Rinse; Repeat

You know that "exhaustive search" I mentioned yesterday, the inspiration for my grit-your-teeth-and-do-it approach to searching through the Fort Wayne Catholic Cemetery records? Well, it may seem exhausting, trawling through those indexed records via the Genealogy Center. But that doesn't mean one pass through the records was my ticket to stop repeating the search process. There was another Danehy family plot to puzzle over.

This one, located in Section O, was lot number 74. Right away, I could see there were two additional Danehys located in this plot: Daniel J. and Beatrice E. Danehy.

This Daniel Danehy was a grandson of the original Danehy immigrant to Fort Wayne, Phillip. Daniel was also one of the Irish-born sons of the very man whom Phillip had designated as his executor should his first choice, his County Cork parish priest, predecease him. Daniel, apparently, came to Fort Wayne in 1909 and stayed there until his death in 1954.

Along the way, he married—Beatrice E. Ottenweller, a Fort Wayne native—and raised a family of at least two daughters and two sons. However, none of those children appeared in the family burial plot. The only other Danehy listed in that burial location was Daniel's wife, Beatrice, who died June 14, 1976.

It was back to that search routine to see who else might show up in the Catholic Cemetery records at the Genealogy Center. But try as I might, I couldn't turn up any other names listed for Section O, lot number 74.

Perhaps it was close enough on the timeline to shift from the old preference of purchasing family lots to that of buying a burial place for couples alone. After all, the first burial listed was dated 1954; the second not until 1976. These were far removed from those quaint, 1800s burials in which eight or more members of an extended family were laid to rest, all in the same vicinity, regardless of how many thousands of miles away they might actually have died.

So this one Fort Wayne cemetery plot, regardless of how I tried to spell the surname Danehy, turned out to contain only two members of Phillip Danehy's extended family: one grandson from Ireland and his homegrown spouse. Despite the thoroughness of the exercise, it didn't reveal any further clues about the Danehy family.

However, the overall search project is not over yet. There is one more plot to be considered—one which contains some of the oldest of the Danehy burials.