half when John took over as administrator.