Think Positive Cyber

Reference: TG315902

For this entry, I am documenting my direct connection to Polly Myrtle Bowman, who is my great-grandmother through the line: Me → Father → Grandmother → Polly Myrtle Bowman. This places Polly as a foundational figure in my paternal ancestry. According to the family history volume Ancestors and Descendants of the Indiana Pioneer George Bowman: A History of the Bowmans From 1738 (acquired November 21, 2016), Polly was born May 18, 1887. She later married Jason Bryant and eventually moved to Southern California, where she died on June 27, 1955. Her life represents a geographic shift in our family story—from Indiana agricultural roots to California migration in the twentieth century.

Polly was the daughter of Thomas S. Bowman (TG856134), born February 1863 in Eminence, Morgan County, Indiana, and Nancy Jane Lambert, born June 8, 1864, in Morgan County, Indiana. Thomas was a farmer in Morgan County and part of a multi-generation agricultural family. He was the son of Abel Bowman and Mary Martha Shumaker (TG962430). Abel, born December 25, 1830, in Lincoln County, North Carolina, relocated to Indiana as a child and later farmed in Boone and Morgan counties. This generational movement reflects the broader 19th-century migration pattern from North Carolina into Indiana farmland.

Going back another generation, Abel was the son of George W. Bowman Jr. and Mary Catherine Eisenhower (TG940672). George was born in North Carolina in 1787 and died in Morgan County, Indiana, in 1874. Family history sources indicate that the Bowmans were part of a German Palatinate migration stream—families who first settled in Pennsylvania, then moved collectively into North Carolina’s Piedmont region before continuing west into Indiana. These German Protestant families maintained their language and customs for generations, often participating minimally in English-language civic structures while remaining law-abiding and community-oriented.

Earlier family accounts reference an immigrant ancestor, Daniel George Bowman, whose will and census-era documentation place the family in North Carolina in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Records indicate migration planning toward Indiana well before it became a confirmed destination for multiple Bowman descendants. Additional archival notes describe early Lutheran church beginnings in Indiana around the mid-1800s, tying the Bowman family into German Protestant religious life in the region. Together, these documented movements—from Pennsylvania to North Carolina to Indiana, and eventually to California—trace a multi-century arc that situates Polly Myrtle Bowman within a much larger migration narrative.

TG315902