Never Really Have to Say it's Over

 

When it comes to summer, thinking it's over after passing Labor Day is so old school. Summer apparently can begin or end when the local governing body proclaims it so. Actually, if I were still a student, I'd feel robbed of my vacation if I attended class in a school district discarding that post-Labor Day tradition; one school district near me cuts summer vacation short by a full month.

The opposite is true, as well, thankfully—at least for those not bound by school schedules. Those of us who are able to travel (and include family research in our wandering ways) find the opportunity to stretch "summer vacation" into those fall months quite refreshing—and sometimes even quite a bargain.

Lately, I've been hearing the news about fellow genealogical society members returning from research trips. One member and her (now-adult) daughter just traced the memory lane winding through all the old hometowns of her Oklahoma ancestors before their emigration to California. A former student from one of my genealogy classes came up to chat after a meeting. She was so energized when she told me about all the material she gleaned while visiting several cousins back in Louisiana. Her next task: write it all down so the next generation will know these details, too.

Others I know are planning their research trips for later this month or even in October. Some local groups are organizing trips to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. One of our board members recently discovered some new details on an ancestor in Tennessee, and is making plans to travel there next month for research.

While in the past, we might have reserved our research trips for those "official" months of summer vacation—all the better for drafting "research assistants" on those family trip detours to libraries or cemeteries—now, the end of summer hardly stops us. When it comes to summer, we never really have to say it's over. As it turns out for so many of us, any time is good for a family history research trip.

Little Telltale Signs

 

Though Catharine Kelly Stevens may have died in 1858 at a young age, she left three telltale signs to help guide us to the right Kelly family in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. Those little signs were her three sons: James, John Kelly, and William. With their help, I was able to piece together the right Kelly family of Catharine's mother and remaining siblings.

It had always been a mystery to me why those three children had seemed to disappear after their mother's death. Since James was born about 1854, John Kelly in 1856, and William a little over a month prior to his mother's passing, by the time of the 1860 census, they would have been young children in need of care. They had to be somewhere, but there was no sign of them—nor their father, the widowed John Stevens, either.

It was records of Catharine's collateral lines which began to paint a picture for me of what became of her three sons. In the household of Catharine's presumed brother, Matthew Kelley, it just so happened that there were three Stevens boys in the 1860 census. It's just that, looking at that entry for Matthew Kelly and his family—including his mother Mary—the listing for the Stevens children wouldn't have been obvious without turning the page. It appears as if the household listing were complete with the line entry on Matthew's mother Mary at the end of the first page.

Note to self: always turn the page. Just in case.

With the subsequent census in 1870, the two older Stevens boys returned to live with their father John, who by then had remarried and welcomed three more children into his household. Once again, I needed to revisit the Kelly household to trace that third, missing Stevens son. It wasn't until the 1880 census when I finally found William back in Matthew Kelly's household, this time listed specifically as Matthew's nephew.

With that useful pattern of following the motherless sons of James and Mary Kelly's deceased daughter Catharine, I was able to make a few connections between John Stevens and his in-laws' family. It helps to have some confirmation that one is following the right family line, especially with a surname as common as Kelly.

Seeing that, I wondered whether piecing together a listing of the unfortunate Catharine's siblings might also provide some enlightenment on where the Kelly family may have originated. We'll take a closer look at the collateral lines in that Kelly family tree, beginning next week.

NOT Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

 

If I stare at the headstone of Catherine Kelly Stevens long enough, I can barely make out the words, "wife of John Stevens." Or perhaps that is wishful thinking. I can't even decipher any entry for her own name. Only her date of death—May 3, 1858—seems clear enough to believe.

Truthfully, I can't even say it's beyond a reasonable doubt that James and Mary Kelly's daughter Catharine was married to John Stevens, my father-in-law's great-grandfather. Records are far more sparse for Indiana's Tippecanoe County in the 1850s than in those east coast locations boasting immigrant settlers as far back as the 1600s. And what few records can be found sometimes come with irksome abnormalities.

Take the presumed marriage license for John and Catharine. The license, dated on the twenty-seventh day of December in 1853, authorized "any person empowered by law to solemnize marriage" of the named couple. However, on that same document, the groom's name is given once as John Stevenson, and three more times as John Stephenson. Is this still our man John Stevens?

If this was the correct couple, they were married a little over three months after Catharine's father James had died—a likely possibility if a widow was seeking to find promising situations for her daughters after losing her own husband. But this could as likely have been the case of two people with the same name. After all, even in a city of barely six thousand people, it could be possible for someone named Catharine Kelly to have a name twin.

Of course, even the spelling variation on Catharine's own maiden name—Kelly or Kelley—would give pause to someone nowadays, but may not have been cause for concern in a previous century. But with no other records yet available to compare, we don't have much to go on beyond family tradition and these sparse indications.

There is, however, a way beyond this tangle, and that is to employ the records we can find of Catharine's collateral lines. As it turns out, because Catharine was a young mother when she died, the records of her own children will help guide us in the process of sorting out the details on this family—first for Catharine herself, then for her parents.

Tomorrow, we'll begin reviewing what's already been found on John and Catharine's three sons, then take a look at Catharine's own siblings to see what else can be discovered about the family.

"Start With What you Know"

 

If the standard genealogical mantra is to "start with what you know," then I probably shouldn't even begin pursuing James and Mary Kelly. There is so much not known about these second great-grandparents of my father-in-law—but if I don't start somewhere, I won't start at all.

Researching this couple with the quintessential Irish surname amounts to groping about in the dark like a blind man in a back alley. Most of what I "know" is based on associations with family members of the next generation and very weak inferences. With next to zero documentation, there isn't much for me to go by. If it weren't for the help of local researchers familiar with the territory and history of Lafayette, Indiana, I wouldn't even have made as much progress as I have to this point.

Take James Kelly, for instance. There is an entry for him in the Find A Grave listings for the old Greenbush Cemetery in Lafayette—but no headstone shown to verify the name or dates. And the date given in the Find A Grave memorial as James' death—September 1, 1853—may actually be the burial date.

Fortunately for me, the Find A Grave volunteer who posted James Kelly's memorial—it was spelled there as Kelley—happens to be a very active participant in the local genealogical community in Lafayette. Though I haven't met her face to face, we have discussed this Kelly family by phone and email before one of my trips to visit Lafayette. According to the volunteer, she gleaned the information on those early Greenbush burials from the actual cemetery records, of which I believe she had a copy.

What was helpful in those conversations was the volunteer's provision of information on James' wife Mary, as well as their daughter Catharine, whose untimely death followed the birth of her third child, William Stevens. In Catharine's case, thankfully, we do have a photograph of her 1858 headstone.

Once again, information on Find A Grave is sparse for Mary Kelley: no date of birth or death given. Only thanks to the specific location of her burial plot can we determine Mary's connection to James and to Catharine Stevens: section 2, lot 118. Even then, it is an inference based on proximity—that, and family oral tradition that Catharine's parents were James and Mary.

There were, thankfully, a few other signs of proximity to help bolster such inferences about the Kelly family. Finding those, however, will mean exploring what essentially are collateral lines among these ancestors of my father-in-law. Let's take a look tomorrow.

Got Kellys?

 

Doing family history research? From Ireland? Got Kellys?

Funny, so do I. In fact, my father-in-law actually has two different Kelly families attributed to his direct line ancestors, not to mention several in-laws married to collateral lines in his tree. Let's just say there are a lot of Kellys to go around. And enough research angst to unnerve all of us.

I knew I might regret it when I selected James and Mary Kelly to pursue for my Twelve Most Wanted for this year. Perhaps that's the secret reason why I messed up and skipped right over that goal last month. August was supposed to be the month I would tackle James and Mary, but somehow I "overlooked" that detail. We'll see whether we can make up for that oversight this September.

Here's what I know about James and Mary Kelly so far. After all, I've worked on their family back in 2020, and again the next year, so at least I have some basis for launching us from their final resting place in Lafayette, Indiana, to their original homeland somewhere in Ireland.

James and Mary Kelly must have arrived in Indiana some time around 1850—but that is my best guess. I can't yet find them in the 1850 census, and by the time of the 1860 census, Mary was a widow living in her son's household in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. By 1870, she too was gone.

Searching for Kellys can be a daunting experience. Besides the fact that Kelly is such a common surname for Irish descendants, it is a name with spelling variations. Thus, in seeking James and Mary Kelly, we must also be open to seeking James and Mary Kelley.

Though my father-in-law's brother Ed, keeper of the family "stuff," was so careful to pass down the history of his family to me, when it came to this line of Kellys, he could not say where in Ireland they might have originated. Thus, in working on this task for September's version of my Twelve Most Wanted, our search will be wide open. Ever wonder just how many Kellys there might have been in Ireland?

With work like this cut out for us this month, we may be facing a daunting task. I'll be the first to admit I may find myself looking for detours—like learning far more than planned about Irish immigration, or conditions pre-famine in Ireland—to enrich my understanding in the face of a hopeless goal of seeking a Mary Kelly anywhere in Ireland.

But first, remembering the family history mantra, tomorrow we'll start with what we know. Once we get our footing firmly established, perhaps we can launch our search in a promising direction.

Change of Plans

 

Sometimes, a change of plans can happen for the nicest of surprises. Today is one of those days. I had planned to launch into a new month of research on the third of my father-in-law's mystery ancestors for this year. Then, an unexpected email landed in my in-box which I simply can't not talk about. I thought about saving this post for next weekend, but since today's a holiday anyhow, I'll let that be my excuse to celebrate a little.

If you have been following A Family Tapestry for any amount of time longer than, say, the past couple years, you probably have picked up the notion that when I started this family history journey, I knew next to nothing about my own father's side of the family. Put it simply: I knew my dad's name, and a rough estimate of his date of birth somewhere in New York City—and that was it. He wasn't too helpful about adding any information, either; his usual response to my childhood pleas—delivered in a typical New York accent—was, "Ah, you don't wanna know that."

My older siblings and cousins and I eventually got together and compared notes on our respective parents from this side of the family. Bit by bit, we were able to assemble lines from census records and other details which revealed the story of a family with a far different surname than the one I grew up with: it was Puhalski. Or Puhalaski. Or, finally back in Poland, the family's origin, Puhała.

That search took years of sharing discoveries among ourselves, but even then, I'd run into people who warned me that what my cousins and I had found was simply a case of a woman—my paternal grandmother, Sophie Laskowska—marrying two different men. That was the usual way to explain away family records with two different surnames, not the alternate—and very possible—scenario of an immigrant deciding to unofficially change his own name.

Well, along came technology—we bandy about the term "AI" now—and changed all that. Unbidden and certainly unexpectedly, I got this email yesterday about a discovery regarding a newspaper printed over a century ago. The email was from the genealogy company MyHeritage, which a few years ago had acquired a significant collection of New York newspapers and state documents. With their release this year of OldNews.com, MyHeritage was certainly equipped to help me resolve that research dilemma, but I never dreamed it possible to actually find an answer to this problem in print, certainly not in the pages of any New York newspaper.

It was MyHeritage's SuperSearch function which did the heavy lifting for me, though I hadn't even the slightest notion that they were working behind the scenes to uncover answers for me. Thus, the unexpected email brought me, unbidden, the answer I thought I would never find.

That long-awaited answer was buried in the legal notices from the June 13, 1917, edition of the Flushing Daily Times, in the midst of articles on page three concerning rallies for the Red Cross, real estate sales, classified ads, and even a cartoon strip. In essence, at a "Special Term of the Supreme Court" for Queens County (but held in Kings County) on June 12, Theodore J. Puhalski petitioned to change his name to John T. McCann. In addition, the notice included the request for the petitioner's two children to also have their surname changed for "good reasons" and that their interests "will be substantially promoted thereby."

Makes one wonder what those "good reasons" might have been. Whatever they were, they remained as much a secret as the very court incident, itself—until, at least, a smartly set up computer system aided in uncovering details I never dreamed actually existed.

Today might be a different holiday celebration for you than the event I'm celebrating. For now, I'm cheering for this unexpected discovery, definitely a genealogy happy-dance-worthy moment. Tomorrow, we'll get back to work on previously scheduled research plans. I promise.

Newspaper image above from page 3 of the Flushing Daily Times for June 13, 1917, courtesy of OldNews.com at MyHeritage.com.

Some Goals are Stickier Than Others

 

If a family historian's research goals start with finding the names, dates, and locations of each direct line ancestor, you'd think it would be an across-the-board equal effort for any given relative. But no, as it turns out: some research goals are stickier than others. They contain prickles and barbs and ooey-gooey sticky messes that get us snarled up in the paperwork. They include the lions, tigers, and bears along the research path which make us take wrong turns, run from evidence we can't access, or simply chicken out at the immense effort. And it all comes with no guarantee of success, no matter how hard we work.

Don't say you haven't been forewarned.

Take this past month, for instance. Searching for Theresa Blaising's roots, despite her relatively recent acquaintance with my father-in-law's family during his childhood, required me to slow down and immerse myself in the general history of French immigration to the midwest. I won't say the detour wasn't valuable;  I'm just disappointed I couldn't make more progress in the thirty one days I tackled the topic.

All that to say I wasn't surprised to see my progress in growing my in-laws' family tree was much slower than any usual biweekly period for my customary tally. In the last two weeks, the rate slowed to only 151 new individuals added to that family tree—and most of those additions were due to a secondary, behind-the-scenes goal of continuing to work on some DNA matches for my mother-in-law's Snider and Snyder line. Still, I can't complain: in the aggregate, this step-by-step work over the years has yielded a tree which now stands at 36,660 individuals.

For my own tree, progress has drawn to a standstill, but that is part of the plan. When I outlined my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, I set aside the third quarter of 2024 to devote to my father-in-law's family. We have one more month to focus on that before we return to working on my own family's tree. While my tree has 38,421 documented individuals right now, that number only budges upward during the summer on the rare chances that I stumble across news of an addition to the family, or a loss of an elder. Unless prompted by birth announcements or obituaries, I won't return to that side of the family until October.

Yet September may turn out to be another month with a sticky goal. I have been stuck on the roots of the lines of James and Mary Kelly—from Ireland, of course, during those tragic famine years. If I can't find any further documentation on them, we'll take that detour to examine the more generic overview of the local history and occurrences of that time period, both in Ireland where they once lived, and in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, where they spent their last days after their immigration.