Seeking Cyril

When confronted with a genealogical brick wall, sometimes the best policy is to do an end run around it.

That was my strategy when I got stuck at the point of researching my mother’s cousin, Sarah Martha Moore McKinnon. Though my mother had hoped that if I applied my research skills to finding her favorite cousin, she could reunite with her, my hopes were dashed the minute I found Sarah Martha listed in the Social Security Death Index.

Well, that is, at least I thought I had found her. What if it was someone else? After all, the record only showed her name as Sarah M. McKinnon. As I’ve already discovered, there are several Sarah McKinnons out there.

On to my next strategy: find Sarah Martha’s husband’s records.

That, as we’ve already discussed, was not an easy proposition when I first started out. All I had, at the beginning, was my southern-lady grandmother’s address book with its proper heading for the family: “Mr. and Mrs. C. J. McKinnon” in Columbia, Maryland.

It was the passenger list which I mentioned yesterday, originally found at Ancestry.com, that jump-started my search for the man. Now I knew his full name was Cyril John McKinnon. And it was a good thing that Passengers Agent included his middle name in the document. Believe it or not, there are also several Cyril McKinnons out there, including a widely-known priest and college professor.

As for Cyril John McKinnon, though, I did locate a couple census records which seem to fit the birth date provided in the Social Security Death Index record.

In the 1930 census, there was an eleven year old Cyril living in the household of John and Kathleen McKinnon of Detroit, Michigan. As had been indicated on the 1953 passenger list I mentioned yesterday, Cyril had been born in England, and this 1930 census record bore that out, while his father, younger brother and sister were listed as born in Canada. Interestingly, his mother declared her birthplace to be Madagascar.

A 1940 census record for the same location presented the same family constellation—parents John and Kathleen, siblings Archibald and Joan—each one roughly ten years older that in the 1930 census.

More exciting was to find a few Ancestry.com members who had posted their family trees, including a mention of Cyril John McKinnon, with the same dates I had found online—though with no mention of a wife or children.

That sort of discovery only compounds my doubt that I’ve found the right person. It makes me wonder whether I need to revise my strategy to do an end run around the end run I’ve done around Sarah Martha, my original brick wall. If I’ve yet to find a burial record or even an obituary for Sarah Martha or her husband, Cyril John McKinnon, would it be possible to find one for Cyril’s brother Archibald or sister Joan? And if I did find one, would it include any mention of Cyril as a surviving sibling—and provide mention of his current residence?

One difficult point in this chase is knowing that Sarah Martha and Cyril had children—but because my mother had lost touch with Sarah Martha’s family, I have no idea what those children’s names might be. Hauntingly, within my aunt’s possessions that I’ve inherited, I’ve found school pictures of three children whom I think might be Sarah Martha’s children—but I can’t know for sure, because I can’t find enough records of the family to check.

Could it be possible that finding relatives from far-removed generations would be easier than finding close kin from our own parents’ generation? It certainly seems so, at least in this case.


Above right: Sketch, "Attack on the Walls of a Besieged Tower," included in the book by Charles Knight, Old England: A Pictorial Museum, published in 1845; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.