This barn near Helena, Montana, bears the name of T.B. Merritt. He was the great-granduncle of Ray Merritt of Baker City. Ray discovered this branch of his family while doing geneaological research.

BAKER CITY — Ray Merritt stepped outside his Baker City home into the chill of a December twilight and he paused to ponder that his great-grandfather, more than a century and a half ago, must have shivered on just such a night.

And not far from where Ray stood.

The connection was palpable.

And powerful, largely because, until a couple years ago, it was inconceivable.

“It was something, just to think about that,” said Ray, 66, who has lived in Baker City since 1972.

He had known that his family arrived in the Baker Valley more than a century earlier, in 1864, just two years after the Oregon Legislature carved Baker County out of Wasco County.

But other than that basic fact, which he learned from his father, Wes Merritt, who died in 1988, his ancestors’ exploits were a mystery to him.

Then Ray discovered the rich genealogical deposits available through his computer.

And like the miners who settled Baker County, he began to follow the veins, his commitment to the search gaining strength with each new discovery of a photo or a homestead record.

Ray’s journey has been both figurative, as he wends his way through troves of online archives, and literal.

In July 2023 he traveled to Montana to meet some of his cousins, members of what he calls the “Montana Merritts,” a branch of his family he didn’t know existed before he started researching.

His curiosity led him to a fateful episode along the Oregon Trail in 1864, when two brothers and their families paused at a fork in that famous road, just east of what would become Casper, Wyoming.

One brother, T.B. Merritt, decided to head north on the Bozeman Trail, which led to the Montana gold fields.

The other, Daniel Merritt, chose to stay on the Oregon Trail.

A couple months later, his wagons descended Flagstaff Hill into the Powder River Valley.

Daniel was Ray’s great-grandfather.

The search begins

It all started about two years ago.

Ray was reading about Baker County’s history on a few websites, including the Baker County Library’s historic photo collection.

He knew, from conversations with his father, that his grandfather, Andrew Jackson Merritt, worked as a freighter, hauling supplies to mines in the Granite and Sumpter area.

Ray’s mother, Grace, was a member of the Srack family. She was born in 1901 in Baker City.

But these morsels merely whetted Ray’s appetite.

“I didn’t know too much else,” he said. “My dad didn’t know much about his dad, who died when he was about 14 or 15. I wondered, reading about these pioneer families, where do we fit in?”

Ray started digging around on genealogical websites.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, of which Ray’s wife of 41 years, Eris, is a member, was a significant help. The church has a wealth of historical records, and it allows the public access through its family history centers and its Family Search website.

“I’ve sat all day on a computer looking for one single thing,” Ray said. “And when you find it, if you find it, it’s like a great weight is lifted off you.”

Ray traced his family to 1673, when some of his ancestors lived on Long Island, New York.

He also discovered that his forebears were loyalists, siding with the British during the Revolutionary War.

“On the wrong side,” as Ray puts it.

His relatives lost their land as a result, and they moved to Pennsylvania. Some worked as farmers, or in coal mines. One served for a time as a riverboat captain.

Ray found records showing that his great-grandfather, Daniel Merritt, was born in 1819 in Pennsylvania. In 1864 Daniel and his brother, T.B., having moved to Iowa, decided, as so many Midwesterners did in the middle part of the 19th century, to follow the Oregon Trail.

The brothers and their families headed west together, then parted ways at the Bozeman Trail branch.

U.S. Census records showed that Daniel Merritt was living in Baker City in 1870 with his wife, Sarah Ann Smith. The year before, one of their sons, Andrew Jackson Merritt, was born in Baker City. He was Ray’s grandfather.

Daniel Merritt didn’t stay long in Baker City.

Ray’s research showed that his great-grandfather moved his family to southwest Oregon in 1872. He took a homestead about 20 miles from Jacksonville, a town that, like Baker City, owed its start to mining.

Daniel Merritt died just a year later, in 1873.

Ray learned about his great-grandfather’s death from a newspaper story which noted that Daniel died while traveling to Coos Bay with his brother-in-law.

Daniel’s wife, Sarah, remarried in 1878 and moved back to Eastern Oregon, settling in Granite.

Ray’s grandfather, Andrew Jackson Merritt, started work there as a freighter.

In 1892 he married Katie Deardorff on her family’s ranch near Prairie City.

Six years later, in Prairie City, Kate gave birth to a boy, David Wesley Merritt. He would become Ray’s father, known as Wes.

From Granite to Baker to California. … and back to Baker

Ray knew almost nothing about his father’s early life in Granite.

“There was a lot of stuff they didn’t talk about,” he said.

He did know that his father had two sisters and six brothers, and that one of his brothers died as an infant. The baby was buried at the Granite Cemetery.

Andrew Jackson died in Pendleton in 1913.

Ray said he doesn’t know for certain what his grandfather’s malady was, but apparently he suffered from a mental disorder, as he was confined, not long before his death, to an asylum in Pendleton.

His father and mother moved to Baker Valley around 1915. Ray said he’s not sure what prompted their move from Granite, although at least one of his father’s brothers had a 600-acre farm near where the Baker Valley Rest Area is today.

Wes worked for a dairy and at a butcher shop on Main Street in Baker City.

Ray said he still has books, published in 1927, that describe techniques for butchering and smoking meat.

“I’ll tell you, they didn’t waste anything back then,” he said with a laugh in lieu of describing the processes in grisly detail.

In 1941, Ray’s parents moved to Southern California, where Wes worked for North American Aviation, helping to build B-25 bombers during World War II.

Ray was born in 1957.

When he was a teenager his parents started talking about moving back to Baker City. They did so in 1972.

Ray laughs when he says that his mother, accustomed by then to Southern California, was leery about returning to the hinterlands of Eastern Oregon, lamenting about the “wooden sidewalks and muddy streets.”

Ray said his father assured his wife that, after three decades away, Baker City surely would be more developed.

Except the Merritts’ first home was on a section of Walnut Street, near Wade Williams Park, that had yet to be paved.

Although Ray’s roots in Baker dated to the 1860s, he was a newcomer.

As a child growing up in California, he said his family took vacations to the Medford area, where some of his family still lived, but never to Baker County.

He joined the U.S. Army at age 17.

He ended up serving 10 years on active duty and 15 years in the National Guard, retiring in 2000.

But once Ray settled in Baker City, he never left.

Nor wanted to.

Ray spends a lot of time in the mountains.

The walls of his front room are decorated with mounted heads of elk, deer and antelope, as well as photos of him competing in rodeos and off-road motorcycle races.

Ray admits that before marrying Eris in 1982, he was far more interested in drinking and carousing than in his family’s history.

His parents both died in 1988, just three weeks apart, so when his interest in his family tree was rekindled a couple years ago, Ray had to rely largely on the internet.

The journey continues

Although Ray has pieced together a fairly complete picture of his family’s history, he envisions many years of research ahead.

“It’s a puzzle, and there’s so many different pieces to it,” he said. “It’s pretty fascinating.”

Because many of his forebears had large families, with as many as a dozen kids, as was the custom in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the branches of Ray’s family tree are long ones.

“There’s still lots of relatives I haven’t even started tracking down,” he said.

He marvels at how his initial searches led him to T.B. and Daniel Merritt and their fateful parting on the Oregon Trail.

“That opened up the whole Montana thing,” Ray said.

So far as he can determine, the two brothers didn’t stay in contact after they went their separate ways, T.B. to Montana and Daniel to Baker Valley.

He discovered a distant cousin, Jay Merritt, who was T.B.’s great-grandson and was living in Helena, Montana. But when he called Jay in February 2023, Ray learned that his relative had recently died.

But Ray persisted, and he ended up talking with Jay’s son, Shawn, who also lives in Montana.

That conversation led to Ray’s visit to Montana in July, when he met Shawn and learned that the ranch T.B. started in the 1866, though significantly diminished in size over the decades, was still in the Merritt family. The holdings include the original barn that T.B. built.

But the most satisfying success in this search, Ray said, was learning about his family’s legacy in Baker County, a history that started with Daniel Merritt’s decision to continue on the Oregon Trail rather than heading for Montana.

It’s the depth of that history that continues to inspire Ray — and to create those moments, as on that cold December night, when his connection to his ancestors feels especially close.

“I can’t get over that — 160 years ago my great-grandpa was here, before Baker City was even established,” Ray said. “That’s pretty cool, I think. It’s nice to know, I guess, what your legacy is, when did your story start.”

Ray said he wants to ensure that subsequent generations, thanks to his diligence, will be able to answer those questions.

He and Eris have two sons, Justin, 40, and Bobby, 35, both of whom live in Baker City. The couple have two grandsons and two granddaughters.

“I’m trying to do this for my kids, my grandkids,” Ray said.

He imagines that someday, after he is gone, they will be able to celebrate 200 years of Merritts in Baker County.

And in the meantime, he’ll continue to try to find more connections, more answers.

“All that stuff is out there,” he said. “You ‘ve just got to look for it.”

“I can’t get over that — 160 years ago my great-grandpa was here, before Baker City was even established. That’s pretty cool, I think. It’s nice to know, I guess, what your legacy is, when did your story start.”

— Ray Merritt, whose great-grandfather, Daniel Merritt, emigrated from Iowa to Baker Valley in 1864