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There are all kinds of crazy discrepancies like that in vital records. I come across them a lot doing geneology research, and sometimes it's because the person who wrote it down heard wrong or they weren't familiar with it so they just made up a spelling or whoever transcribed it later couldn't read the writing (or is just bad at reading).

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Anyway, getting around to my point is I searched your ancestor on ancestry.com and found some stuff, some of which you could already know. But if you're not on ancestry I can PM you the stuff in case there's some you don't know. I found a picture of one of her daughters, for example. But man... she and her family were sure good at evading the census! Lame. (ETA: Aha, found them in the 1860 census!)

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And back to Ossian's likeliness as a name, it's possible that was what her name really was since it's a place name, even though it's a masculine name. I've seen some people named some stuff in that time period! But her marriage record says her name was Ocean, so I'd take that to be most likely correct. If I just search for people named Ossian born around 1835, there are plenty of male ones.

This message was edited 11/6/2011, 12:22 PM