Daisy Chain, DNA Style

 

Take one DNA match—any match—and build out the collateral lines in your family tree to see where that match fits into the big picture. Then, once the relationship is pinpointed, look at the other matches you share in common with that DNA match. One by one, they fall into place in your family's picture, much like you'd weave a daisy chain, one flower at a time.

While I've nearly given up hope of completing my research quest for this month—finding the Irish origin of immigrants James and Mary Kelly of Lafayette, Indiana—I've taken to building out my father-in-law's Kelly line in hopes of finding a distant cousin who might have been the lucky one to get all the family "stuff." Hey, I'd even be happy to learn about a family legend of their origin. At least that would be a clue.

That process of adding descendants for those collateral Kelly lines is apparently paying off. As I attach records to each of James and Mary Kelly's children, then grandchildren and beyond, behind the scenes at Ancestry.com, the ThruLines tool is realizing how many of their other Kelly customers actually match up with this line. 

Last weekend when I looked—yet again for what seems like the kazillionth time—I noticed there was an additional name showing on ThruLines as a descendant of Ann Kelly, James and Mary's youngest child and sister of my father-in-law's great-grandmother Catharine Kelly Stevens. Wonderful! And I actually had that person already listed in my father-in-law's tree, someone I had added in that process of noting all the descendants of collateral Kelly lines. I just hadn't realized the person already took a DNA test.

Connecting that DNA match to the proper place in our tree, I then clicked on "Shared Matches" to see who else might be a relative in common with that Kelly line. No surprise: there were more. Thankfully. After all, searching through all one's DNA matches for a surname like Kelly can be daunting. Even looking for Ann Kelly's married surname, Doyle, doesn't make the process much easier.

Then comes the daisy chain weaving. Shared match by shared match, I find documentation to support adding that person to the correct place in that same tree, then attach the name in the tree to the report in the DNA match list. In that way, I easily connected several more names this weekend. Next, I'll let Ancestry's algorithms do their work behind the scenes to dredge up any more possibilities among their countless customers who share a Kelly surname in common with my father-in-law's family. I expect to find more results to follow up on in a few more days.

In the meantime, I've been reaching out to those DNA matches in the slight chance one of them just might be the lucky one who got all that fabled family "stuff." Who knows? Sure, maybe my efforts will pull up a null set. Yet if I don't give this a try, I'll never know. In the meantime, bit by bit, I'll weave all those Kelly daisies together into a family circle of relationships among what are, to our generation, essentially fourth cousins and beyond.

Who Got All the Family Stuff?

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Face

 

What if the research direction you've chosen to pursue doesn't yield any answers? If I can't find further detail on my father-in-law's brick wall Irish immigrant Kelly ancestors, perhaps changing direction might help. Surely those Kelly siblings from the 1850s now have multiple descendants all over this country.

Pivoting about face may seem counter-intuitive, until I realize that even if our family didn't receive all those coveted keepsakes, someone in the family surely did. And it's in search of that "someone" that I'll reverse direction and look for descendants of James and Mary Kelly.

I usually make this a practice, solely because I have multiple mystery DNA matches whom I can't fit into the family tree schemata. Tracing each collateral line's descendants helps open up the possibilities for how each DNA match relates. But in this Kelly case, while I thought I had done a thorough job of this line, apparently I had neglected a few branches.

So it's back to tracing all the descendants of the siblings of my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Catharine Kelly Stevens. Actually, what launched me into that search was the thought that perhaps some of Catharine's brothers could have filed for naturalization, once they settled in Lafayette, Indiana. Unfortunately, all of them died before any census records could provide a hint of when that process could have happened—if at all. The only one alive for that 1910 census immigration question was the baby of the family, Ann Kelly—by the time of that 1910 census, widow Ann Doyle. As a woman, her citizenship status at that point would have been based on her husband, so no date was entered in the census.

While there are other routes for determining application for naturalization in earlier years—another task to add to that ever-growing to-do research list—I realized there are also several blanks left in that descendancy review for Kelly collateral lines. So, instead of looking backward in time for the next few days, I'll be looking ahead from that arrival point in Indiana in the 1850s, to see if I can find anyone who just might have been the fortunate recipient of all the family mementos—hopefully someone who would be willing to share what they've discovered about their roots.  

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stevens? Stephens? Anybody?

 

In an era during which spelling mattered much less than it might today, a thirty one year old man left County Mayo in the northern reaches of Ireland, journeyed to Liverpool, England, where he obtained passage—likely on the cheapest ticket possible—to New Orleans, Louisiana. From there, he completed his journey up the Mississippi, then by its tributaries to Lafayette, on the Wabash in Indiana. According to his report recorded on his First Declaration, he arrived during the last month of 1852.

The name he gave was Stevens—Hugh Stevens—but it could just as likely have been spelled Stephens. In fact, looking at passenger records for New Orleans, I was just as likely to find entries for "H. Stephens" as for a man spelling his name as Stevens. Besides, who are we kidding here? Hugh Stevens signed his First Declaration with a mark, not a signature; he likely had no idea at all how to spell his own name.

So, taking that question one step further, I took one last peek at the records drawn up—and thankfully still in existence—back in his home location in County Mayo. For this, I first visited the website Ask About Ireland, where their search of Griffith's Valuation yielded me one solitary household in County Mayo listed under the surname Stevens: the family of Michael Stevens.

Ah, then, the question becomes: could this Michael have been the father of Hugh? Or even of his possible brother John? Looking back at John's family where he settled in Lafayette, Indiana, I can see he had three sons named James, John, and William. No Michael. Can I trust that Irish immigrant to follow the tradition of his forefathers and name his firstborn son after his own father? If so, that father wouldn't have been named Michael.

What can be learned about the parish in which that Michael Stevens was said to have lived? Griffith's Valuation showed Michael Stevens to have lived in the civil parish of Killasser. Taking that question to the search engines led me to a newsletter published for what appears to be the church parish by the same name. Still, it provides a usable description of the rural location for someone as far removed from the scene as I am, as does another entry I found on the near-defunct old RootsWeb site. Townlands.ie fills in some of the blanks about the many townlands within that civil parish, but as I'm at a loss as to where to turn next, the information is currently of no use to me.

Could that surname have turned out, rather, to be spelled Stephens? Trying this second option back at Ask About Ireland, I found thirty six entries in County Mayo, including two with the given name John. Prominent among the many given names listed were Patrick and Michael, but no James, the name of John Stevens' firstborn son. And not a one of those thirty six was named Hugh, making me wish all the more that Hugh had not disappeared—not, at least, until having fathered a firstborn son and followed the traditional Irish naming pattern to give me some help with that question.

Until I find more clues to help with this puzzle, I doubt I'll be able to move forward with this month's research question. With that, I'll fold the file up and put it back in its digital place. If any major discoveries of further records surface in Ireland—or a long-lost distant cousin and descendant of our missing Hugh Stevens decides to take a DNA test—I'll be happy to revisit this research question. But for now, it's time to move on. There are other research tasks to tackle.

Overused Cliches and Doing Things Over

 

If doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result has become a cliche—try this cataloguing of the famed "definition" attributed to a really brainy guy—then I guess I won't write any more to litter the literary landscape. That said, I still did try my hand—again—at looking for Hugh Stevens' arrival in New Orleans in December of 1852. 

And the result? This may come as a surprise, but it was the same outcome as the last time I tried to find him. Despite what he insisted to officials when he arrived in Lafayette, Indiana, Hugh Stevens' name wasn't on passenger lists in New Orleans during that supposed month of his arrival. Or that page (or two) is still missing from the records which have been saved for all these years.

I did find some near misses. Using the search mechanisms at FamilySearch.org, I filtered out all passengers born in places other than Ireland and Great Britain, but somehow managed to include all the spelling variations for the Stevens surname. The closest date of arrival I could find was for a Stephens in 1851.

Moving to Ancestry.com, their search process yielded twenty four possibilities arriving in New Orleans for the search term "H. Stevens," including spelling variations. Two of them even arrived in 1852—a promising sign that those dates weren't totally lost from the record—but they came much earlier in the year.

Despite those disappointing results, I did notice one detail that might turn out to be helpful: many of the ships arriving in New Orleans listed their point of departure as locations either in the Caribbean or in Central America. Only four of the arrivals listed came directly from Liverpool, Hugh Stevens' supposed originating point.

That said—and this will come as no surprise to you—it's time to stop doing the same thing over and over again in the hopes that this time, the result will be different. Though signs of Hugh Stevens' origin was my slated research goal for the month of July, we'll wrap up a few other futile searches on his behalf this week, and then move on to another more pressing investigation. 

Time for Comparisons

 

Now that I've got a copy of the actual First Declaration for Hugh Stevens, it's time to compare his answers to those of earlier arrival John Stevens. Since Irish immigrant John Stevens was my husband's second great-grandfather, I had made sure to get a copy of his record when we visited his newfound American home in Lafayette, Indiana, years ago. Now I'm wondering whether comparing the two Stevens men's answers will reveal anything.

Since I've written about John Stevens before, I simply turned back to that blog post to revisit the wording on John Stevens' First Declaration. For John, let's put the data in a simple outline:

• The document was dated August 4, 1851.
• He gave his age as twenty seven.
• He sailed from Liverpool in 1850.
• He arrived in New Orleans during December of 1850

From that information, we can extrapolate that John Stevens was born about 1824.

What about Hugh? Here's what the recently-received document revealed about that second Stevens immigrant to Tippecanoe County, Indiana:

• The document was dated October 10, 1854.
• He gave his age as thirty three.
• He sailed from Liverpool in 1852.
• He arrived in "Orleans" during December of 1852.

From that information about Hugh Stevens, we can assume he was born about 1821.

From birth dates that close together, one could presume that Hugh Stevens and John Stevens were brothers. After all, they both were born in County Mayo, Ireland, and both immigrated to the same rather small city in Indiana. What are the chances? But we need to be aware that they could just as easily be first cousins. Or more distant relatives. Or not related at all.

With this small set of data, there isn't much we can say at all—but we can consider it an indication of a F.A.N. Club at the very least. The similarity of travel routes, down to the same month of arrival, is a tempting indicator. That they both chose a city of barely over six thousand people to settle in can seem a compelling detail. That they both chose a destination other than the main immigration ports on the east coast—far easier for travel—is also a tempting confirmation.

Now that we have the actual dates for Hugh Stevens' arrival in New Orleans, we can take a second look at passenger records to see whether any "H. Stevens" passengers did show up in Louisiana in December of 1852. Better yet, let's take another look at a wide set of records to see whether there is any sign of a Stevens family containing both given names.

First, the Transcription

 

Years ago, I had discovered the Tippecanoe County Historical Association included a genealogical records section called the Alameda McCollough Research Library. You can be sure that every time my travels called for me to drive from Chicago through Indiana, I found a way to make a stop at that repository. Since I have no travel plans slated for that direction any time in the foreseeable future, I was ecstatic when I discovered, earlier this month, that they now can provide researchers with near-instantaneous gratification—so I ordered a copy of the First Declaration for my possible Stevens relative, Hugh.

Now that I've gotten the digitized document in hand—so to speak—let's take a look at the transcription. That, after all, will be my first step before determining what else we can discover about this Irish immigrant. Here is what the form stated.

To the Judge of the Tippecanoe Circuit court, in the State of Indiana:

Hugh Stevens, Being an Alien, and a free white person, makes the following report of himself; upon his solemn oath declares that he is aged 33 years; that he was born in the County of Mayo in Ireland, that he emigrated from Liverpool in the year one thousand eight hundred and fifty two; that he arrived in the United States at the City of Orleans in the State of Louisiana in the month of December eighteen hundred and fifty two; that he owe allegiance to Victoria, Queen of Great Britain + Ireland and that it is bona fide his intention to become a citizen of the United States of America, and to renounce forever allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty whatever; and particularly to Victoria, Queen as aforesaid, of whom he is subject.

The document was completed on the tenth day of October in 1854. Hugh Stevens signed on that day with a rather weak cross, noted as "his mark."

And from then on, he simply disappeared—but we know that that can't be the rest of the story. Though the document only gives us a few clues, let's see whether they can give us any guidance.

Thinking Creatively While Waiting

 

There is nothing that frustrates me more than having to wait. In this week's case, I'm waiting to learn just how to proceed with ordering a second copy of the First Declaration signed by Hugh Stevens, some time after his arrival in Lafayette, Indiana, in the early 1850s. Yes, yes, I know: if I had gotten the record copied and carefully preserved the first time, I wouldn't have to wait a second time. Such is the story, sometimes, of genealogical guinea pigs like me—always a test case, and sometimes a messy one.

While waiting, I thought I'd try to be productive by considering how else I could solve my research problem. You see, I'm stuck with my husband's second great-grandfather, supposed Irish immigrant John Stevens, whose own First Declaration tells me he emigrated from County Mayo in Ireland, via the port of New Orleans, up the Mississippi and its tributaries to arrive in Lafayette sometime before the close of 1850. The problem is: I have no idea who his parents might have been, back in Ireland.

Come to find out there was a second Stevens man—you guessed it, Hugh Stevens—who took the same route at about the same time, only a year or two later, and I'm wondering whether John and Hugh were related. Perhaps brothers? This could lead to an end run around this Stevens brick wall, I am thinking.

While I am waiting for Hugh Stevens' own naturalization record, I'm wracking my brain for ways to find any sign of Hugh in other records. Up to this point, I've had no luck. I checked for city directories online at Ancestry, but discovered there are pitifully few records of any kind specific to Tippecanoe County, location of the city of Lafayette. Besides, the dates are long after Hugh's arrival, with the collection beginning in 1885.

Looking at quick sketches of local history, though, I find an encouraging sign: Wikipedia's entry for Lafayette indicates that "in its earliest days" the place was considered a "shipping center" on the Wabash River—a detail which has long since changed, due to soil erosion impacting the river's navigability that far north in its course. At one point, the nearby Wabash and Erie Canal work undoubtedly was a draw for immigrant labor, particularly the Irish, who also flocked to other such projects—but this, too, would be before the time of Hugh's arrival.

One final thought is to revisit the passenger records for ships arriving in New Orleans. I've checked those records in the past with little success, both for the Stevens men, and for John's Kelly in-laws. It seems our ancestors always arrived in the very gaps currently existing in the preserved records, an unfortunate scenario for researchers like me. But perhaps things have changed, or more records have been discovered. It is, while I'm still waiting, a reminder to go take a second look. Maybe this time....

The Gift of Local Resources

 

When looking for leads on ancestors, it is indeed encouraging to discover that the place they once called home now has a dedicated cadre of volunteers intent on preserving their stories. That is the gift of local people who value preserving their history: they create resources which help others do the same.

While I've heard reports from disappointed researchers, recently returned from research journeys in places without much resources, in the case of this month's project—to find Hugh Stevens in 1850s Lafayette, Indiana—I may be in luck. Tippecanoe County apparently has an ample supply of residents dedicated to preserving records dating back to the county's formation in 1826.

I've benefitted from the ongoing work of these volunteers now for decades, having personally visited the Alameda McCollough Research Library of the Tippecanoe County Historical Association, and followed up with material placed online by the Tippecanoe County Area Genealogical Society. Years ago, one of the Society's longstanding board members personally assisted me in locating the grave sites of my husband's Kelley ancestors at the historic Greenbush Cemetery, using original burial records to mark that location for our upcoming visit that year.

As it turns out, there are ongoing projects the county's volunteers are still pursuing, judging by what I've read while on the hunt to find answers to my current research question. According to an article in Lafayette Magazine, a September 1, 2014, publication of the Lafayette Journal & Courier, there's been plenty of work to assemble a thorough listing of all cemeteries in the county, versions of which can be viewed on the Society's site at Rootsweb.com, as well as the older Indiana GenWeb site.

What I am keen to see, though, is the joint project of the Society and Historical Association, called "Finding the Forgotten." This grant-funded project, launched in 2016, sought to comb through county records to glean information on pauper burials dating from the county's creation in 1826 through 1860. Though the TIPCOA website does indicate an alphabetical listing was created, only those for surnames beginning with the letter "A" are accessible. 

With our likely relative Hugh Stevens' arrival in Lafayette in the early 1850s followed so quickly by his disappearance, a likely scenario might have been death from disease contracted during his voyage from Ireland. If that were the case for such a recently-arrived immigrant, it could be likely that he was buried in a pauper's grave. I have yet to find any other records of what became of him, making a listing such as the "Finding the Forgotten" project a promising resource to check.  

More or Less, Still Moving Ahead

 

It is really hard to predict, over a biweekly period, just how much progress I've made on my family trees. Sometimes, it seems like I am flying through the records, easily finding source after source to build that line. Other times, it takes a massive struggle just to complete one relative's timeline.

I had thought this past biweekly period would have been one of the times when scores of ancestors would have been added to my in-laws' tree, but that was not the case. I did manage to support adding 220 more names to their tree, which now contains documentation on 35,810 individuals. Yes, that means I'm still moving ahead, more or less—but it was far less than I had expected. I've certainly seen busier weeks.

Part of the slow-down is due to this month's research proposal: to locate a Stevens immigrant from County Mayo, Ireland, who seemed to vanish into thin air, the minute he set foot on land in his newly adopted home in Indiana. This month will likely add up to a lot of searching with very little positive traction to move me forward.

There is, however, other activity to propel those numbers onward. Though not part of my Twelve Most Wanted goal for this month, other questions pop up. Some of those are inquiries from DNA matches—always gratefully received—which lead me to double check my work, realizing as I revisit the data that there are portions that I left undone, the last time I had wandered in that research direction.

Other occurrences tap me on the shoulder and redirect my research, even to trees I haven't selected for this month's research goal. Newly discovered obituaries, for instance, demand follow-through with addition of information to the appropriate tree, an incident in the past two weeks which led me to add another thirty six names to my own parents' tree. Though I won't be returning to work on that tree until the fall—at least, according to my research plans—that unexpected detour last week pushed that tree up to now number 38,405 relatives.

As I check ThruLines results at Ancestry for each of my monthly research goals, that process also leads to new discoveries. That became the impetus for most of my progress on my in-laws' tree in the past two weeks, as I moved from June's research goal on the Metzgers—with lots of ThruLines discoveries uncovered—to the scant few DNA matches I've found this past week as I shifted to the Stevens ancestry goal.

There are just some research goals which seem to produce an abundance of results, while others take patience and endurance while yielding precious little, other than general knowledge to enrich my understanding in future efforts. The patience, however, is certainly worth the effort, and I look forward to having a better understanding of the times when Hugh Stevens arrived in Lafayette, Indiana, in the early 1850s. What a different world that must have been than the assumptions I'd otherwise be tempted to overlay upon his immigrant story.

Naturalization: First, the First Papers

 

In searching for more information on our immigrant Stevens ancestor in Lafayette, Indiana, let's start with the first step: the Declaration of Intention, or what is often called "first papers."

The idea of the Declaration was to formally have the immigrant state his or her intention to renounce any allegiance to the country of origin, and instead transfer that affiliation to the United States government. In order to assure that transference of allegiance, signing that Declaration became the doorway through which the immigrant stepped into a waiting room of sorts: the waiting period required before proceeding to the next step in the naturalization process.

In the case of Hugh Stevens, the possible brother of my husband's second great-grandfather John Stevens, his arrival in Indiana by 1852 meant a waiting period of two years.

What I've already observed by looking at various Declarations over the years for ancestors in various states is that the format used for that document was not a standard layout. Different time periods and different jurisdictions required different sets of information. In the case of Hugh Stevens' arrival just after John Stevens own immigration (and long before major changes to the process in 1906) tells me that, since they both filed in the same court, Hugh's record will likely contain much the same categories of information.

That an immigrant could file a Declaration of Intention in one court, then proceed to file the Petition for Naturalization in a different court—or never file one at all—is highly likely, compounding the problems with researching such material. In this case, I've already noted that Hugh filed his first papers at the Tippecanoe County courthouse, but I already know I have no guarantee of finding the rest of the paperwork at the same location.

I've already taken the first step to obtain a copy of Hugh Stevens' Declaration of Intention. While we're waiting to examine the details, we'll first explore what is now available online for Tippecanoe County. Next week, we'll revisit two websites which have provided ongoing assistance to me in my pursuit of Stevens family history.