Who Got All the Family Stuff?

 

I keep holding on to the notion that, though we can't shove our way past the ancestral "brick wall" of our past, surely some distant cousin in the family became the keeper of the family "stuff," as Denise Levenick calls it. And in that "stuff," hopefully, is some indication where those distant relatives once called home.

For my father-in-law's second great-grandfather James Kelly, those roots are buried somewhere in Ireland, but where is still undisclosed. Though it appears the family was mostly intact after their arrival in Indiana—James had died in 1853, leaving his widow Mary to head up the household—from that list of his children, I can only find a few who had descendants of their own to pass along any family keepsakes.

James' two sons, Matthew and Thomas, though born in Ireland, may never have applied for naturalization—at least not after they arrived in Tippecanoe County, their adopted home. I can find no sign of Matthew on a current list of such applications, though there are two possible candidates for Thomas: one arriving from Ireland in 1846, and another from Great Britain in 1853. Yet, as for any descendants who might save such papers, Matthew had none, dying a bachelor in 1895. 

Thomas Kelly, on the other hand, though dying barely a month before his older brother Matthew, had several children. If the immigrating Kelly ancestors left any keepsakes to their sons, it would have been Thomas who would have been most likely to pass such treasures down to the next generation.

On the other hand, James and Mary Kelly had four daughters who traveled with them to America—and who could have been the recipients of any family mementos. Yet once again, the possible heirs would have been limited. Of those four daughters, two died young—Catharine, my father-in-law's great-grandmother, and her sister Bridget, wife of Michael Creahan.

That still leaves us with two possibilities, and yet, of those remaining two, Rose did not marry or have children of her own. Thankfully, Ann, the baby of the family, did. Whether Ann even had anything to pass down to her three sons, I do not know—but I do know that three of Ann's descendants chose to do DNA tests and are on my husband's match list. My next step will be to reach out and try to make contact with some of those distant Kelly matches on the slim chance that any of them will reply and share what they know about our mutual Kelly ancestors.