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.