The Other Half of Every Family: The Women Who Married a Malott

Every marriage joins two families

Every one of us has two parents, four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, and the number doubles with each generation back. Count back ten generations from Mark Malott, the owner of this site, and you reach Gideon Merlet, the Huguenot who crossed to New Amsterdam in 1662. In that generation Mark had 1,024 ancestors. Gideon was one of them. Only one of those 1,024 passed down the surname.

The other 1,023 are just as much a part of the family. They came from many places and walks of life, each with a story as long as the one told here. Most of them are not on this site. That isn’t because they matter less. It’s because a site that followed every branch would never end.

What a surname hides

For most of history, a woman took her husband’s surname when she married, and her own family name slipped out of the records. Census takers, clerks and ministers wrote down the husband’s name; her father’s name might appear once, on a marriage record, and then vanish.

This site records about 180 people from nearly 150 other families who married into the Malott line. Twenty-six more women appear only by a first name, recorded here as “surname unknown.” Each one of them was somebody’s daughter, with parents, brothers and sisters, and a family story of her own that the records have not yet given back.

One of them is Sarah, the wife of Peter Malott. Around 1780 she was captured with several of her children on the Ohio River near Fish Creek and taken to Detroit (the full story is in Captured on the Ohio). She was mother to a large family through war and captivity, and died in Canada about 1796. We know what she lived through, but not the name she was born with.

And the daughters who carried the family into other names

The same is true in the other direction. Every Malott daughter who married took her husband’s name, and her children and grandchildren carried it on. Catherine Malott, captured with her mother in 1780, married Simon Girty in 1784 and raised a family in Ontario under the Girty name. Martha J. Malott became Martha Hill. Their descendants are Malott family just as surely as anyone listed here, and most of them will never appear on a site that follows the name.

With respect to the researchers of every line

Genealogy is patient, painstaking work. Around the world, researchers are tracing the Adamses, the Strattons, the Reeveses, the Lanes, the DeLashmutts and the Bellemains with the same care that has gone into the Malott line. Researchers of one family often turn up records that help another, and generously share what they find.

If you are researching one of the families that married into ours, we would love to hear from you. And if you know the maiden name of one of the women recorded here as “surname unknown,” please get in touch. Giving a woman back her own name is one of the best things a genealogist can do.

With gratitude

This site carries the Malott name, but it was never only a Malott story. To every woman who married a man named Malott, Mellott, Marlatt, Marlett or Merlet, and to the families who raised them: thank you. You are half of everything here.