Major Roadblocks, Minor Revisions

 

Let's admit it: at this point, we are stuck with the puzzle of what became of Stephen Malloy, my father-in-law's great-grandfather. Perhaps, as his 1849 letter to his wife Anna indicated, he did indeed sail from the English port of Liverpool, heading to a new life in Boston. As far as the family knew after that point, the man simply disappeared.

Anna, Stephen's wife, did not let that deter her. She, too, took passage to America, though I don't know how—let alone exactly when and where—she arrived. All I know is that she ended up not in Boston, but in Chicago.

Stephen Malloy's disappearance thus becomes a major roadblock to my research goals. Seeking out further details on how Anna and her daughter arrived in Chicago, however, amounts to minor revisions. And these discoveries are indeed possible, considering the fragments of information we can glean from other records.

For instance, perhaps Anna traveled alone; perhaps she didn't. We can't yet tell. We do know, however, that Anna's young daughter Catherine—her only child—lived with her at the point when we found documentation of them in the 1860 census. Then Anna, along with Catherine, lived in Chicago with Anna's brother, a single man by the name of William Flanagan.

It is there in Chicago that we've pieced together as much of the story of Stephen and Anna as we could find—everything from the scant information on death certificates of that era to family lore explaining what they had heard about the disappearing Stephen Malloy. And while Stephen's story still presents what seems like an impenetrable enigma, it is the smattering of details we can gather on the rest of the family which, in yet another review, may lead us to answers—or at least revisions of our understanding of the story.

Take Anna's brother William. The family's story was that William had been arrested for a minor crime and sentenced by the British authorities to "transportation" to Australia to serve time. It turns out there was a record for one such William Flanagan in 1851. The case was decided in County Cork, not in the location of our Flanagan residence in County Limerick—but keep in mind that Anna's and William's home church parish reached across the county line, close to the main road leading south to the city of Cork.

While William was eventually "discharged"—as I learned during our visit to Ireland several years ago—in reviewing this detail now, I see the date of that decision was May 9, 1855. This date may become helpful to us in pinpointing the family's move to America.

Of course, we must not rely on only one document to build our case here. Keep in mind, I'm not entirely sure this entry in the Irish National Archives database is our William Flanagan. Taking a look at other indicators of the family's date of immigration, though, we find approximate corroboration.

For one thing, Anna's own death certificate bore the report that she had been in the state of Illinois for thirty years from her 1885 death. Granted, that detail was gleaned from someone else's report—an unnamed person, at that—but seeing the added comment on the certificate, "Mother of Mrs. John Tully," one could presume that the reporting party was indeed her daughter, the former Catherine Malloy.

That one document pointed to an arrival date—at least in Illinois—in 1855, aligning with William Flanagan's release from his sentence. Let's look for one more indicator: daughter Catherine's own report of her arrival in the United States. Although the one place where I found it was a document which was horribly overwritten, that 1900 census record also asked the question in a second manner: how many years was she in America? Catherine answered forty-five years, once again pointing to an arrival in 1855.

Having reviewed the documents I already had noted in my records, I can now at least estimate a year for their arrival. Furthermore, rather than the assumption which was held previously by the family—that Anna and Catherine arrived first from Ireland and then, somehow, William joined them from Australia—we can assume the trip may have been made by all three on the same passage.

Additionally, there is a strong possibility that those three Flanagan descendants—William, Anna, and her daughter Catherine—were not the only Flanagans to travel to Chicago. Years ago, I explored another woman who, in some references, was mentioned as a Flanagan related to these others. I had followed her family tree as much as possible in the past, but the work was incomplete due to lack of some records. Revisiting this other Flanagan relative one more time, perhaps we can find some additional connections to explain more of the extended family's saga.

Above: One possible entry from the Ireland-Australia Transportation Database at the National Archives of Ireland's website indicates a William Flanagan who had been sentenced in County Cork in 1851, but ordered to be discharged in 1855.

Getting Political About Divisions

 

Anyone researching their Irish forebears eventually becomes accustomed to seeing such terms as townlands and civil parishes. When we delve into the mystery of just where Stephen Malloy's wife and daughter were staying during his abrupt departure for Boston, those division labels become an important part of the Irish research lexicon.

Basically, a townland was considered among the smallest of geographical divisions in Ireland. As an indication of their relative size, keep in mind that there were literally tens of thousands of townlands in Ireland when Stephen Malloy sent his letter to his wife Anna in 1849.

Finding the townland of an Irish ancestor becomes, for some, the equivalent of pursuing the genealogical holy grail. Yet, here we are handed that information passed down to us in the form of a letter clutched closely for the rest of her life by the wife of the man who supposedly sent it. If the letter to Anna Flanagan Malloy was indeed sent care of the Flanagans' landlord John Mason, his property holdings, as the envelope led us to believe, were noted to be contained mostly in the townland of Cappanihane.

From that tiny vantage point of the townland, we can examine the various geopolitical divisions in which the Flanagans' home was located. Cappanihane was contained within the electoral division known as Ballyagran—an important name for us to keep handy as we explore this possibility later this month.

Beyond that, the local civil parish would have been Corcomohide, contained within the barony of Connello Upper. All this was under the jurisdiction of County Limerick, despite the original townland—to say nothing of the Catholic parish to which they were personally affiliated—actually including land either at the county line, or (in the case of the Catholic parish) reaching across to the other side of the border with County Cork.

Confusing? I still find the designations hard to remember, which may be reason for so many researchers urging us to persist in seeking those townlands. And yet, with those terms, we can now begin to explore what records for the Flanagans and the Malloys are available to us from that time period, both at the governmental level and from their own church parish.  

Learning About the Location

 

Having a copy of the letter which Stephen Malloy sent to his wife Anna in Ireland before his abrupt departure for Boston helps us just a little. After all, the address on the envelope—still kept with the letter itself—pinpoints where, at least, Anna was living in February of 1849.

I find it helpful, when beginning a new research challenge—or even when revisiting a brick wall with the hopes of this time tearing it down—to examine details on the place where these specific ancestors were located. Delving into the description and history of the ancestor's location can sometimes shed clues useful for further study: additional tips and resources, or explanations of situations which may have impacted our ancestors' life decisions. In the case of Stephen Malloy and his abandoned wife and daughter, I was searching for anything which might open up a little crack in that brick wall.

That said, I can't be certain that the address on the letter to Anna Flanagan Malloy was meant to send Stephen's message to his own home back in Ireland. Anna may have been well aware of Stephen's circumstances; his absence, though likely temporary, may have been an extended one, and she could have moved back home to be with Flanagan kin during her husband's absence. It is hard, given only one letter at this point, to tell what the entire back story might have been.

Though we are all quite familiar with how people address letters in our own times and location, we need to remember that that was not a universal, timeless custom. I had to learn from Irish researchers how residents of Ireland were accustomed to addressing letters, back in the 1800s. I also needed to keep in mind that Stephen, as a Catholic living in Ireland during that era, likely did not know how to read or write, himself, but may have required the services of someone else (hopefully a friend) to compose his message.

The envelope (shown below) bore this address:

Anne Moley

Cappanahane

County [Cork?] Charleville

[to?] care of J— M— Ireland

Let's examine that information, line by line. On the very first line, we obtain the reminder that spelling was not an important factor during that time period, at least to the person writing the letter—and doubtlessly to Stephen Malloy, who probably knew very little about such details. It does, however, remind us to be just as flexible as we reverse the situation and attempt to find records for someone with that surname.

The second detail we need to realize is that this letter was being sent to someone located in a rural area far from any urban centers on an island which traditionally presented a uniformly rural setting. Thus, there was no need to designate a street name, let alone a house number. The address basically serves to direct the letter carrier from the point of the urban area through the next-sized town, and then on to the actual townland, where someone was sure to know who the addressee might have been.

Thus, we find Stephen's letter, sent from Liverpool in England, directed first to the seaport in County Cork—the city by the same name, most likely—then northward on the main road leading from the city of Cork on the way to Limerick. That midpoint was the town of Charleville, still within County Cork.

Just looking at the entry for Charleville at Wikipedia allows us to glean a brief sense of what the region had been experiencing, leading up to that time period. Keeping in mind that Anna was Catholic, the Wikipedia Charleville history observes that ever since the enactment of the Penal Laws, Catholics wishing to attend Mass had to do so secretly. Though that edict occurred well before the time of Anna's generation, over decades, it meant the abandoning of church facilities and the combining of Catholic parishes. Thus, the parish at Charleville became joined with parishes at nearby Bruree and Colmanswell.

These, as it turns out, were across the county line in County Limerick. This draws us even closer to the location to which Anna's letter was heading, the townland of Cappanihane in County Limerick.

Added in even smaller script underneath the address, as if an afterthought, was the direction, "care of," followed by an illegible name. Even scanning and enlarging the photocopy in hopes of making the script easier to decipher didn't help much. Perhaps the name was John Mason—judging from other examples of the handwriting, the initial letter seemed to be a "J" followed by an "o"—but the surname could just as easily have been something like "Melon."

However, knowing a bit more about the location now, it was easier to discover that the property in that townland was largely the responsibility of the Mason family, of which one John Mason was immediate lessor during the time of Griffith's Valuation. While it is not possible to know for sure—considering the condition of the envelope's copy and the unclear handwriting on that line—it is quite possible that Stephen Malloy addressed his last letter to his wife by sending it in care of the Flanagan family's landlord.

Now that we have a better idea of the vicinity in which Anna Flanagan Malloy had been living—at least temporarily—we can delve further into the geopolitical details tomorrow. After that, we will begin to explore the online resources available to us for our research on this family.  

Above: Enlarged detail from the envelope containing the 1849 letter, handwritten on the behalf of Stephen Malloy and addressed to his wife back in County Limerick, Ireland.

Places They Left Behind

 

When we puzzle over the origin of our ancestors, there is nothing quite so eye-opening as finally getting the opportunity to stand on the same spot where they last bid their home goodbye. In the case of Margaret Flannery and her husband Denis Tully, thanks to maps affixed to Griffith's Valuation, my family has been able to stand on the very plot of land where the Tullys once lived in County Tipperary. High above the River Shannon and the town of Ballina to the southwest, the Tullys lived in a townland called Tountinna.

Named after the "mountain" which, among the others in the Arra Mountains, rises sixteen hundred feet above sea level—that's fairly high for Ireland—the spot afforded enough of a view, in between rain showers, to make one shiver at the melancholy thought of having to leave such a place of beauty. Something bordering on desperation must have been behind the making of such a decision.

Every immigrant family has their own story, of course, and the Tully decision to vacate their poor hovel—no building stands in that space now—by necessity will be different than that of the next family we'll consider. And yet, from Ireland, immigrants of that era around the early 1850s carry a unified narrative alongside their personal saga.

While I find it difficult to imagine leaving Tountinna behind, when I consider another set of great-grandparents from my father-in-law's family history, my imagination goes into overdrive. All I know about Stephen Malloy I learned from one single-paged letter. That he—or at least his wife, Anna Flanagan—once lived at the border between County Cork and County Limerick was a detail I gleaned from the envelope carrying the letter Stephen wrote her from Liverpool. After he mailed the letter, he set sail for Boston. And disappeared.

In an oh-no-you-don't-either move, upon receiving her husband's letter, Anna apparently grabbed her one-year-old daughter Catherine and headed for America. At least, that's the way the family story goes. That Anna and her daughter arrived somewhere in the United States, we can vouch for; after all, my husband is a direct descendant of that line. But how they arrived, or when—or whether they even traveled together—is a detail beyond my reach, at this point.

Since I last considered this puzzle, so many additional digitized records have appeared online, introducing the possibility that this time, we may be able to trace the travels of Anna and Catherine. As for Stephen, we've already seen that his announced travel plans could be confirmed by passenger list of the very ship he detailed in his letter—but after that, what became of him?

The family's oral tradition was that upon arrival in Massachusetts, Stephen Malloy was shot and killed. But why? And where was any record of this crime? Hopefully, in this month's revisiting of the research quandary, we can open more doors to explain what actually happened.

In beginning our research quest for September, we'll begin first, tomorrow, by reviewing the letter itself, and the details we've already gathered. Sometimes, a second examination can bring out details missed in the first reading.

For Auld Lang Syne: "A Little Tea Party" Redux

It's such a rewarding feeling to reap the fruit of these blog-posting labors, especially when a descendant finds a family photo here on A Family Tapestry. As I mentioned yesterday, I want to take the time in the next few days to update you on some of the emails I received, subsequent to sharing pictures from other people's family history.

You may remember the little lost photo album I began writing about almost exactly a year ago. Of course, the tiny treasure has since found its way back home, hand-delivered by a distant cousin to the granddaughter of Harry and Alice Reid, the couple who had originally mailed it off from Cork, Ireland, as an extended Christmas greeting.

That little photo album continues to reach out and call family members who, as it turns out, are also interested in their family history.

One of the photos in this album which connected me with current-day relatives of its 1936 subjects was the one labeled "A Little Tea Party." If you remember, the summertime setting included a photograph of sixteen individuals, all named in the album by Alice Hawkes Reid. Some of those people identified in the picture were young children at the time: besides the two Reid children, Ruby and Iris, there was a young girl named Daireen Foott and a young boy labeled as "Alfy" Allen.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to exchange emails with Daireen, who still lives in Ireland and now takes an interest in her family history. In one letter, she mentioned,

It is really interesting what things crop up when we are able to make contact so easily, and with the common interest of genealogy research.... I spend large parts of my days trying to sort and transcribe letters and research notes left by my ancestors over several hundred years, and storing my efforts on computer and with hard copies.

It was because of her avid interest in her family history that I had originally been able to contact her—owing to a connection she had with another family researcher who lives in Canada, and thanks to some search engine magic by a reader here at A Family Tapestry for leading me to that connection.

Yet another connection was just recently made through another person listed in that Tea Party photograph. The newlywed husband of a granddaughter of Alfie Allen got in touch with me, having discovered the photograph. Wishing to spruce it up with the digital wizardry now available for graphic design, this man wanted to obtain a scan of the original photograph to see if it could be enlarged and transformed into a Christmas gift for his bride, who also keeps many photographs of family members over the generations. So close and yet so far away, this Cork contact hadn't realized that the original is now resident in a place in his own county. This is a project that will need some additional networking to fulfill, but it is nice to hear from the people who radiate out from the list in that Little Tea Party entry.

Perhaps because there were so many people mentioned in that photo album, I've enjoyed receiving other such contacts, not just from folks connected to the names listed in the Tea Party portrait, but regarding other names mentioned in the album's pages. It is encouraging to see people coupling their interest in their family's history with the powerful connecting capabilities of this awesome digital age. We've finally come to a point where we really can reach out and touch somebody, no matter where in the world that someone might be.

Meanwhile, Another Story Concludes

While I am floundering to figure out who my paternal ancestors were, and where they originated in Poland, I need to set aside the false start of that story to jump back in time to conclude another research story. The journey of that little photo album I found in an antique shop in northern California has finally reached its destination at the place where it originated in County Cork, Ireland.

This is a story long awaiting its conclusion. I found the album a couple years ago—at least I think; I didn't really mark down the date. The first post here on the story of the photo album came almost eighty years after the tiny package was mailed as a Christmas gift in 1936. By April of this year, I had discovered the identity of, and made contact with, a living granddaughter of Harry and Alice Hawkes Reid, the couple who sent the album. The Reids' granddaughter, Heather, helped me figure out who might have been the recipient, and with that hunch, I mailed the album to a relative, Rita, living in the States.

The final step in the plan to take this album full circle back to the originating family was for Rita's daughter Lollie to bring the album with her on her travels to Ireland this summer. At that point, Lollie would present the album to Heather, and the journey would be completed.

I received the news just a couple days ago, and was elated to hear. As planned, the two women—who are actually second cousins—met in Ireland. As a kind gesture making me feel a part of the process, they arranged to send me photos of the occasion, which I definitely appreciated.

Even though I've researched almost every step of the way from the sending of that album in 1936 to its discovery a few years ago in northern California, it still amazes me to realize that that one small package had made a trip with so many winding detours. More than that, it fascinated me to see all the stories that can be gleaned by studying one solitary object representing a sliver of the lifetime represented by just one family. Such a few pages offered up so many hints to a family's history!

Perhaps camping on that thought for this season will help encourage me, as I delve into the same process once again—only now, rather than names from Ireland, this time with a few names from Poland.

 

Thinking of August

Yes, I know August is just a few days away. It isn't the calendar that prompts my thoughts about August, though. It's the full circle of an eighty year long journey that is finally going to be completed in just a few days. And I can't wait until it happens.

If you recall, just after Christmas in 2016, I began a series in an attempt to figure out the origin of a mystery photograph album I found in an antique store near my home.

With work on the puzzle taking nearly four months to conclude—and with lots of help from many interested friends—the album which was sent as a Christmas present in 1936 finally gave up some of its secrets. The senders, it turns out, were one Harry and Alice Reid from County Cork in Ireland. The recipients may well have been the family of Harry's emigrant brother Richard, by then living in upstate New York.

By mid-March, I was talking to the granddaughter of Harry and Alice, who then put me in touch with the suspected recipient—well, actually, Richard's daughter, who now lives in Oklahoma. By the second week of May, that little photo album—no longer a mystery—began the first leg of its journey home to Ireland when I mailed it to Richard's daughter Rita, who wanted to see it once again.

And now begins the rest of the journey homeward. And this is why August is on my mind: in a matter of days, Rita's daughter will be traveling to visit family in Ireland. When she returns to County Cork, she will be bringing that little album, which she'll return to Harry and Alice Reid's granddaughter in the very place where the journey once started.

Of course, I'm thrilled to see the album come home again. But more than that, I'm pleased to see others catch that same enthusiasm for finding tokens of micro-history—those small treasures representing a family's history—and personally becoming part of the solution in guiding those objects back home to those who will appreciate their return.

Just the other day, someone found me courtesy of an online search, on account of that very issue: trying to reunite photographs with family. I'll share that story tomorrow, but as it turned out, those who are familiar with genealogical research techniques are already suited to the task at hand. And once the goal is accomplished and the objects reunited with the family of origin, the enthusiasm for sharing a part in that process is indeed contagious.

The beauty of stories such as this is that we all can play our part in reuniting these lost treasures with their families of origin. As one, then another success story makes its way out, to be shared with others, the effort seems to be amplified. More people realize ways they can help. The dynamics of crowdsourcing kick in, and word spreads—perhaps through blogs or social media, perhaps through groups or friends-of-friends. The more that help, the more those success stories multiply.

We are all so much more inter-connected than we realize, especially in this age of instant and global contact online. In an unofficial yet organically-grown way, our genealogical skills are leading us to a very different kind of Random Acts of Genealogical Kindness.

Above: Front cover of a photograph album sent as a Christmas gift from an Irish couple, Harry and Alice Reid, to an undisclosed recipient in 1936. The album is soon to make the final part of its journey home.   

A Package Postscript

It was nice to learn I made someone else's Mother's Day weekend a bit brighter.

Remember that parcel I sent off in the mail—the package to someone I've never met? The mystery photograph album I'd been wondering about for almost a full four months finally arrived at the first stop on its long journey home from California when it arrived in Oklahoma last Thursday afternoon.

Its recipient—Harry and Alice Reid's niece, Rita—was quite energized as she flipped through the pages that day, and noted the strong family resemblances among the faces which, to us, were merely the likenesses of strangers. Not so to Rita, who recognized many of the names listed on the album's notes. What a delight to see a family's personal treasures reconnected with someone who appreciates the heritage.

In celebration of this first step—mind you, the album still needs to continue on its journey to County Cork, Ireland—I went out and tried my hand at antiquing, once again. This is something out of the ordinary for me; I don't usually find myself drawn to antiques, nor to collecting photographs. But if I could find yet another photograph with enough information attached to sent the thing home, well, I'm certainly game to try again.

Apparently, there are not too many of such old photographs out there to be had. Photographs sans identification there are aplenty, of course, but not any with names attached. Thus, sadly, I returned home empty-handed after this encore foray into the collectibles world.

Or perhaps that points out something I should have realized all along: that stumbling upon this photo album—with just the right hint of identifications attached—was a rare occurrence, indeed.

Epilogue: Experiment in Context

Every story has a plot, characters and conflict resolution to carry it along. It also—at least if it is captivating enough to be mind-bending—carries a meta-message. This theme sometimes serves to tickle our altruistic—or at least sophisticated—side in tempting us to think the effort we are participating in (trading our precious limited time for a running stream of tens of thousands of words) really is, after all, for a worthy cause. We are educating ourselves. Or enlightening ourselves. Or vicariously experiencing someone else's agony which will somehow make us, afterwards, emerge a better person.

I had no idea, when I took on the adventure of exchanging a few bucks for an old discarded family photograph album, that when it finally left my hands, it would leave me with a message. But it did.

With the first steps I took on this adventure—trying to figure out who the album belonged to—I only saw it as an experiment in applied genealogy. Form hypothesis and test. Use research techniques; document results. Repeat.

By the end of the marathon, I had not only explored the genealogical pathways between Lodi, California, and County Cork, Ireland, but I had received an epiphany of sorts—not about the process of genealogical research, but about the meta level implied by that genealogical process.

Part of that message I already had intuited from years of research prior to this experiment: the roots we untangle in our genealogical research are really the very fine strands of the micro-histories of many, many reiterated lifespans. Genealogy is really history; it's just history of "insignificant" lives.

Plying my trade to this mystery photo album reinforced that message about genealogy. With this album, I held in my hands the keys to the history of a family I had never met.

With that one experiment—the challenge of finding the album's originator and returning it to the family—I re-awoke to the wonder of that meta-message. History is embedded in much of the life we see as we pass, unaware, through it. While we may call that discarded album a bit of ephemera—the scraps of paper from which we may, if we know how, reconstruct the story of someone's life—it is an object within which is embedded history.

History is all around us—micro-history, admittedly, but history, nonetheless. It is our task—much like the sculptor who saw the angel in the marble and carved until he set him free—to release that history from the paper chains of the ephemera in which it is bound and present it to the world, reassembled, to allow its potential message to have its impact on others.

Start of a Journey, End of a Story

Today—likely long after you read this post, depending on the juxtaposition of your time zone and mine—a package will be hand-delivered to the local branch of the United States Post Office on the first leg of its journey home. It's a small package, less than eight inches wide and five inches in length. Inside will be the carefully wrapped album, the pursuit of whose secrets have captivated me for the past four months.

I say the first part of its journey home, because it must make a stop in this country before venturing across the ocean to reach its ultimate destination, when it finishes a round trip begun over eighty years ago. The shortstop is located in the American state of Oklahoma, where someone remembers, as a child, having exchanged letters with the Irish originators of the package. Perhaps this package was once the Christmas gift sent from County Cork by her uncle and aunt, Harry and Alice Hawkes Reid, in 1936. Now, many years later, Rita would like to see the actual photograph album, herself, and wonders if it was, indeed, the very item she thinks it was.

The album will likely reach its destination in Oklahoma in a matter of days. Rita will likely share it with her immediate family—especially with her daughter, Lollie, who has been so kind to help make the arrangements for me to speak with Rita by phone, earlier this month.

And for the rest of the journey? The album will have made its rendezvous in plenty of time for that second part of the trip. Later this year, Lollie will be traveling to Europe, and will hand carry the album back to County Cork, where it will be reunited with the granddaughter of the couple who sent it out, so long ago.

It's indeed been an incredible journey. For me, it's been a chance to travel through history—to learn about the Penrose family and Waterford crystal, then to learn about the Hawkes family's Penrose namesake and their business entities which created variations on those original crystal inspirations, both in the British Isles and in America. It's been a story which spanned two World Wars, three countries, and several generations.

Most of all, it's been an adventure I never dreamed I'd be a part of, back at that crucial moment when I picked up that tiny photo album forsaken in a basement bin of an antique store, and wondered if those three names contained inside its covers—Iris, Ruby, and Penrose—would be sufficient to lead me to the identity of its owners, eighty years ago.

Finding a Way Up North

Sometimes, we can't possibly find documentation to justify our theories about family history details. In such cases, we sometimes must satisfy ourselves with noting our recollections and hoping for the best that those stories are made as accurate as possible.

How can you document the journey made by a parcel sent in the mail? In the case of the mystery photo album I found in a northern California antique shop, all I know is that I found the thing in Lodi, California. How it got there is a tale sans documentation.

We do, however, have a family member's memories. We've met Rita, a niece of the couple—Harry and Alice Reid—who sent this photo album from Cork, Ireland, as a Christmas greeting in 1936.

When I questioned Rita about her hypothesis concerning the route taken by this photo album to arrive in northern California, she was quite certain about a few things. For one, as a young girl living in the family home in Buffalo, New York, she had taken to exchanging letters with her aunt and uncle in Ireland. Because of the family's connection—Harry's brother Richard was Rita's father—Rita was also sure that hers would have been the family most likely to have received the holiday gift from Ireland.

However, the 1936 album—if it was sent to Richard Reid and family—would have been addressed to their home in Buffalo, New York. Granted, the family later moved from Buffalo to California, but they moved to southern California, not the northern portion of the state. That is a difference of hundreds of miles.

As she had mentioned to me, Rita herself left California after the war—that being the second World War. She is fairly certain the photo album would have remained with her mom at their home in San Bernardino, California.

But then, her mom eventually left California, herself, moving to Arizona. Because the by-then deceased Richard Reid had only one son, Rita feels it is likely that her mother had left the album with her father's namesake. And that is where we need to pick up the chase, even though this post-1940 time period leaves us without the usual genealogical documentation we are accustomed to relying upon in our ancestor searches.

While I can't be quite sure, it seems this younger bearer of the Reid surname may have been a military man. I was able to find a transcription of a World War II enlistment record for someone by the same name, with same year of birth as our Richard. A promising detail: the place of birth indicated on the enlistment record happens to align with the blip of time the Reid family had moved from New York to Michigan—could that mean this was our Richard Reid? Additional details included the fact that, at the time of his enlistment, this man lived in the same county in California as our Reid family.

Interestingly, a person who seems to be this same man—the brother Rita thinks may have received the album—later surfaced at a residence in a place called Contra Costa County.

When you learn the meaning of the county's designation—basically, in Spanish, the name means "opposite coast"—you realize its northern California location on the other side of the San Francisco Bay puts it quite reasonably within a range to reach its final stop in a long journey at that antique store in Lodi. This county is so close to that Lodi location that its most prominent landmark—a set of peaks known as Mount Diablo—is clearly visible from the western edges of the city of Lodi.

While I can't yet determine whether Richard, the son, was ever married or had children of his own, I do know he passed away in that northern California county. However, he died in 1985, making it doubtful that a subsequent estate sale would have been the impetus putting that photo album on sale in an antique store. It's my guess that there might have been a wife or other family member who then inherited his personal papers, and held on to all the memorabilia until that person eventually passed from the scene.

If that is indeed the route the Reid family's photo album took—from County Cork to Buffalo to Riverside and San Bernardino to Contra Costa County—there is one additional observation that occurred to me about the album's long journey. At the beginning of this series on the photo album, I mentioned I started this quest because I was inspired by a blogger who has made it her mission to rescue what she calls "orphan photographs."

That is only part of the story. What really happened was that, through our research efforts, I and another of her readers had helped her return a particular portrait to a descendant of that subject. In gratitude, that descendant had sent my blogging friend a gift to help support her purchase of even more photographs to reunite with family. She, in turn, decided to share that gift with her readers who had helped make that return possible—including me.

Thus, cash in hand, when I made my first foray into an antique shop in emulation of my mentor, I was spending money provided by a person who happened to live in Contra Costa County. The photographs I found to buy—the mystery album we've been discussing here—may have traveled all the way from Ireland to the very same county in California from which the funds later originated, provided by a total stranger, to make the purchase.
   

A Closer Kind of "Far Away"

When speaking of the photograph album I found discarded at a local antique shop, to say it came from far away may be true, but certainly needs some qualifying modifiers.

Since the shop where I found the album is in northern California, using the term "far away" certainly was an accurate reflection when I discovered the place of its origin was County Cork, Ireland. Even realizing that the family to whom it was originally mailed may have lived in Buffalo, New York, could permit usage of that same terminology; a cross-continental distance certainly merits the descriptor, "far away."

The next step in the photo album's journey, however, might—at least in some people's minds—bring it much closer to that northern California location, but I don't consider it so. To understand that, you need to know the distance between the next stop in the saga of the album and its final point of purchase was over four hundred miles.

Still, four hundred miles is much closer than the five thousand miles the album traveled from its origin to its most recent point of discovery.

One challenge, when trying to determine just how the thing landed up in my hands—after all, this is not the story of my family I'm telling you—is that at this point, we are entering an era not easily documented, from a genealogical point of view. When Richard Reid faced his untimely death, it was two years beyond the last available census record in the United States. While online resources do reveal some records later than that 1940 enumeration, we still enter a different research domain.

What may not be accessible via online documentation has been covered, thankfully, by information provided by one of Richard Reid's daughters. This, too, interjects another research challenge: by entering the domain of living persons, genealogists have traditionally made every endeavor to respect the privacy of those people. For those wondering, I do have Richard's daughter's permission to use her first name and the basic outline of her hypothesis as to how the album ended up in northern California. But by the same token, at this point, I will refrain from hyperlinking any assertions to corresponding documentation, as I would generally have done in other posts about genealogical research.

At some point after her father's passing in 1942, Rita and her family moved from their home in Buffalo. Sometime later, her mother ended up on the other side of the country, living in the area east of Los Angeles, around Riverside and San Bernardino. Eventually, Rita's siblings moved elsewhere, as they launched out as adults. Rita, herself, left California "after the war," and, having married a military man, may have moved more than just that once.

Still, if Rita's family was the recipient of the Christmas family album sent by Richard's brother Harry and his wife Alice, it is likely that the album—if they kept it at all—made the journey with Richard's widow Amy and her four children as they left Buffalo to move to southern California.

That, however, doesn't quite explain the rest of the story as to how the thing went the additional four hundred miles to reach the northern portion of the state. To tell the rest of that story will require an introduction to yet another member of the family.   

Crossing Borders

Let's take a look at the details of Richard Reid's life—the one member of the Henry Reid family most likely to have been the connection between the 1936 photo album sent from Ireland by Harry and Alice Reid and the antique store in northern California where I found it eighty years later.

We've already learned that Richard was the next-oldest brother to Harry Reid, arriving in 1887, three years before Harry's birth. We can confirm that relationship, handily, by the 1901 census in Ireland, showing the family still living in the same place—Grange in County Cork—where Richard had been born.

While I can't yet find any passenger records confirming his arrival in Canada, we were able to learn his arrival date, thanks to the 1921 Canadian census, in which Richard was now living with his wife—the former Amy Lucking, a British immigrant who likely met Richard somewhere in Ontario—and a baby daughter.

Though Richard and Amy were living in the northern part of the city of Toronto in 1921, that wasn't an arrangement which lasted for long. By 1922, a border crossing report from the United States immigration service showed Richard temporarily leaving his wife at their then-current residence in Windsor, Ontario, while he sought permanent residence for the family in Buffalo, New York.

Judging from an entry in the 1925 New York state census, Richard succeeded in his effort, for the family was by then living in a Buffalo apartment building at 17 Walden Avenue.

Finding the border crossing record provided us with another small observation about this Reid brother we're currently discussing: at the time of his immigration to the United States, he was five foot seven and one half inches in height, with brown hair, blue eyes and a "fair"—a later report from his World War Two draft registration card described it as "ruddy"—complexion.

That later document also revealed another detail about Richard: he was diabetic. So it was stated on the reverse of his draft registration, completed on April 27, 1942, in Buffalo, New York, where the family had remained—but for a brief stint in Detroit, Michigan—since their immigration to the United States around 1922.

It wasn't long after that, though, that Richard—whether on account of difficulties from his diabetes or from another cause—died, on the first of December in that very year. He was only fifty five at the time of his passing, leaving Amy with four children still in the home—three teenagers and a daughter in her early twenties.

That specific loss may be the very trigger catapulting the family from their adopted home in Buffalo to seek other living arrangements much closer to that northern California antique shop where I eventually found the Reid family's photograph album.   

Another Brother's Story

The key thing to remember when researching large families is that any one of those siblings can hold the key to unlock the brick wall mystery keeping us from our answer. In the case of the mystery photo album I found in northern California—the one originating far from there, in County Cork, Ireland—we've discarded the possibilities from one side of the target family, and moved on to the other side of the family. In other words, rather than following possibilities from album creator Alice Hawkes' side of the family, we are now looking at her husband's side of the family.

Alice's husband, Harry Reid, also came from a family with many children. In fact, before Harry's parents were married, his father's first wife had also had several children before her untimely death.

We could follow a careful routine of obtaining all the details on each of the Reid children in turn, by date of birth, and examine each for possibility of a nexus with a California-bound descendant. Since we've already obtained a hint from Harry and Alice's granddaughter Heather, though, it would be more to the point to hold up that hypothesis for examination. And we've begun that process, with the phone call to Heather's mother's cousin, Rita, this past weekend.

Rita, as we've discovered, is a daughter of Harry Reid's next-oldest brother Richard. According to Rita, her father was born in Ireland—in County Cork, we can presume—but moved to Canada. In fact, it was quite easy to confirm Rita's report, now that genealogical documentation is handily available. In a quick visit to irishgenealogy.ie, I was able to pull up this record from the birth returns of the district of Bandon, showing Richard to be son of Henry and Elizabeth Wolfe Reid, born on May 7, 1887 at Grange.

There may need to be some reading between the historical lines for just how Richard ended up moving to Canada. However, once again, it was easy to locate an explanation of that fact, thanks this time to Ancestry.com. Dated April 5 of 1915, record of Richard's signature on a declaration when he signed up to serve in the Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force may provide a key to how and why—or at least when—he moved from Ireland.

Apparently, this document represented the right Richard Reid—after all, this could be a name held by many, both in Ireland and in Canada—for it showed his application, indicating his place of birth in Grange Cottage on that very same May 7, 1887. He gave his next-of-kin to be Henry Reid, still living at that same address.

Indeed, Rita's father did serve in the first World War, and, according to Rita, he had been trapped in a trench at one point during his service. Fortunately, we have the vantage point of looking back through history to Richard's story, and can see that he survived his service and returned to Canada, where he can be found in the city of Toronto in the 1921 census.

That document includes the detail that Richard had immigrated to Canada in 1908. But that is not all we discover by locating that Canadian census record. By 1921, not only had Richard Reid survived the war, but he had returned to his new homeland and settled down with a wife. He was, by then, also the proud papa of a baby girl. That, however, begins a new chapter in his life, as well as a convenient moment to pause in our recounting of it—for with the next step, the family will find themselves moving once again.   

Finding a Plausible Explanation

It's been four months since I began that research journey to uncover the story behind a discarded photograph album found in a local antique store. Since then, we've learned that the couple who assembled the album as a Christmas gift, back in 1936, was Harry and Alice Reid from County Cork, Ireland. We've even become acquainted with their granddaughter, Heather, who has since graciously shared additional family photographs with us.

There was one more question I wanted to see answered, though: just how did a Christmas album from Ireland make its way to a small town in northern California? Was there a descendant here who moved five thousand miles from beautiful, green Ireland to make his home in the parched hills of northern California?

Heather had a suggestion. There was a family member, a brother of her grandfather Harry Reid, who had emigrated from their home in Ireland. Only problem: he moved to Canada. Granted, he since removed from his home in Ontario to live in Buffalo, New York. But that still is a long way from northern California.

Nevertheless, I had to check that out. I've been emailing with a descendant of that branch of the Reid family, thanks to the introduction kindly provided by Heather. Once again, I've been blessed with further details on the family, including more wonderful family photos. This past weekend, I was finally able to call and talk to this Reid family member and compare notes on just how that photo album could have completed the trip from a home in Buffalo to some place in California.

So, once again, I have the privilege of introducing another member of the Reid family—this time, a cousin of the young girls, Ruby and Iris, whom we met in the very first pages of the photo album. Her name is Rita, and she, like the album we're attempting to trace, lives a long way from the Ontario town where her parents once lived in Canada. And far from the address in Buffalo, New York, where she, herself, spent her childhood years.

Like many families in the twentieth century, Rita's was one which, over the decades, changed residences several times, including a cross-country move to California. Unfortunately, that move to California was to southern California. If you are not familiar with that state, let me assure you, it is a long drive just to traverse the territory between, say, Los Angeles and San Francisco—let alone travel the full distance from the state's southern to northern border.

To make matters seem even less credible, I was talking to Rita this weekend at her home in Oklahoma. Not California. Oklahoma.

Did that photo album make an unexpected detour in the process of this family's North American journey?

To examine Rita's theory of how the album ended up in California, we'll first need to take yet another detour to learn the story of Harry Reid's brother Richard.

One More Phone Call

With so much of the work behind me—of determining the family featured in the mystery photo album I found in northern California—it might seem like it is time to wrap up this story and move on to another. But no, not quite yet. There is one more item of business to attend to. Remember, that photo album still needs to find its way back to Ireland. And I want to figure out how the thing made its way to California.

There is one member of the Reid family who may know the answer. Now that I'm returning home from my most recent trip, I'll be set to make another phone call to hear the details on what may well be a plausible explanation. Today, I heard from that branch of the extended Reid family, asking to schedule a time to talk. Believe me, I can hardly wait.

This family will also likely be the very ones to deliver the album back home to County Cork. You see, the family is planning a trip to Ireland later this year, including a visit with none other than the very granddaughter of Harry and Alice Reid whom we've already deduced was the right couple.

My task, hopefully to be completed this weekend, is to arrange a phone conversation with this new family connection. Hopefully, that will include even more details that can be shared about this research journey, from personal remembrances this person has of the Reid family. Remember, the album was put together in 1936, and we are now over eighty years beyond that Christmas date. Those memories will reach far into the past of someone's lifetime, surely. I'll be interested to hear every detail that can be shared.

But first, a long flight home today as I head from Connecticut to California on a journey of my own.

Going Back a Long Way

Working on this Hawkes line from the mystery photo album I found in a local antique store reminds me that I have much research to do to verify the generations preceding the ones pictured in the album. The Hawkes family has such a long, interesting history, and yet, I've not been able to secure documentation for much of it beyond John Pim Penrose Hawkes' grandfather. Judging from the Hawkes family researchers I've corresponded with during this research, though, the family's pedigree can be traced back a long, long way.

One reason this comes to mind is due to the many people who have helped, along the way, with this search. Of course, it is easy to find several trees on Ancestry containing these Hawkes relatives, but it is correspondingly disappointing to see, as the owners' resources, such "verified" source documents as "Ancestry family trees." This, in my eyes, is no better than the blind leading the blind.

One reason I've wished to obtain documentation from a few generations prior to our target family members is, as I've mentioned, that I've been communicating with some other Hawkes descendants. Not from the immediate family of Alice Hawkes Reid's parents, of course, but with distant Hawkes cousins. So distant, in fact, that even they aren't sure just how they relate.

Since one reader, Intense Guy, had provided the link to a family tree naming one of the children mentioned in the post about the tea party at the Hawkes residence, I was led to an email address permitting me to correspond with one Hawkes descendant in Canada, and the very person, still in Ireland, who had been featured in that tea party group photograph.

It's been a treat to be able to correspond with those two women. Though neither was able to directly lead me to the descendants of Harry and Alice Reid, they certainly sent me kind responses to my questions, which I appreciated. It is certainly an odd inquiry to receive in one's inbox, agreed. To have such gracious responses was heartening.

So, yesterday was a day to send out thank you notes. Agreed, again, that such thank you notes are also unusual entities. But perhaps that will someday become the norm, as we delve further into genealogical connectivity in this age of universal contact, thanks to the Internet.

Another Trip, Another Phone Call

Has it been only a month since my trip back east to Florida—the very day in which I received the message confirming connection with the granddaughter of the Irish couple from my mystery photo album? It was in the airport that morning I had checked my messages one last time before boarding my flight. There, Heather had responded, confirming she had received my messages and wanted to talk.

Phone calls in busy airports, though, do not blend well with this type of conversation, so we waited until a mutually convenient—and quiet—time to make our first phone contact.

Once again, I've received an answer to a tentative message—in the affirmative, and with a request to talk by phone. If not from the actual recipient of that mystery photo album, from someone who could possibly be the oldest living relative of this family line. She likely has a lot of information to share. And I am keen to hear it.

But travel plans have once again gotten in the way. For a phone call of this type, I'd not only need a quiet place but a space to spread out with note paper and my online database—that "secret" family tree I constructed to help keep track of my guesses as to who this family was that sent the album, and just who its recipient might have been.

Meanwhile, though, we do have email. And we've been exchanging notes—on my part, pumping out an endless volley of questions about the Reid and Hawkes families, and from the other end, a gracious stream of answers plus the bonus of more photographs.

Once that call has been made, all that remains is to make arrangements to return the album to the family in County Cork whose grandparents had sent it westward, over eighty years ago. In the interim, though, I have one more small bit of research business to attend to: contact all the others researching these family lines who had helped me along the way to accomplishing this goal.

We're Stuck in Lodi, Too

Back before Saint Patrick's Day, when the unsolved mystery of that photo album I found pushed me to go hunting, one last time, for a living descendant in Ireland, I posed my quandary to a Facebook group of genealogical society members in County Cork.

When I mentioned I found the album five thousand miles from where it originated, one of the group members piped up, "So what's five thousand miles away?" When I informed this seasoned society member the answer to his question was a town called Lodi, California, he retorted with the inevitable: "Stuck in Lodi."

Yes, it's true: if anyone from that time frame remembers anything about the place, they remember the 1969 Creedence Clearwater Revival release by that same name.

Lodi, however, has a life of its own, separate and apart from that doubtful claim to fame. A city of about sixty five thousand, among other features, it sports a revitalized downtown which is finding its way amidst the exurbs of the more tony Bay area communities.

Right on the main street running through that downtown area sits the antique shop where I found the photograph album that turned out to belong to Harry and Alice Hawkes Reid of County Cork, Ireland. That's the shop where I returned, the other morning, to see if I could find an answer to my question of how the thing managed to get here from there.

The name of the place is Secondhand Rose. According to the shop's website, it has been in existence for twenty years, and has been established in the same location since 2000.

The difficulty—well, for me, at least—is that this is not just one shop. It is actually a collection of "shops," each the domain of a separate dealer. Right now, the store boasts forty five such dealers in their cooperative. And one of them—an unnamed one of them—is the person responsible for finding the album which eventually got sold to me. But I won't know anything more about the details unless this dealer decides to give me a call.

And so, I'm stuck, too—stuck in Lodi.

You know me: impatient. I want to know the answer now. But it's been two days since making my request, and I haven't heard a thing. I've even answered what turned out to be spam calls, all for the sake of not missing this caller from the antique dealers' secret society. Do you know how hard that is for me?! This is true dedication.

Meanwhile, it seems I may have an answer coming from a different direction. The person Heather had thought might know something about the album's journey to California has responded to my tentative plea via Facebook messenger. We are going to talk. Soon.

Photo courtesy Wren.

 

Back to Where We Started

Some things are never easy—but they are still worth the try.

It occurred to me, while puzzling over how a 1936 photograph album from Cork, Ireland, could make it all the way to California when there was no one in the family living here at the time, that perhaps I could find a different way to answer my question.

After all, though it took almost three months to figure out where the album came from—and who the family was, sending it—some things may not lend themselves best to genealogical solutions. Perhaps there was another way to discover how the album landed in the antique shop where I found it.

I had noticed there were two unobtrusive white stickers affixed to the back of the album. The purpose of one of them, of course, was to notify the potential buyer of the asking price. The other, also bearing numbers, was likely a code of some type—though handwritten, hopefully some sort of tracking or inventory code.

I don't know much about how to run an antique store. Presumably, the owner goes to special locations where such treasures may be bought, obtains items most likely to move quickly off the store's shelves, and adds them to the store's inventory—hopefully for the duration of a brief shelf life.

Since it was my daughter who introduced me to the antique shop in the first place, I ran my idea by her to see if it was reasonable: go back to the store and see if the code could lead me to where the item had been obtained by the shopkeeper.

We made a mid-morning coffee date and started out on our expedition, back to the antique store. Arriving in town at what seemed to be a quiet hour of business, we breezed in the door and found ourselves talking with the woman behind the counter in a matter of minutes. While she was willing to help, right away she brought up the down side: the store was actually a consignment shop, and the code on the back of my album actually told her which contact person was responsible for that object.

Only problem: for whatever confidentiality reasons there are among antique dealers, she could not reveal her source for this sale item. But she did offer to forward to that person any message I might want to send.

So there I was, yesterday morning—before my cup of coffee—pulling out a business card and scribbling a note on the back.

How do you explain a story like the one we've just been through in the past three months? It doesn't really fit on the back of a business card—nor on the paper the shopkeeper so kindly offered for the continuation of the tale. I thought about including a link to A Family Tapestry so this antique dealer could read it for herself—but then, I found out she was likely not online, herself.

All I could do was write my plea for assistance, and walk out, hoping for the best. And really, considering I probably bought the album at least two years ago, how could I expect anything at all?

Well, at least I could expect my cup of coffee. With a shorter visit than expected at that lovely little antique store, now we'd have even more time to enjoy it.