In a Quandary

 

When it comes to researching those hard-to-find Kelly ancestors from Ireland, I'm in a quandary. I know when they arrived in Indiana—give or take a few years—and I know they sailed from Ireland, but for the way they got here or where, exactly, they were born, I can't find any trace of information. I was hopeful, in discovering one Kelly sibling's husband's obituary mentioning a route through New Orleans, that other records might bear out that statement—but nothing materialized.

What to do next? I've been wracking my brain for alternate resources to use. It occurred to me that, if in-law Michael Creahan's obituary was so chatty about his life story, perhaps the same might hold true for some of his Kelly brothers-in-law. But there was one catch to that idea: newspapers in Lafayette, Indiana, for that time period are not consistently available.

Since I hold subscriptions to three historic newspaper resources—Newspapers.com, NewspaperArchive.com, and GenealogyBank—you'd think it would be easy to find those Kelly obituaries in one of the three. Think again. Each company's collection may include one or more newspapers for a specific city, but the date range may contain gaps. Or the particular newspaper company that a family might have favored may not have been in the given collection at all. Hence, my original reason for having more than one archival subscription.

There are free resources, as well, of course, especially thanks to Google, which has an extensive collection of digitized newspapers freely accessible online. However, reviewing the available titles, listed by name alphabetically, didn't reveal any possibilities for my Kelly search.

Yet, the very fact that a Find A Grave volunteer was able to find and post a copy of the 1895 obituary for Matthew Kelley shows me that the Lafayette newspapers have been preserved somewhere—but where? Of course there is the U.S. Library of Congress' Chronicling America, but though it is searchable by state as well as by name, asking for Kelley in 1895 produced over two hundred hits; there is no way to narrow the search by city.

I was aware that the Indiana State Library has holdings of their state's newspapers, including their Hoosier State Chronicles. There, I could search by date, which I tried for Matthew Kelley's obituary, but the function, which lists all the Indiana newspapers available in their collection for any given day, indicated nothing in their holdings for Lafayette for the dates following Matthew's August 17, 1895, death.

Remembering my Twelve Most Wanted project earlier this summer, searching for Hugh Stevens' naturalization record, I wondered whether the source of that answer, the Tippecanoe County Historical Association, could help with my obituary request. Sure enough, their website provides a listing of their newspaper holdings—but even there, the collection is spotty. At least the year of 1895 seems to include a full year of editions for one Lafayette newspaper, so that may be my next step, since both Matthew and his brother Thomas died in that year.

Bit by bit, I'll assemble the set of obituaries for the Kelly siblings, in hopes that someone else was just as chatty about family history as the informant for Michael Creahan's obituary in 1915. Whether those family stories are correct may be another matter, but I can't know unless I first get started with that thorough search.