Asking the Question

 

What makes a person ask the question about their roots? What prompts someone to decide the answer will only come through a personal commitment to the search?

I've always had my own thoughts about a possible answer to such questions, but when the discussion led that way in a local genealogical society meeting last week, it was interesting to hear what prompted other members.

One member began the conversation by noting that it was when one of her grandparents had died that she realized the additional implications of that loss: a personal repository of family remembrances of bygone generations was lost as well. Others agreed and added their illustrations. For another member, the oldest in her generation in that family, she realized her position as natural-born resource when any of the cousins wondered about a family detail; they would come calling her for information. She, correspondingly, complied by finding answers.

It has long been my conjecture that it is those for whom family details were hidden—versus out in plain sight for all to know—who felt a compulsion to seek out the real story on their roots. That was always my case. Despite my mother's ample supply of family stories—recounted to my generation, thanks to her mother's Aunt Fannie—there was an absolute vacuum when it came to reports about my father's family. Though amply filled with oral heritage on one side, the silence from the other side sucked me in.

As we move well into an era of instant online access to a wealth of information, including digitized historical records, I'm realizing it might be helpful to reach out to others and ask what motivated them to begin their family history pursuit. Technology introduces secondary changes to life—how we access information shifts whom we depend on—and sometimes we don't even realize how we, as a collective, are responding. Returning to our roots as genealogical organizations as well as individuals might help put us in touch with the original motivations which brought us here in the first place.

Saying Goodbye

 

We had an interesting conversation the other morning, the few of us who lingered after our genealogy society's special interest group meeting. A longstanding member asked, "What do you see as the future of our organization?"

Perhaps a question like that might seem reasonable, considering what prompted it was news that the three thousand volume collection of reference material we had amassed over seventy years was possibly headed to a future of being "purged" from the public library's bookshelves. Was it all over? Was it time we were saying goodbye?

Goodbye must have been on our members' minds for a season. Over the past few months' meetings, members had been bringing their personal books, journals, even unused pedigree charts—"free to good home"—for anyone who could use them. The reason? Members just wanted to clean up their personal office. Only problem was: everyone was hoping to do the same thing.

We talked about some of our longstanding members. These were people who were so fascinated by their own family's history that they had stayed committed to finding the answers to their questions for decades—and then helping others to learn how to do the same. They talked about reasons why they first were drawn to family history—for many, it was when they started losing their own grandparents—and wondered how to find the next generation of answer seekers. Were they even there?

Over the nearly seventy-five years since our local genealogical society was first established, the world of family history research has changed in ways so far beyond our wildest dreams. So has the world of volunteer action and dedication. And so have the individual members who had made all this possible for us to share.

In their own way, some of our most dedicated volunteers were ready to say their own personal goodbye—but hesitant to let go...to whom? To multi-national corporations with the power and resources to digitize all the handwritten records of the ages but limited reach into the world of face to face relationships? To a volunteer partnership of local residents in an age plagued by the curse of Bowling Alone?

In an ambience more befitting a late night conversation around a campfire, a mellow mood enveloped our morning coffee time gathering. We didn't come up with any answers, this gathering of researchers who, over the years, have become friends. In the hush of contemplating what could come next, we eventually said our goodbyes and each of us went about our day's schedule. But I couldn't seem to let go of the question that sparked the conversation: what do we see as our future, those of us who still want to gather to pursue our family's stories? Is it time for us to say goodbye to an era of collective effort?

Tracking Timothy Kelly

 

Sometimes, being stymied with a brick wall ancestor means wrestling with a person for whom we can find no further documentation, especially concerning the earlier years of his life. When that happens, discovering a cluster of possible family relationships—or at least friends, associates, or old neighbors—can help us bypass the impasse. In John Kelly's case, my father-in-law's great-grandfather, that key connector would be his co-worker, Timothy Kelly.

Before we can even decide whether Timothy Kelly might have been the linchpin bringing John Kelly and his family from County Kerry, Ireland, to a job in Fort Wayne in the United States, we need to piece together what we already know about Timothy's life into a timeline.

We've already discussed some of the key dates from Timothy's later years, such as his marriage in Fort Wayne, late in 1860, or his death in 1901. What I'm keen to do now is push back the man's personal history to the earlier years of his life. For that, all we have so far is a note in his obituary mentioning his work on the "Fort Wayne Road" in 1857.

Pinning a date on the opposite end of Timothy's life proves difficult. Depending on which document we use, Timothy could have been born as early as 1827 or as late as 1839. His death record on September 21, 1901, gave his age simply as sixty two years. That would yield a year of birth in the fall of 1839.

However, depending on which census record we rely on, Timothy's year of birth could have been in 1830 (from the 1870 census), or 1828 (according to the 1900 census, taken right before his death), or even in 1827 (if we rely on the 1880 census). To complicate matters, Timothy's headstone added the inference of another date: 1829.

When he came to this country, on the other hand, is only provided by one date—so far. The 1900 census noted that Timothy arrived in the United States in 1854. That record also indicated that Timothy was a naturalized citizen—though that is an event for which I have yet to find documentation.

If Timothy Kelly did work on the Fort Wayne Road as a "very young man" in 1857, we'd have to take that phrase with a genealogical grain of salt. If the death certificate had his birth fixed accurately, that would mean the "very young man" would have been about fifteen years of age at the time. But if the earliest date held true, he simply would have been a worker aged about thirty, no age to be surprised or concerned with at all.

Regardless of how old Timothy Kelly was when working on the railroad, the real question—at least for me—is how I can find signs of the rest of his family, if they had also immigrated along with him. For a young worker of fifteen years of age, we might expect to see parents, or at least a sign of older siblings. If, on the other hand, Timothy did turn out to be closer to thirty at that point, it would be no surprise to find he had immigrated on his own as a single man, seeking a better life in a new country—not unusual for many young Irish immigrants at any time after the devastating Irish famine years.

Despite this date quandary, it still would benefit us to look for any further connections between our Timothy and that sister Margaret mentioned in his obituary. An exploration of newspaper mentions next week might help point the way for a next step in this search for a possible collateral Kelly line.    

Revisiting a Personal Track Record

 

One positive aspect of writing about our research progress is that, eventually, we build a track record detailing what we've already tried. Whether successful or a miserable failure in answering our research questions, the log of our research wanderings charts details we won't need to revisit. It also, thankfully, can point us to spots in our previous searches which do need to be revisited.

In the case of Timothy Kelly, the co-worker and Fort Wayne, Indiana, neighbor of my father-in-law's Irish immigrant great-grandfather John Kelly, I had worked on his line in the past. Part of my task now is to review everything I've already written on him, both back in 2016 and more recently in 2020.

I'm hoping to zero in on gaps in that research and look for signs of possible additional record sets which could add helpful pointers. After all, a lot of digitized documentation has been uploaded to websites both in the United States and back in Ireland in the past ten years. I'm hoping to spot those gaps, discover which newly-added record sets could fill in the blanks, and then recap what's been discovered with this iteration in researching Timothy Kelly. And that, in turn, will hopefully point out any further connections between the two Kelly families.

Thankfully, those clues about a sister for Timothy named Margaret and family connections pointing back to Toledo, Ohio, were details I had touched on in past years' posts. It's time to recap the family's story by reviewing that material, then step out to fill in the remaining blanks. From what I've reviewed of past posts, though, it looks like the journey won't be entirely straightforward. It's time to set out a timeline of what's already been found.

The Fort Wayne Road

 

Perhaps it was a mild form of presentism which struck me when pondering the early years of Timothy Kelly. Since he was a contemporary and co-worker of my father-in-law's great-grandfather John Kelly, I've been trying to discern whether there was any further connection between the two Kelly men. Finding information on Timothy Kelly, I hoped, could fill in a few blanks regarding how the two were connected.

Timothy Kelly's September 22, 1901, obituary in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette mention his work, back in 1857, on "the Fort Wayne road." Since I had been unable to find Timothy in census records before 1870, I was keen to locate his whereabouts. A sighting in the 1860 census, before his marriage to Ellen Hannan in October, might provide the names of his parents, or at least a mention of siblings.

Wondering what the "Fort Wayne Road" might have referred to—here I was thinking of something historic like Zane's Trace, admittedly a too-far stretch into the wrong period of history—I took my question about the road to the search engines. When the responses mentioned routes far too early for Timothy's participation in a construction project in 1857, I added that specific year to my search terms.

Suddenly, the results were no longer discussing the early roads of stage coach travel, but a far different kind of road: rail roads. Of course it made all the sense in the world, once my mind shifted to the realities of that era. Even more than that, putting it in context with a man who spent the rest of his working years employed by the railroads—oh, duh, how could I have missed it?

Stuck in my own timeframe.

The Fort Wayne Road, if you're curious, was part of the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Rail Road, later reorganized as the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne and Chicago Railway. Fort Wayne, as a city, played a large role in the development of railroad lines through the midwest, something I should have surmised from my research visits to the city over the years. The Allen County History Center mentioned in a social media post that Fort Wayne was considered one of the most important railroad centers in the nation.

While it was helpful to get reoriented to what was considered the prime "road" in the city during that time period, knowing these railroad details didn't quite pinpoint where I might find young Timothy Kelly. The entire railroad operation extended westward from Pittsburgh through Fort Wayne and on to Chicago. In fact, researching the term, "the Fort Wayne road," I found one mention which identified the Fort Wayne Railroad Bridge as crossing the Allegheny into Pittsburgh—certainly far from Fort Wayne itself. If the entirety of the tracks was dubbed the Fort Wayne road, that would make pinpointing Timothy's location quite a puzzle.

On the other hand, mention of some of Timothy's family residing in Ohio might make more sense if the family had moved with the expansion of the work project. It might help to turn our attention to mentions of the Kelly family in various newspaper reports over time. 

Floating

 

When faced with charting an unexplained connection to a possible relative, my first step has always been to set up a separate family tree. On Ancestry.com, I usually created an entirely new tree, often making it private and unsearchable while my doubts yielded the upper hand. Once my sandbox experiment made it clear to me that I was on the right track, only then I might add the person as a "floating branch" in my own tree.

Once I caved and signed up for Ancestry's ProTools subscription, "floating" became a far easier proposition. While, yes, I could always create a floating branch in any family tree, the ProTools arsenal helped me tackle that a bit more easily. By creating a "network," I could link a person to a known relative in my tree, beginning the process by clicking on "Networks Beta" at the bottom of the "Relationships" column.

Though the next step offers several options, I simply named the network, specified the person I wanted to add, and that was it. In this case, I named my network Kelly FAN Club, wrote a descriptor for the network's purpose, and entered my first candidate, Timothy Kelly.

While it is true that I will be duplicating some effort—after all, I already had set up a small tree headed by this same Timothy Kelly—it was effort expended several years ago. With all the improvements in accessible resources over that time period, I am hoping more digitized records will help point the way to Timothy's family. After all, he did not come alone. I want to know not only who his siblings were, but whether his parents also migrated from County Kerry. Such a discovery as that, alone, would be a gift, especially if he turned out to be a close relative of John Kelly, his co-worker and my father-in-law's great-grandfather.

The next step, then, is to find any new additions to record sets, both at American resources such as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org, and also back in Ireland, and add them to this new floating branch. But first, I'll be following up on that newspaper obituary clue about Timothy's work on the Fort Wayne Road in 1857. I'll be looking, first, for signs of his residence right there in the same city where that other Kelly family was soon to arrive at their new home.

A Kelly Connection, Far From Home

 

When seeking clues on the roots of an Irishman with a name as common as John Kelly, any Kelly connection is tempting to follow. As it turned out, my father-in-law's great-grandfather John Kelly happened to move far from home in Ireland to a city in America where one of his co-workers turned out to also have the surname Kelly.

Imagine that.

This co-worker, by the name of Timothy Kelly, also happened to live around the block from where John Kelly settled in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his wife and family of three surviving Irish-born children: a son who was also named Timothy, along with daughters Catherine and Mary Ann. 

By the time John and his family had arrived in Fort Wayne by 1860, Timothy had married Ellen Hannan and soon had a growing family of his own. Oldest daughter Catherine was welcomed by Timothy and Ellen in 1861, followed soon after by Mary in 1863, Andrew in 1868, Timothy in 1869, Richard in 1871, and Deborah in 1873, before Timothy's wife Ellen died in 1875.

A list of names like that was enough to also give me pause, as here was another Kelly whose namesake choices for his children echoed that of our John Kelly. Though there were many more years of life lived by Timothy Kelly before his own passing in 1901, what I had already found about this other Kelly man gave me much to ponder.

Unfortunately, Timothy died just before governmental record-keeping mandates sought the kind of additional personal information that makes genealogists do the research happy dance. Information on Timothy's death record, as reported by his son Andrew, did confirm he was born in Ireland, but as to any other details, Andrew was unable to say.

Fortunately, the wordy obituaries of the era helped to fill in a few blanks. The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette of September 22, 1901, explained that Timothy was born in County Kerry and that he "came to this country when he was a small boy." Though not fixing a date for his arrival, the obituary mentioned that "as a very young man" he "assisted" in the construction of the "Fort Wayne road" in 1857—three years before his marriage to Ellen Hannan.

The only other detail provided by the obituary, besides his work history and his regard as one of the senior members of the Fort Wayne community, was that he was survived by a sister named Margaret Kelly.

When I first attempted following Timothy's family line, it was likely a decade ago, if not earlier. I did try searching for Margaret Kelly, and through details provided in newspaper reports, I had traced her to a residence in Toledo, Ohio. At that point, inability to access archived newspapers from that location stalled my progress. It's certainly high time to pick up that chase once again, to see if we can isolate enough details on this Kelly man to pinpoint who his own family was, and where in County Kerry they may have had connections with our John Kelly—if any.