11 Wells McCool and the Case of the Missing Wife: A Brick Wall Reconsidered

 Paternal 2nd Great Grandparents Wells McCool and Unknown Second Wife

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks 

Week 11 March 10, 2025

Prompt: Brick Walls

Sometimes, a brick wall in genealogy just needs a closer look—or the right record to shine a light through the cracks.

In genealogy, a “brick wall” is an ancestor we can’t identify—someone whose paper trail has gone cold, leaving us stumped and searching. Over the years, I’ve chipped away at several of my own, sometimes with the help of DNA, sometimes through a closer look at old records or an unexpected clue in a census. But what happens when a brick wall turns out to be just a tangle of assumptions and missing context? This week’s story looks at my paternal 2nd great-grandfather Wells McCool and the mysterious identity of his wife—the mother of my ancestor John W. McCool. For years, conflicting records and an unnamed bride suggested a second, unknown wife. But recent findings may point back to a familiar name—and possibly a solved mystery.

I’ve had some success breaking down brick walls using DNA.

For instance, I discovered my maternal great-grandmother’s parents—Daniel Crull and Elizabeth Lent—after finding numerous DNA matches with those surnames. I wrote about that in Blog Post 2: A Favorite Photo.

In Blog Post 4, Revisiting McCorkle, I described the 1850 census dilemma involving a widowed mother with both her maiden name and her husband’s name unknown. That remains my closest and biggest maternal brick wall, involving two unidentified ancestors.

In Blog Post 5, I revealed that my maternal 2nd great-grandfather was actually George Neal—not Josiah Coon, as previously thought.

Then in Blog Post 9, I shared that Louisa Jane Wright’s maiden name wasn’t Wright at all—it was Foley. She had been briefly married to George Wright before marrying my maternal great-grandfather, Parmenas James Nolen.

On my paternal side, the closest brick wall has been the wife of Wells McCool—the mother of my paternal 2nd great-grandfather, John W. McCool.

John W. McCool was born on July 12, 1816, in Miami County, Ohio. His father, Wells McCool, was born November 10, 1780, in Bush River, Newberry County, South Carolina. They were members of the Society of Friends (Quakers).

Quaker meetings in early 19th-century Ohio were simple, reflective gatherings—often deeply tied to the community’s records and values.

According to the FamilySearch universal tree and several public family trees on Ancestry.com, Wells McCool had one wife, Anne Coats, and she is listed as the mother of all of his children. Wells and Anne married on March 19, 1810, in Miami County, Ohio.

However, I found a second marriage recorded for Wells McCool dated August 9, 1813, in the records of the Union Monthly Meeting in Miami County. The bride’s name is not listed. The entry notes that Wells was “condemned” for this marriage being “out of discipline,” which indicates that the bride was not a Quaker.

This kind of record—plain and precise—held the clue that raised more questions than answers about Wells McCool’s marriage.

This raised the possibility that Wells had two wives, and that John W. McCool—born in 1816—may have been the son of the unnamed second wife, not Anne Coats.

To investigate further, I searched FamilySearch’s full-text records and found two deeds from 1822 that reference “Wells McCool and wife Anna.” These documents are dated after the supposed second marriage and after John’s birth. If Wells was still married to Anne/Anna in 1822, it strengthens the case that she was, in fact, John’s mother.

Could Anna and Anne Coats be the same woman after all? Perhaps this brick wall was only a shadow cast by incomplete records.

So, maybe I don’t have a brick wall after all. Maybe the records were just misleading—and maybe Anne/Anna Coats was the mother of John W. McCool.

Based on the 1822 deeds that names “wife Anna,” I think there’s a strong possibility that Anne Coats and the unnamed bride in the 1813 Quaker record are actually the same person—or that the second marriage never lasted. The fact that no bride’s name was recorded in the Quaker condemnation might have caused others (myself included) to assume there was a second, unknown wife. But the continued presence of Anna alongside Wells after 1816, and the lack of any other likely candidates in the records, makes me think this brick wall may not have been a wall at all. For now, I’m content to loosen a few more bricks and call this wall—if not entirely gone—well on its way down.