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.

When the "Big Easy" Isn't Easy

 

It isn't easy searching for ancestral names in the Big Easy's passenger lists. I already knew that from trying to find my father-in-law's great-grandfather John Stevens, who supposedly came through the port at New Orleans from Ireland. Nor did looking for any of his Kelly in-laws help pinpoint those New Orleans arrivals. Now, trying a third time with yet another collateral line—Michael Creahan, John Stevens' eventual brother-in-law—I'm not finding any better results.

According to Michael Creahan's own obituary, he had arrived in this country at the age of twenty. Though it is hard to pinpoint his actual age, based on the most realistic of documented reports, it could be said that he was born any time between 1824 and 1830.

Taking a closer look at that obituary, I noticed it doesn't actually say he arrived in New Orleans on his immigrant journey, only that he spent ten years working there—with all the rest of his years in this country spent in Lafayette, Indiana. One could presume that meant the first stop was New Orleans—and that New Orleans was the port of his arrival here—but of course, the record doesn't come out and specifically say that.

So, what do we find in the passenger records for New Orleans? Not much. In one collection found through Ancestry.com, I did find one Michael Crahan—but that Michael Crahan was eighteen at the time of his arrival in 1851. On that same passenger list was a twelve year old girl named Mary Crahan, and a twenty year old named Catherine Crahan—but no Bridget or Patrick, our Michael's family members.

In another New Orleans passenger collection index at Ancestry, since Creahan brought up no results, I searched instead for Crane, an alternate spelling which materialized so often for this month's project. There, I did find a passenger listed as "M. Creehan" on a vessel arriving in New Orleans on February 10, 1848—a very possible date. But again, with the initial rather than a full given name, there was not enough information to conclude this was our Michael. Combined with no sign of Patrick or Bridget Creahan in that listing, it is doubtful this was our Michael's arrival.

Granted, one reliable listing of all available collections of New Orleans passenger records often mentions the phrase, "with some gaps." Perhaps it is just in the cards for me to accept that dilemma: Michael Creahan, his brother Patrick and his mother Bridget Doyle Creahan, may well have taken their migrant voyage from Ireland on a sailing vessel whose data has been lost to history.

Not in 1850

 

The all-consuming question for me this week: was Michael Creahan in New Orleans by the time of the 1850 census? To expand on that in a way that might help pinpoint the right Michael Creahan, just in case there were name twins: was Michael Creahan, son of Bridget Doyle Creahan and brother of Patrick Creahan, in New Orleans in time for that 1850 census? The answer—at least as far as I can see—not in 1850.

Granted, these missing members of a collateral line in my father-in-law's Kelly-Stevens family had some research challenges embedded in their very names. We may think of the name Bridget, for instance, as rather unusual here in America, but among Irish immigrants to this continent, the name was part of their heritage and a very popular name for women in older times, only recently dropping in popularity. In fact, Ireland's Central Statistics Office offers an app which examines the popularity of given names in their country by year, with the earliest year shown being 1964, when the name Bridget was ranked eighth of all baby names recorded in Ireland for that year. All that to say looking for an Irish immigrant Bridget in a city the size of New Orleans in 1850 might be a challenge.

Then, too, Michael Creahan's surname wasn't necessarily the easiest of names to record. Depending on the accent of the speaker and the accent the ears of the recorder were tuned to, that surname might go down on paper somewhat closer to Crane than Creahan. Even in the documents which I know belonged to Michael's own family, there was a wide variety of spellings.

Despite that, it was possible to go page by page through the census records for New Orleans, or at least do a bare-bones search for all surnames sounding like Crane, using not only Ancestry.com but FamilySearch.org, in case one company's indexing process missed what the record-keeper's handwriting might have been trying to tell us.

Still, no luck. Not for Bridget. Not for her other son Patrick. And certainly not for Michael.

It seemed like a good idea at the time, to look for those three family members in the 1850 census in New Orleans. After all, that was the lead gleaned from Michael's own obituary, which placed him as having arrived in port around 1847. It could be very likely that Michael worked to save money to send to Ireland so that his family could come join him after his arrival and establishment in New Orleans. Perhaps he only achieved that goal after moving north to Lafayette, Indiana, where we found him in the 1860 census. But judging from descriptions of the tenement surroundings of the places where Irish immigrant laborers settled in New Orleans, I wonder how likely it might have been that Michael was missed entirely in the enumeration process.

There are, of course, other ways to trace these three Creahans in New Orleans. We'll take some time tomorrow to see whether our results are more promising in the passenger records for that same time period.

Brick Walls and Kellys

 

If we call those hard-to-research ancestors "brick walls," then my father-in-law's Kelly family must be a walled citadel of relatives. Demarcation of this barrier began when James and Mary Kelly left all behind and sailed for New Orleans from somewhere in Ireland.

Trying to find any clues through DNA testing has not been promising. Using my husband's DNA test as proxy for my father-in-law's genetic heritage, we are looking at a connection at the distance of third great-grandfather—not so distant as to be unreachable, but still only showing us eight possible connections to these Kelly descendants via Ancestry.com's ThruLines tool. Out of those eight, two are children of my husband's cousins, telling me nothing new.

The paper trail has been clear enough from James and Mary's children down to the present, thankfully. I have not really added many new Kelly descendants to my father-in-law's tree since beginning this month's research project, thus it is no surprise that I only added ninety one new individuals to that family tree in the past two weeks. Those have mainly come from continuation of previous months' research projects, which are always chugging away in the background. Still, the total count for the tree, after two weeks' work, is now 36,751 names.

However, of those eight DNA matches linked to James Kelly's line, there is one ThruLines suggestion which I cannot trace. Beginning at the top with James himself and moving forward in time, there is a disconnect at the level of a grandchild. I simply cannot find any documentation to identify that individual which ThruLines indicates as James' descendant.

If I can't see my way clear to the end, perhaps switching perspective and looking in the opposite direction—from the DNA match backwards in time, all the way to the ancestor during James Kelly's era—may help point out the connection. Or point out the error. Building a "quick and dirty tree," as CeCe Moore used to call it in her training sessions, may highlight the error in the Kelly connection—or perhaps help highlight how the suggested ancestor actually fit in. There have been several iterations of that original tree-building idea over the years, complete with caveats from experienced researchers. But the biggest hurdle, at least from my perspective, will be finding the time to actually do the work of building someone else's tree.

I had hoped that, building out my own take on the Kelly line—plus all the collateral lines—would prompt ThruLines to identify additional DNA connections, but that count of eight ThruLines Kelly matches has stayed set for quite some time. It's the luck of the draw if any other Kelly descendants will choose to test in the future—and that may only be augmented if James Kelly had any siblings whose descendants also survived down to the present generation.

In the meantime, this coming week it will be back to our alternate research strategy: examine the context of immigration through New Orleans for these Irish immigrants, and hope for some sign of a F.A.N. Club associated with the extended Kelly family.

Still Off the Shelf: Irish Migrants in the Canadas

 

Some books take time to absorb. Back in July, as I was closing out my search for the Flannery branch of my father-in-law's roots, I received a well-recommended book which promised to broaden my thinking on the subject of Irish immigration. Since I've been traveling this summer, I took the four hundred page book with me on trips where I knew I'd have time to read (think long flights across the continent). And Irish Migrants in the Canadas certainly did give me food for thought.

One concept behind the book was author Bruce S. Elliott's intent to examine the stories behind Irish immigrants from one specific place—County Tipperary in Ireland—during a specific time period and headed to a specific location across the Atlantic. As the foreword explains, rather than discussing that migration as an "abstract process or an aggregate phenomenon," the book's goal was to focus on actual migrants and "trace the lives of a significant number of real people—not aggregated census numbers."

Thus, the author's breakthrough work pinpointed the stories of nearly eight hundred families on their journey from Ireland to Canada and beyond. That "beyond" is key for my father-in-law's family, as is likely for many of Irish descent who not only traveled further inland in Canada, but also migrated south to the United States, as did my father-in-law's ancestors. Many researchers, I'm sure, don't consider this possibility for their American ancestors, though I noticed through Gail Dever's blog, Genealogy à la carte, that an upcoming presentation to be delivered by Canadian Kathryn Lake Hogan for the Fairfax (Virginia) Genealogical Society reveals that there is a lot to be considered with this possibility.

What I am valuing about this book is the depth of thought put into the historical context of these Irish immigrants. Though I likely will not find any mention of my father-in-law's specific ancestors (spoiler: I already peeked at the index of names), the exercise of following the author's thinking behind his research approach will be excellent for developing a sense of what is necessary to understand about any given ancestral situation.

Though this month I am far afield of those Flannery ancestors headed to Ontario, focusing instead on why the Kelly family chose to route through New Orleans to Indiana, I believe the same research discipline will yield helpful details by broadening my perspective. The book may be slow reading, but I am tagging several passages with helpful reminders of how Bruce Elliott approached his study, and contemplating how I can adapt that method to use in search of the story behind each of my ancestral immigrant families.

Wondering Why

 

There comes a time when chasing our mystery ancestors that we begin wondering why. Why, for instance, did John Stevens, my father-in-law's great-grandfather, choose the port of New Orleans as his landing place after leaving his Irish homeland? Why did John Stevens' future wife, Catharine Kelly, and the entire Kelly family, also choose to head to New Orleans? And why did his brother-in-law, Michael Creahan, future husband of Catharine's sister Bridget Kelly, also head from Ireland to New Orleans?

When it comes to wondering why, I propose a universal resolution to that state of puzzlement: search for an answer. That, in effect, was what I did: look for reasons why these Irish immigrants to the United States didn't take the usual route to New York City—or even the less expensive alternative of moving to the British colony in Canada. That search, in fact, led to a productive exploration of this alternate destination.

As I discovered, the route from Ireland to New Orleans was a choice exercised by the Irish for almost one hundred years before the famine took its toll on the population of Ireland. It turns out there were logical reasons for such a draw. For one thing—a reason too easily dismissed in our less-reverent age, perhaps—the Catholic majority of that southern American port city was a draw to the persecuted Catholics in Ireland. Then, too—especially prior to American acquisition of the territory—New Orleans was once beholden to a nation which was not British, perhaps a draw for those Irish weary of their struggle with their English overlords.

Between 1842 and 1864, according to one estimate, 110,000 Irish entered the port of New Orleans. Another estimate pegs the number at 425,000 for Irish arriving in New Orleans. No matter what the count, the influx of Irish immigrants in New Orleans made the city the number two destination in the United States for Irish arrivals, second only to New York City.

When they arrived at the port in New Orleans, many Irish chose to move on to midwestern destinations, but a good number stayed and worked where they landed, just as did Michael Creahan. This, however, was not the easiest option in the long run. Given the climate and hazards of the environment there, combined with the usual jobs taken by many Irish immigrants—working at the port, or digging canals through mosquito-infested swamps—many died of yellow fever, cholera, or malaria. In 1850, for example, one New Orleans hospital admitted 18,476 residents suffering from such diseases, of whom 11,130 were Irish immigrants.

Another possible inducement to choose New Orleans as their destination might have been the cost of getting there. As one resource put it, cotton ships from New Orleans bound for Liverpool unloaded, then "filled their holds with human ballast for the return trip." The fare—for those who actually reached their destination—was a bargain.

Discovering these details through a little bit of research into a "side topic" helped enlighten me on the reasons why the Creahans, Kellys, and Stevenses might have chosen a destination far different than the one I assumed would be a more likely choice. It doesn't, however, provide me the documentation for their arrival—a task which we still will need to face up to in the coming days. More important than the paper proof that they arrived here in America—we already see signs of that occurrence in other records—what we need is a listing of the family constellations in each party's traveling group. And—though I doubt I will find it—some nod to the townlands they once called home in their particular county in Ireland.

At this stage, pre-discovery, at least we can hope.

Tracing Michael

 

There are some Irish immigrants in my father-in-law's heritage whose age seemed to be rather fluid. When they were young, they were very, very young—but when they were old, they were ancient.

Take Michael Creahan, the husband of Bridget Kelly. Bridget was the sister of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Catharine who, like that sister, died young leaving several children behind. Depending on the record, Michael was said to have been born somewhere between 1824 and 1827, or even to have a date of birth as late as 1842, according to his death certificate—and yet his 1915 obituary states his age at passing was eighty eight. It is only because of other identifying details that we'll be able to trace Michael Creahan over time, and hopefully glean the missing details about his journey to Lafayette, Indiana.

It is a good thing that we have some clues to guide us in that paper chase. Prime among those clues was the statement in Michael's obituary that he had spent ten years working in New Orleans before proceeding up the American waterways to Indiana. It was not lost on me that that was the same route followed by Bridget Kelly's own family, as well as the route taken by the future husband of Bridget's sister Catharine, John Stevens. You can see now what had put me in mind of the F.A.N. Club concept for this extended family. 

With Michael Creahan's timeline, as given in his obituary, it might serve me well to review whatever passenger records still exist for the port of New Orleans. Arriving in America in 1847, if we can safely extrapolate from the details given in his obituary, Michael did not immediately depart for Lafayette, but remained in New Orleans to work for ten years.

It is clear from the 1860 census, where he appeared with his wife Bridget and his Indiana-born one year old daughter Ellen, that he had been in Lafayette since at least 1858. Looking ten years ahead provides us more useful details to help in tracing Michael: the 1870 census, while showing the household after the loss of his wife, includes additional family members Bridget Creahan, his eighty four year old mother, and Patrick Creahan, likely his older brother.

These additional names may help identify the right Michael Creahan in passenger records—if the family traveled together—and locate them within the mass of Irish immigrants remaining in New Orleans for the 1850 census. And if we play our F.A.N. Club cards right, perhaps that will include a turn at locating the rest of the Kelly family in New Orleans, as well—perhaps even the impossible-to-find immigrant John Stevens.

When the FAN Club Keeps Calling

 

Sorting through siblings sometimes uncovers a missing member of the family, as we saw yesterday in tracing the unexpected niece in bachelor Matthew Kelly's 1880 household. We discovered that Matthew had a sister who died as a married woman with four young children. As it turns out, though that Kelly sister, Bridget, died before the 1870 census, we can still learn a lot about her family—particularly her husband—by following his record through the rest of his own life.

There is a reason for chasing after that seemingly unrelated person. Yes, as an in-law, Bridget's husband Michael Creahan would not likely be a blood relative of the Kelly line I'm working on. However, I'm banking on that one reason for continuing the search: the possibility that, even in the family's "F.A.N. Club," we may find ourselves led to some clues about further family connections.

That F.A.N. Club premise is calling my name quite loudly right now, and for good reason. Just taking a brief look at what I could find on Michael Creahan, I may have run across some leads. Thanks to the Find A Grave volunteer who transcribed his obituary onto his memorial on that website, I learned a few details about Michael's journey to his final home in Lafayette, Indiana. That record I confirmed by finding a similar version of the May 17, 1915, obituary which was published in the Bloomington Evening World in the Indiana town where Michael's daughter had moved.

We'll talk more about Michael Creahan's obituary tomorrow, but here are some details which made me want to look further at documenting the steps along his way to America. First, the obituary mentioned that Michael Creahan was from Limerick. While the obituary didn't specify whether that meant the city of Limerick or County Limerick, it did add that Michael had left his homeland about 1847, and at that time of emigration he was twenty years of age.

Another point brought out in Michael's obituary was that, having arrived in America, he spent all but ten years living in Lafayette, Indiana. Those other ten years? That was when Michael was working in New Orleans, bringing to mind the familiar immigration route of some other members of the extended Kelly family. Could Michael have been an early arrival among his family members, sending funds back for their eventual voyages to join him in the New World? Or did Michael actually follow the path because others from among his associates and neighbors had already been that way before him?

That's why the F.A.N. Club concept is tapping me on the shoulder: family, friends, associates, or former neighbors could have influenced Michael's decision to leave home for, eventually, Lafayette, Indiana, via the route others from Ireland had taken, through New Orleans and up the river waterways of the central United States.

Michael Creahan's obituary was a tempting starting point, but there are some other details we'll look at tomorrow to see whether we can glean any further clues on what brought all these Irish immigrants to Lafayette, Indiana, by the 1850s.

When Stumped by Ancestors, Keep Searching

 

On a mission to find a family member—any family member—who could provide clues as to where the immigrant Kelly family once lived in Ireland, we've run across a puzzle: who was A. M. Crahan? We've found the children of widow Mary Kelly and her deceased husband James handily all reported in the same household for the 1860 census: sons Matthew and Thomas, plus daughters Rose and Ann. We already know the three grandchildren Mary was caring for were the children of her deceased daughter Catharine Kelly Stevens, and we were even able to spot the youngest of those grandchildren in the Kelly household for the 1880 census, long after Mary's own passing in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. But when we look more closely at the Kelly family entry in that 1880 census, we're stumped by the appearance of another relative: a thirteen year old niece named A. M. Crahan. Who was she? More importantly, who was her mother?

The plain response to such unexpected discoveries is: when stumped by ancestors, we simply need to keep searching. Hopefully, there is an answer out there. Somewhere. But it sometimes takes quite a bit of  looking before we run into the finding.

I tackled this messy question several years ago. I won't repeat all the steps in the discovery process here, as my point now is to gather all I can find on the Kelly siblings of Catharine. It is they who, if anyone would, might point the way back to their home in Ireland, wherever it was. Yet of the four siblings found in the 1860 census, we've since discovered that Matthew and Rose died unmarried. The appearance of this Crahan niece tells us that there was another Kelly sibling not listed in that 1860 household. Who was she?

A woman married before the 1860 enumeration, whoever she was, she was gone before the time of the 1870 census. Through a long series of steps, I discovered the woman's husband was named Michael Creahan, and the daughter's initials—"A. M.," as she was listed in the Kelly household for the 1880 census—stood for Anna M. Creahan. Her missing mother, who died in 1869, was the former Bridget Kelly.

So there was another Kelly sibling, showing me that it sometimes takes a lot of effort to track down all the collateral lines in a research problem. Perhaps there will be even more siblings to discover in this Kelly family. But for now, as I review this discovery, I realize that Bridget's husband Michael Creahan, himself,  might have some clues to help us in our search for more details on where the Kelly family once lived in Ireland.

When There are Too Few Matches

 

It is sometimes surprising to me to see how different the count is for DNA matches from different ancestral lines. The other day I mentioned working on my mother-in-law's Snider/Snyder line, where her ThruLines results (through her testing proxy, my husband) boast well over two hundred cousins—and then I scrolled down the list to see how many DNA matches there were for my father-in-law's second great-grandfather, James Kelly.

The result? A puny eight matches. Where were all the Kelly matches? Did no one among those descendants decide to test their DNA?

As I pore over the documentation for this Kelly family, I keep thinking there were far too few matches for the number of siblings Catharine Kelly Stevens had. Of course, I have to be doubly careful when analyzing these Kelly DNA matches, not only because the surname is such a common Irish name, but because my father-in-law actually descended from two entirely separate Kelly lines. But bearing that in mind, I still would have presumed James and Mary Kelly would have had far more descendants than they had.

Here's the overview, mostly drawn from the same 1860 census where we found the widow Mary in the household of her (presumably) oldest son, Matthew—along with her motherless grandchildren James, John Kelly, and William Stevens, found on the subsequent page. Matthew, then age thirty eight, was named in that census along with Rose, age thirty three, then Thomas, age twenty three, and finally Ann, age twenty one.

At first glance, it might be easy to assume, based on ages given, that Rose was Matthew's wife, and Ann was Thomas' wife. One could guess that Matthew and Thomas could have been brothers—but it is hard to tell what the family constellation might have been, given that there was only the most minimal of marriage information recorded for that census (whether anyone was married within the year).

With a record like the 1860 census, it takes comparing notes with other documents to construct the family's story more accurately. That there was some sort of relationship with the three Stevens boys was evident by their placement in that household, to be sure, but we'd need to look elsewhere to learn more about who, exactly, might belong in the now-deceased Catharine Kelly Stevens' collateral lines.

Fortunately, though I can't find Matthew Kelly in the 1870 census yet, he was still in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, for the 1880 census. And the 1880 census marked the starting point for recording family relationships, providing us the information that Rose was certainly not his wife; she was Matthew's sister. 

Furthermore, as we noted the other day, the youngest Stevens son, William, was also in the Kelly household in 1880, this time solidly identified as Matthew's nephew. At the time of Matthew's death a few years later, the local newspaper's report of his passing also noted his relationship to William, as we can see from the work of a Find A Grave volunteer, who posted the clipping on Matthew's memorial online. That same simple newspaper entry also confirmed that Matthew, up to the time of his death, was a bachelor.

If, like Rose in the 1860 enumeration, Ann was also an unmarried Kelly sibling, we begin to see why the number of possible descendants who could be candidates for DNA testing might be limited. And yet, that 1880 census provides us with another tantalizing clue: an additional member of the Kelly household, A. M. Crahan, identified as a niece. If she was Matthew's niece, yet not a Stevens descendant, which Kelly sibling claimed this child?

Though it gave us a start at piecing together the Kelly family constellation, that 1860 census apparently didn't reveal all the collateral lines of our Catharine Kelly Stevens. You know what that means: it's time to search for further Kelly connections.

When it's Time to Compare

 

Could a simple change of background color be all it takes to make me sit up and take notice of surroundings? 

Since I've been working on my father-in-law's Kelly ancestors, I thought I'd take a peek at the latest DNA matches via Ancestry's ThruLines tool. As I always do, I clicked on the icon for Ancestry, then chose the drop-down menu for DNA results to select ThruLines. I was on a mission to find all Kelly matches and nothing was going to get in my way.

I thought.

How is it that a little change of color on the website's display can suddenly make an oh-so-familiar screen look completely different? I clicked on ThruLines on that drop-down menu, but a different looking page came up. It was labeled "DNA Compare."

Hmmm, I thought, That's not what I was looking for. Must have clicked the wrong choice, I thought. I'll go back and try again.

That's when I saw it: the "NEW" button next to the word "Compare." 

Funny, I hadn't noticed that before—but a Google search told me the Ancestry blog had written up that "DNA Compare" on February 24, 2023. How did I miss that?

For the most part, the offerings under "DNA Compare" include "Regions"—comparing estimated ethnicity percentages with selected DNA matches—and "Ancestral Journeys," which focuses on immigrant communities' destinations or origins. In addition, for a limited time, a third comparison is made with "world class athletes," possibly a nod to this past summer's newsworthy sporting events.

While those categories were admittedly fun to peruse, I didn't find any eye-opening stunners. There was really no surprise to learn that I share similar ethnic backgrounds with those close relatives who also decided to test their DNA at Ancestry.com. Perhaps if I had been an adoptee still struggling to determine the identity of my birth parents, this might have been a useful tool. At this point, though, I'd peg such offerings as similar to what, in a previous century, might have been called "parlor games." Fun divertissement but not really useful.

On the other hand, being able to compare what our matches share with each other on a more basic level would be helpful. That, however, is the domain of a different set of offerings: the Ancestry Pro Tools. I haven't sprung for that additional cost yet, intending first to wring out all the information already available to me concerning those DNA matches. I prefer to complete the basic work first before upgrading.

Meanwhile, chasing those elusive Kelly roots may indeed call for a DNA assist, but I'll first be doing my comparisons with the basic tools available. For those whose intent in testing was to do the work in finding matches based on centiMorgan counts and large segments of shared genetic material, what's needed to complete the task is, for the most part, already there.

As I work through the matches, I'm not finding any surprises yet, but I did notice there weren't very many matches linked to this Kelly line to begin with: only eight for my father-in-law's Kelly line, compared with over two hundred matches for one of my mother-in-law's ancestral lines. Sometimes, there just aren't enough candidates out there for comparisons, no matter how impressive—or fun—the available research tools may be.

Never Really Have to Say it's Over

 

When it comes to summer, thinking it's over after passing Labor Day is so old school. Summer apparently can begin or end when the local governing body proclaims it so. Actually, if I were still a student, I'd feel robbed of my vacation if I attended class in a school district discarding that post-Labor Day tradition; one school district near me cuts summer vacation short by a full month.

The opposite is true, as well, thankfully—at least for those not bound by school schedules. Those of us who are able to travel (and include family research in our wandering ways) find the opportunity to stretch "summer vacation" into those fall months quite refreshing—and sometimes even quite a bargain.

Lately, I've been hearing the news about fellow genealogical society members returning from research trips. One member and her (now-adult) daughter just traced the memory lane winding through all the old hometowns of her Oklahoma ancestors before their emigration to California. A former student from one of my genealogy classes came up to chat after a meeting. She was so energized when she told me about all the material she gleaned while visiting several cousins back in Louisiana. Her next task: write it all down so the next generation will know these details, too.

Others I know are planning their research trips for later this month or even in October. Some local groups are organizing trips to the Family History Library in Salt Lake City. One of our board members recently discovered some new details on an ancestor in Tennessee, and is making plans to travel there next month for research.

While in the past, we might have reserved our research trips for those "official" months of summer vacation—all the better for drafting "research assistants" on those family trip detours to libraries or cemeteries—now, the end of summer hardly stops us. When it comes to summer, we never really have to say it's over. As it turns out for so many of us, any time is good for a family history research trip.

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.

NOT Beyond a Reasonable Doubt

 

If I stare at the headstone of Catherine Kelly Stevens long enough, I can barely make out the words, "wife of John Stevens." Or perhaps that is wishful thinking. I can't even decipher any entry for her own name. Only her date of death—May 3, 1858—seems clear enough to believe.

Truthfully, I can't even say it's beyond a reasonable doubt that James and Mary Kelly's daughter Catharine was married to John Stevens, my father-in-law's great-grandfather. Records are far more sparse for Indiana's Tippecanoe County in the 1850s than in those east coast locations boasting immigrant settlers as far back as the 1600s. And what few records can be found sometimes come with irksome abnormalities.

Take the presumed marriage license for John and Catharine. The license, dated on the twenty-seventh day of December in 1853, authorized "any person empowered by law to solemnize marriage" of the named couple. However, on that same document, the groom's name is given once as John Stevenson, and three more times as John Stephenson. Is this still our man John Stevens?

If this was the correct couple, they were married a little over three months after Catharine's father James had died—a likely possibility if a widow was seeking to find promising situations for her daughters after losing her own husband. But this could as likely have been the case of two people with the same name. After all, even in a city of barely six thousand people, it could be possible for someone named Catharine Kelly to have a name twin.

Of course, even the spelling variation on Catharine's own maiden name—Kelly or Kelley—would give pause to someone nowadays, but may not have been cause for concern in a previous century. But with no other records yet available to compare, we don't have much to go on beyond family tradition and these sparse indications.

There is, however, a way beyond this tangle, and that is to employ the records we can find of Catharine's collateral lines. As it turns out, because Catharine was a young mother when she died, the records of her own children will help guide us in the process of sorting out the details on this family—first for Catharine herself, then for her parents.

Tomorrow, we'll begin reviewing what's already been found on John and Catharine's three sons, then take a look at Catharine's own siblings to see what else can be discovered about the family.

"Start With What you Know"

 

If the standard genealogical mantra is to "start with what you know," then I probably shouldn't even begin pursuing James and Mary Kelly. There is so much not known about these second great-grandparents of my father-in-law—but if I don't start somewhere, I won't start at all.

Researching this couple with the quintessential Irish surname amounts to groping about in the dark like a blind man in a back alley. Most of what I "know" is based on associations with family members of the next generation and very weak inferences. With next to zero documentation, there isn't much for me to go by. If it weren't for the help of local researchers familiar with the territory and history of Lafayette, Indiana, I wouldn't even have made as much progress as I have to this point.

Take James Kelly, for instance. There is an entry for him in the Find A Grave listings for the old Greenbush Cemetery in Lafayette—but no headstone shown to verify the name or dates. And the date given in the Find A Grave memorial as James' death—September 1, 1853—may actually be the burial date.

Fortunately for me, the Find A Grave volunteer who posted James Kelly's memorial—it was spelled there as Kelley—happens to be a very active participant in the local genealogical community in Lafayette. Though I haven't met her face to face, we have discussed this Kelly family by phone and email before one of my trips to visit Lafayette. According to the volunteer, she gleaned the information on those early Greenbush burials from the actual cemetery records, of which I believe she had a copy.

What was helpful in those conversations was the volunteer's provision of information on James' wife Mary, as well as their daughter Catharine, whose untimely death followed the birth of her third child, William Stevens. In Catharine's case, thankfully, we do have a photograph of her 1858 headstone.

Once again, information on Find A Grave is sparse for Mary Kelley: no date of birth or death given. Only thanks to the specific location of her burial plot can we determine Mary's connection to James and to Catharine Stevens: section 2, lot 118. Even then, it is an inference based on proximity—that, and family oral tradition that Catharine's parents were James and Mary.

There were, thankfully, a few other signs of proximity to help bolster such inferences about the Kelly family. Finding those, however, will mean exploring what essentially are collateral lines among these ancestors of my father-in-law. Let's take a look tomorrow.

Got Kellys?

 

Doing family history research? From Ireland? Got Kellys?

Funny, so do I. In fact, my father-in-law actually has two different Kelly families attributed to his direct line ancestors, not to mention several in-laws married to collateral lines in his tree. Let's just say there are a lot of Kellys to go around. And enough research angst to unnerve all of us.

I knew I might regret it when I selected James and Mary Kelly to pursue for my Twelve Most Wanted for this year. Perhaps that's the secret reason why I messed up and skipped right over that goal last month. August was supposed to be the month I would tackle James and Mary, but somehow I "overlooked" that detail. We'll see whether we can make up for that oversight this September.

Here's what I know about James and Mary Kelly so far. After all, I've worked on their family back in 2020, and again the next year, so at least I have some basis for launching us from their final resting place in Lafayette, Indiana, to their original homeland somewhere in Ireland.

James and Mary Kelly must have arrived in Indiana some time around 1850—but that is my best guess. I can't yet find them in the 1850 census, and by the time of the 1860 census, Mary was a widow living in her son's household in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. By 1870, she too was gone.

Searching for Kellys can be a daunting experience. Besides the fact that Kelly is such a common surname for Irish descendants, it is a name with spelling variations. Thus, in seeking James and Mary Kelly, we must also be open to seeking James and Mary Kelley.

Though my father-in-law's brother Ed, keeper of the family "stuff," was so careful to pass down the history of his family to me, when it came to this line of Kellys, he could not say where in Ireland they might have originated. Thus, in working on this task for September's version of my Twelve Most Wanted, our search will be wide open. Ever wonder just how many Kellys there might have been in Ireland?

With work like this cut out for us this month, we may be facing a daunting task. I'll be the first to admit I may find myself looking for detours—like learning far more than planned about Irish immigration, or conditions pre-famine in Ireland—to enrich my understanding in the face of a hopeless goal of seeking a Mary Kelly anywhere in Ireland.

But first, remembering the family history mantra, tomorrow we'll start with what we know. Once we get our footing firmly established, perhaps we can launch our search in a promising direction.

Change of Plans

 

Sometimes, a change of plans can happen for the nicest of surprises. Today is one of those days. I had planned to launch into a new month of research on the third of my father-in-law's mystery ancestors for this year. Then, an unexpected email landed in my in-box which I simply can't not talk about. I thought about saving this post for next weekend, but since today's a holiday anyhow, I'll let that be my excuse to celebrate a little.

If you have been following A Family Tapestry for any amount of time longer than, say, the past couple years, you probably have picked up the notion that when I started this family history journey, I knew next to nothing about my own father's side of the family. Put it simply: I knew my dad's name, and a rough estimate of his date of birth somewhere in New York City—and that was it. He wasn't too helpful about adding any information, either; his usual response to my childhood pleas—delivered in a typical New York accent—was, "Ah, you don't wanna know that."

My older siblings and cousins and I eventually got together and compared notes on our respective parents from this side of the family. Bit by bit, we were able to assemble lines from census records and other details which revealed the story of a family with a far different surname than the one I grew up with: it was Puhalski. Or Puhalaski. Or, finally back in Poland, the family's origin, Puhała.

That search took years of sharing discoveries among ourselves, but even then, I'd run into people who warned me that what my cousins and I had found was simply a case of a woman—my paternal grandmother, Sophie Laskowska—marrying two different men. That was the usual way to explain away family records with two different surnames, not the alternate—and very possible—scenario of an immigrant deciding to unofficially change his own name.

Well, along came technology—we bandy about the term "AI" now—and changed all that. Unbidden and certainly unexpectedly, I got this email yesterday about a discovery regarding a newspaper printed over a century ago. The email was from the genealogy company MyHeritage, which a few years ago had acquired a significant collection of New York newspapers and state documents. With their release this year of OldNews.com, MyHeritage was certainly equipped to help me resolve that research dilemma, but I never dreamed it possible to actually find an answer to this problem in print, certainly not in the pages of any New York newspaper.

It was MyHeritage's SuperSearch function which did the heavy lifting for me, though I hadn't even the slightest notion that they were working behind the scenes to uncover answers for me. Thus, the unexpected email brought me, unbidden, the answer I thought I would never find.

That long-awaited answer was buried in the legal notices from the June 13, 1917, edition of the Flushing Daily Times, in the midst of articles on page three concerning rallies for the Red Cross, real estate sales, classified ads, and even a cartoon strip. In essence, at a "Special Term of the Supreme Court" for Queens County (but held in Kings County) on June 12, Theodore J. Puhalski petitioned to change his name to John T. McCann. In addition, the notice included the request for the petitioner's two children to also have their surname changed for "good reasons" and that their interests "will be substantially promoted thereby."

Makes one wonder what those "good reasons" might have been. Whatever they were, they remained as much a secret as the very court incident, itself—until, at least, a smartly set up computer system aided in uncovering details I never dreamed actually existed.

Today might be a different holiday celebration for you than the event I'm celebrating. For now, I'm cheering for this unexpected discovery, definitely a genealogy happy-dance-worthy moment. Tomorrow, we'll get back to work on previously scheduled research plans. I promise.

Newspaper image above from page 3 of the Flushing Daily Times for June 13, 1917, courtesy of OldNews.com at MyHeritage.com.

Some Goals are Stickier Than Others

 

If a family historian's research goals start with finding the names, dates, and locations of each direct line ancestor, you'd think it would be an across-the-board equal effort for any given relative. But no, as it turns out: some research goals are stickier than others. They contain prickles and barbs and ooey-gooey sticky messes that get us snarled up in the paperwork. They include the lions, tigers, and bears along the research path which make us take wrong turns, run from evidence we can't access, or simply chicken out at the immense effort. And it all comes with no guarantee of success, no matter how hard we work.

Don't say you haven't been forewarned.

Take this past month, for instance. Searching for Theresa Blaising's roots, despite her relatively recent acquaintance with my father-in-law's family during his childhood, required me to slow down and immerse myself in the general history of French immigration to the midwest. I won't say the detour wasn't valuable;  I'm just disappointed I couldn't make more progress in the thirty one days I tackled the topic.

All that to say I wasn't surprised to see my progress in growing my in-laws' family tree was much slower than any usual biweekly period for my customary tally. In the last two weeks, the rate slowed to only 151 new individuals added to that family tree—and most of those additions were due to a secondary, behind-the-scenes goal of continuing to work on some DNA matches for my mother-in-law's Snider and Snyder line. Still, I can't complain: in the aggregate, this step-by-step work over the years has yielded a tree which now stands at 36,660 individuals.

For my own tree, progress has drawn to a standstill, but that is part of the plan. When I outlined my Twelve Most Wanted for this year, I set aside the third quarter of 2024 to devote to my father-in-law's family. We have one more month to focus on that before we return to working on my own family's tree. While my tree has 38,421 documented individuals right now, that number only budges upward during the summer on the rare chances that I stumble across news of an addition to the family, or a loss of an elder. Unless prompted by birth announcements or obituaries, I won't return to that side of the family until October.

Yet September may turn out to be another month with a sticky goal. I have been stuck on the roots of the lines of James and Mary Kelly—from Ireland, of course, during those tragic famine years. If I can't find any further documentation on them, we'll take that detour to examine the more generic overview of the local history and occurrences of that time period, both in Ireland where they once lived, and in Tippecanoe County, Indiana, where they spent their last days after their immigration.

The Cat Ate my Homework

 

Why is it that no woebegone child told any teacher that the homework wasn't turned in on time because the cat ate it? Yet, here I am sitting at my work table after having cleaned up the mess left by our geriatric cat who, against all house rules, spent the night camped up on the table—on top of my notes for an upcoming seminar, mind you—leaving her mark wherever she sat.

Sigh. It's not that I can blame her. She's having a rough time lately. Actually, we all are having a tough time in this house lately, both cat and human population. After having lost my senior editor Luke earlier this summer, the oldest cat in our household finally came face to face with her outsized tumor and tried to do something about it herself. It was not a beautiful sight.

This is the kitten who, as the offspring of a feral farm cat, somehow beguiled her way indoors at the request of our daughter, who wanted a pet.

"You already have pets," my husband reminded her. "They're all outside."

Guess who won that round.

We named her Button, as in "cute as a...." Now, well into her teens, she isn't quite so cute. Cat years can put a lot of wear on a body. And I'm afraid her number's almost up.

On that pile of papers on the table was my roadmap of the Twelve Most Wanted ancestors from the past three years and projections onward through the end of this year. Somehow, that form escaped the camp-out catastrophe unscathed. I looked over the page to make sure I hadn't missed any spots requiring copying and disposal—and that's when my eyes fell on one particular detail I had missed.

You guessed it: I got something wrong with my homework for this month. But unlike the homework eaten by the dog, the cat's vice was getting the homework turned in early. Yep, my month's work on Theresa Blaising and her family was supposed to be my research project for September, not August.

Thankfully, we still have one more month to focus on goals for my father-in-law's ancestors, so we'll just switch positions and pick up with the August goal in September. Taking a look on the bright side, perhaps the month's delay will mean more resources appearing online for us now. Though we're heading back to Ireland for the coming month's research—a tough go for anyone seeking records before the famine years—perhaps that brief break from Irish research will bring us the fresh eyes needed to spot significant leads. After all, if cats can have nine lives, maybe the homework they mess with can gain the same benefit.

Frames of Reference

 

We may bemoan the fact that, despite our best efforts at research, we still don't really know that much about our ancestors—even our closer ancestors. In the case of the only grandmother my father-in-law ever knew, despite the personal connection, there still wasn't much to pass to the next generation about her family's story.

I gave that realization some thought today. Not that I'm the only one to face that difficulty—in the resources we've found this month, it appears I am in good company in my complaints about lack of detailed information. In a 2019 presentation to the Besancon Historical Society, the speaker discussed the "problem"—a sparse supply of "sketchy" stories. Over the generations, that bare-bones story of immigration was "either forgotten or more often simplified."

I am wondering whether that case of the vanishing immigration story might rather be due to the effect of frames of reference. In the speaker's case at the Historical Society, the example was given of simply saying one's ancestors were "from Paris," or even more generally, "from France." I am wondering whether that might be more of a factor of a speaker declining to explain details which would have been beyond the listener's frame of reference. Why go into detail when the detail would be meaningless to the listener?

An example from my own experience resonates. When I first moved to California from the New York City suburbs where I spent my high school years, I never answered the question, "Where are you from?" with a specific answer. I'd generally say New York and leave it at that. Only if I knew the person I was talking to was also from that area would I go into further detail. Otherwise, it would be extraneous information, easily discarded.

How were those ancestors to know that one day, we would have powerful computers with search engines able to ferret out the slightest details, not only of current events and locations, but also of now-nonexistent villages halfway around the world? How could they have even known that generations after them, people would have the time and inclination to dig up those details of the life they had left behind—and good riddance, as far as they were concerned in many cases.

People share information with their audience based on their perception of the listener's frame of reference. Imagine what you'd say to an inquisitive grandchild, after a long day of work in the field, in answer to the question, "Where did you come from?" The answer to Besancon's grandchildren in Indiana might likely be, "Oh, from far, far away, but in a little village much like this one here."

This puts a different spin on the usual complaint about not listening to our elders' stories until it was too late to ask them; if we did ask when we were younger, the answer might be framed for what was seen as appropriate for younger ears.

True, in many cases, we didn't stop and stay to hear any stories when we were younger, but we also might not have had the framework to build upon the references made in the telling of that tale. If all we know about France is that it is across the Atlantic Ocean and has a city named Paris, the clarity of details like "Besancon" might be lost on us. But then, how many of us have taken care to tell our own stories in the detail we wish we had received from our ancestors? Perhaps it is human nature to gloss over the details we think our listener would see as "TMI"—too much information.

In all the letters my father-in-law's family preserved from Theresa Blaising, their grandmother, it is evident that she was writing about happenings very much in the present. Perhaps, by that point as an elderly woman, she was the last one surviving of all her siblings. That immigration story was likely far from her mind—certainly much farther removed than a widow's concerns about living life alone, far from family, during a World War.

Perhaps we need to go more lightly on our ancestors when we complain about their lack of information about where they once lived or any of the other details we crave about our family's history. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to piece together the story—and sometimes we can be quite successful in such endeavors. It's just that, in Theresa Blaising's case, there wasn't much story to gather.

With the coming week, we'll be into a new month, pursuing a new ancestor. We'll set Theresa's story aside, noting what was gained from this month's search and drawing up a list of what is still needed to reach back to another generation in a future attempt. On Monday, we'll move to another ancestral puzzle from my father-in-law's Irish family.

Passenger Records: Finding the Proof

 

The Blaising brothers may have said they completed their immigrant voyage in New York City, but finding the proof in passenger records may be another question. Granted, dates of travel may have been estimated, but our ability now to search through digitized records using a date range should ease us around that search roadblock. However, I've yet to find any sign of Henry, Lawrence, John, Philip, Louis, or August, let alone their mother Mary or baby sister Theresa. One would think it rather difficult to hide a traveling family of that size.

The detail of their arrival—whether in 1866 or 1868—tells us that, if they did indeed arrive in New York City, their records would be part of the collection from Castle Garden, not Ellis Island. Castle Garden, also known as Castle Clinton—named after then-mayor of New York City and subsequent Governor of the state DeWitt Clinton—served to welcome immigrants on behalf of the state from 1855 until the opening of Ellis Island in 1892. Thus, whether the Blaising family arrived in 1866 or 1868, either way, if they came to New York City, they arrived through Castle Garden.

While we now think of immigration documentation as the domain of the federal government, at that time it was the state government which oversaw such a procedure. Thus, searching for immigrants in that time period depends on the laws of the time and the jurisdiction.

Though there are many resources for checking passenger lists during that time period in New York, unfortunately, I was unable to locate any sign of the Blaising brothers. In the process, I collected a list of spelling variations of that surname which far exceeded my expectations. Immigration officials were indeed quite creative in their spelling prowess. Even searching for the exact spelling of the surname on the Ellis Island Foundation website, which includes records for Castle Garden, didn't produce any promising results, nor did my attempt at MyHeritage.

While searching for the Blaising records may turn out to be a far more exhaustive search than I had originally envisioned, I also need to recall that, as the FamilySearch blog put it, these Castle Garden digitized resources represent the surviving records from that time period. And even if I do find them, it is likely, given that time period, that there might not be any further personal information given on the travelers than what I've been able to learn from the brothers' naturalization records. We can glean great amounts of information on our ancestors from historic records, but only to the extent which officials of that time period deemed necessary to know.

Their need to know and mine may not see eye to eye.

To Trace the Family's Route

 

Where to find pre-1906 American naturalization records? I go online, naturally. In the case of the Blaising family's arrival some time between 1866 and 1868—the two dates reported by some of Theresa Blaising's brothers in census records—their records could have been filed anywhere, as there was no central federal office overseeing the process then. If the Blaising family had traveled directly to Allen County, Indiana, where we have already found them by 1870, their naturalization records could have been filed at the county courthouse there, or at any of five different possible court systems within the state's jurisdiction. If they stopped somewhere else on the way to their ultimate destination in New Haven, Indiana, the paperwork could have been begun at that other location.

In order to trace the family's route from France—my goal in finding naturalization records—I might first have to trace their route after arriving from France. With that uncertainty, rather than hunt through records at FamilySearch.org or any of the genealogical companies with such digitized records, I took my search straight to a search engine, seeking naturalization records at the state level. I entered Indiana as my first choice, held my breath, and pressed enter.

Fortunately, a promising entry popped up at the top of the list at Google. It was a page from the Indiana GenWeb site for Allen County, which provided links for accessing the very items I was seeking. Taking my cue from that information, I followed the link to the Allen County Genealogical Society website, where an alphabetized index of naturalization records from the Indiana Archives and Records Administration provided clickable sub-headings. I clicked on "Bl" for Blaising, and presto, I was there, scrolling past eight entries for "Black" to reach the next surname, Blaising.

There, the record provided the person's name, age at time of filing, and the date of the document. A fourth column was labeled, "link."

I wasted no time getting to that next step.

On that new page, actually hosted on the Indiana Archives site, once again I was asked to enter the immigrant's first name and last name. There were also fields to fill in for keyword and organization name, which I left blank. I discovered that it was best to not enter the requested field for "search by county," as when I did enter Allen County, I'd get zero results, but if left blank, the person I was seeking would be served up, no questions asked.

At that point, if more than one person had filed with that same name, all possible entries would be shown, requiring me to make a selection. This might be helpful for reviewing all possibilities to avoid the risk of following the wrong name twin. In the case of one of the Blaising brothers, John, I ran into that case, though our John did include his middle initial.

Clicking on the name selected then produced a drop-down window with a transcription of the basic information. While I was happy to have found that with relatively little effort, I was disappointed that there wasn't further information. Besides the immigrant's name, age, and county of filing, the record gleaned the date of arrival and document date. In addition, the synopsis listed the country of origin: France.

Of course, I wanted more. Perhaps because of that disappointment, I felt placated to see under that perfunctory listing, a blue link with those welcome words, "More detail."

I clicked.

The result yielded a full page listing of that immigrant's record. In the case of the Blaising brothers, I was able to learn that each of them left from the port at Le Havre in northern France, and sailed to New York City. My next step, then, will be to search for passenger records there, though one interesting discovery was that some of the brothers reported different dates of arrival, suggesting the possibility of serial immigration.

In finding these excerpts from the naturalization records, the good news was that the full page entry included the URL to link with that immigrant's actual document, housed at FamilySearch.org. The bad news was that the accuracy of those links left something to be desired. Not to worry, a little hunt and peck effort quickly located each Blaising brother's own filed record among the Allen County naturalization documents. At least the link brought me to the correct record set.

While I was ecstatic to have so quickly found these particular naturalization records, only four of the brothers were identified in the process: John B. Blaising, who vouched for his sister Theresa's marriage to John Kelly Stevens; oldest brother Henry; and then the two brothers immediately older than Theresa, Louis and August. A fifth Blaising man, also named John, appeared in records, making me wonder whether, with a double given name beginning with "Jean" he might actually have been known in later life only as, say, Phillip or Lawrence. However, at this point, I'm presuming Phillip might have filed after moving to Ohio, and likewise Lawrence at his new home in Albany, New York. That will be a puzzle for another day.

With this information, I'll draw up a chart for easy reference, including each brother's stated date of arrival in New York. Whether that helps guide me to any of those passenger records, I can't say. Whether, upon finding them, they include any mention of the place in France each brother once called home is yet to be determined. But it's worth the look.

 

Wanted: French Immigrants

 

It may come as no surprise to those of us studying our ancestors' immigration to the United States that there were ads beckoning certain ethnic groups to cross the ocean to specific locations. Those businesses behind the organization of huge projects, such as the canals or, later, the railroads, placed ads in foreign newspapers to recruit needed workers. Apparently, we can add French immigrants to that list of wanted settlers.

In the case of the French who settled in Indiana, they may have been influenced by a specific publication circulated in the French regions of Franche-Comté—home of the original Besancon—and Lorraine. Commissioned in 1835 by a group of businessmen in Louisville, Kentucky, the circular was entitled, "Guide for French Emigrants to the States of Kentucky and Indiana," according to an article by historian Ralph Violette in the December 1996 edition of the Besancon Indiana Chronicles.  

Louisville, while in Kentucky rather than Indiana, was a city with a distinctive French ambience in the 1800s, making affinity with France a logical outreach target. Still, the issue of how those French immigrants would actually find their way to that central part of the United States of the mid-1800s was another question.

According to the Violette article, French immigrants could have arrived in Indiana by several possible routes. One suggestion was by way of Stark County, Ohio, which already boasted a known French settlement. Another possibility was directly crossing over the state line from Louisville, Kentucky. This, of course, meant arriving in Louisville most likely by the river route up from New Orleans on the Mississippi, then up the Ohio River.

While the New Orleans route points us to research passenger records specifically from that city, that may not have been the route our Blaising family members chose. Most immigrants to Indiana through New Orleans settled in the southern portions of the state, not in the more northern Allen County, where the Blaising family lived. And yet, the possible ports of entry for those immigrants headed first to Stark County, Ohio, would mean searching passenger records for multiple cities.

The Violette article did emphasize the role of Catholic priests in encouraging French immigration to the Fort Wayne area, but did not leave any details about just how those priests and their traveling companions—or those who followed in their footsteps afterwards—might have gotten there. While I can now envision so many more possibilities for how the Blaising family arrived in Allen County, I am still in as much of a loss as to explain the route as I was at the first—all the more reason to head next to naturalization records.

Where's John?

 

Digging into naturalization records, then looking further back to corresponding passenger records, can be a chore. That's the process I need to tackle next for the siblings of Theresa Blaising, third wife of John Kelly Stevens, and the only grandmother my father-in-law ever knew.

There is, however, one problem I faced before jumping into that task. When I listed the reported dates of immigration for Theresa and her siblings last week, I noted what I found on her brothers Henry, Lawrence, Phillip, Louis, and August, but where was John? He was clearly part of widow Mary Blaising's family in the 1870 census, but disappeared from enumerations after that point.

I could have assumed that, like many children during that time period, he died young, but there was one detail standing in the way of such an easy answer: his mother's obituary. There, in that June 13, 1907, entry in the Fort Wayne Evening Sentinel, included among Mary's seven surviving children was "John, of this city."

So he didn't die young—not, at least, before his fifty first birthday. Where was he during all those years since the 1870 census?

In a connect-the-dots moment, I found the answer. Using a different approach, I thought I'd go back to records I had found on John Kelly Stevens, Theresa Blaising's husband, to see if there were any mention of her relatives. It is unfortunate that John Kelly Stevens and Theresa Blaising never had any children in common, for I'd be curious to see who they might have named as godparents, which could have yielded a clue. But it turned out there was another document which provided some help: their marriage license.

Thankfully, preceding John and Theresa's June 14, 1887, wedding in Allen County, Indiana, their marriage license indicated that, upon "being duly sworn," another man stated that he was acquainted with both John K. Stevens and "Tresia" Blaising, the couple about to be married. That man was named John B. Blaising.

Even better, looking through the other marriage licenses in that register, the very next one listed the information for another couple married on that same day: none other than John B. Blaising and his bride, Mary Fisher. Reciprocally, John K. Stevens vouched for them.

So why, if John Blaising was there in Allen County all along, did I miss him in other records? I suspect confusion about the Blaising brothers may have been owing to a French naming tradition. While some research guides indicate that at that time, the French might give a child multiple given names, only one of those names would be used in daily life. Also, during that era in the mid-1800s when the Blaising children were born, names were typically drawn from the Roman Catholic Church, making each child the namesake of a Catholic saint. In some cases, those names took the form of compound names, such as Jean-Baptiste (John the Baptist).

I have often spotted examples of compound names as well as multiple given names, especially those beginning with Jean, or in English, John. This may have been the case for the Blaising family, for I've found indications that some of John's brothers actually were listed with an initial "J" in some American records. While that initial "J" would never have been found in the French tradition, I noted, for instance, John's brother Louis' death certificate and headstone listing him as "Louis J. Blaising," and brother Phillip Blaising showing in the 1930 census in Crestline, Ohio, as "John P. Blaising." Could each of these be revealing an original French version as Jean Louis or Jean Phillipe?

If this were the case, perhaps it is no wonder that, awash in a multitude of sons named Jean—or John in English—the American governmental record keepers became confused. And John B.—whatever that initial "B" might have stood for—became lost in the multitude of French given names.

But now, however, he's found, thanks to his inclusion in his brother-in-law's marriage license.

A Serendipitous Find

 

It might still be August—and well over ninety degrees each day around here last week while I was away, wandering through upstate New York—but rainy weather upon my return (not to mention pumpkin spice lattes on the autumn menu already at the coffee shop) put everyone in the mood to fast-forward to the next season. Perhaps that's why I found myself doing some fall cleaning yesterday.

From a folio still containing old notes, I pulled three slips of paper which could be called a serendipitous find. Each of those three slips was dated from June of 2005, and as receipts, each showed that I had paid $3.75 for the privilege of borrowing a microfilm of records from the Family History Library. The receipts clearly identified the records I was viewing: from Saint Patrick's Catholic Church in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

That particular parish happened to be the home church for my father-in-law's grandfather, John Kelly Stevens, whose third wife became the only grandmother my father-in-law ever knew. Now that I have the identifier for those three microfilms I used so many years ago, I can go back and review them in digitized format, this time in search of Theresa Blaising, rather than her husband.

Having the actual microfilm number so clearly printed on the receipt became a shortcut to finding the records on the current FamilySearch.org website. Of course, I could have looked them up in the catalog by location, then drilled down to the category—church records—and hope to find the right entry. Having found these old receipts, you can be sure I'll be saving the link to the online resources for ongoing research. This time, the perspective will be the other side of the family: finding another way to trace Theresa Blaising's own heritage. Perhaps the church records will tell us something more than what's been found on civil records.

That research, however, will have to be at a local Family History Center, for the digitized microfilms are not currently available online for viewing at home. That, however, is a small price to pay for the ongoing ability to glean information on that ever-expanding family history quest. 

What Makes You Wonder?

 

Wonder is a key necessity for those wanting to discover their family history. So much more than simply building a family tree, or "doing genealogy," exploring our ancestors' history calls for a sense of wonder.

In my case, what makes me wonder the most is how people in my family connected—not just through family relationships, but through time and place as well. Even though Theresa Blaising was not a blood relative of the Stevens family, I wondered just how she connected, how her path crossed with her future husband,  John Kelly Stevens. Even more so, I wondered how she traveled to Indiana at all, considering she was French-born and unlikely to have landed in a place like New Haven. Wonder presumes there is a story and seeks to uncover it.

There are other ways of connection I wonder about. Last week, my husband and I were traveling in upstate New York and had the chance to visit with the daughter of one of his Stevens cousins and her family. Since we had never traveled that way before, we were meeting the children for the first time—upon which opportunity my husband got the chance to explain to some eager young learners just what it meant to be a first cousin twice removed.

During that visit, I was struck with how similar some of the boys looked to the son of one of my husband's sisters, when he was that age. It immediately reminded me of what I've seen through DNA testing: how even a small amount of shared DNA could bring out such similar facial details or personality characteristics as to surprise us when we see them in distant relatives. Wonder propels us into areas of discovery we might not previously have expected to explore.

Those types of connections make me wonder. Even more so, they send me in pursuit of answers to those questions I'm wondering about. Wonder is a force propelling research further, providing tools to navigate the exploration.

Being there, wherever "there" is for your family's story, can awaken a form of wonder, too. When we flew in to Buffalo, the hotel where we spent our first night was actually in a nearby town which name I recognized from researching a collateral line in my own father's Polish immigrant family history. What brought that branch of the family to the opposite side of the state from where siblings had chosen to settle? Actually following those paths and being in those places, though decades or even centuries later, can awaken wonder about what that place held for our traveling ancestors. Wonder calls us to reach out and touch, to share the experience, to see an ancestor's life through their own eyes, if possible.

Each one of us, in our pursuit of our family's stories, may have a different "wonder" about the people we are researching. But whatever that "wonder" may be for you, I'm glad that the "wonder" is there. Wonder allows us to preserve that story of family through the generations, to pass it on to yet another generation removed—to give them a chance to wonder, as well.