Benjamin B Norris.
Benjamin B. Norris was born in Baltimore on October 9, 1783, to James and Mary Norris. He married a Willamina Phillips on August 22, 1822 in Baltimore. But it had long been suspected that he had been previously married as it is doubtful that he married for the first time at the age of 39. But no information on a previous wife has been found.
On December 16, 2011, I was looking over the American & Commercial Daily Advertiser, published out of Baltimore, MD, and thought, what the heck, and looked to see if there were any papers for September 1843. A few papers were missing, but I did find the paper dated Saturday Morning, Saturday 23, 1843. I then looked for marriages and there it was,proof that my Sarah C. Norris Rowe was the daughter of B. B. Norris of Baltimore. This just shattered a brick wall that I'd been banging against for years! It also not only mentions that she is the daughter of B.B. Norris, but says she's the "eldest daughter."
The reason that I find it especially interesting about Clari being the eldest daughter is that she wasn't born until 1818, which means her father was 35 when his first daughter was born. Maybe she was after a long string of boys, it's also possible that her mother was somewhat sickly and thus didn't have many children, or maybe Clari's mother was B.B's second wife and Willamina was his third?
One of the reasons that we had long expected this is that William and "Clari" Norris Rowe's first born child was named Benjamin Norris Rowe (so he was named after his maternal grandfather). It's also interesting to note that they were married by a Reverend James Gamble. I just started researching him because W.H. and Clari named their second born son William Gamble Rowe. Right now we have no name for Clari's mother, nor do we have a name for William Rowe's parents, so I'm wondering if one of them might be a Gamble?
William H. Rowe was my grandfather who went to California three times, once in 1849 overland, a second overland as well, and a third via Cape Horn. However he was always home for the census takers, or Clari just counted him home. None-the-less, I'm wondering if one of his trips west was in the 1850s as Clari was back in Baltimore where William Gamble Rowe (1851) and Henry Howard Rowe (1853) were both born.
