Passengers and Ports of Entry

 

Sometimes, to track down an elusive ancestor, we need to rethink the entire research puzzle. In the case of William Stevens' mother—the unfortunate Catherine Kelly we discussed yesterday—I am stuck with only a part of her information. Yet I can't seem to fill in the rest of the blanks on her immigrant story.

From very tenuous sources, I've been able to determine that Catherine's parents might have been James and Mary Kelly. At least for Mary Kelly, we've been able to spot her in her children's census entry in 1860—in the same household where the motherless William and his two older brothers also lived. It was only from an old transcription of a now-defunct cemetery in Lafayette where I might have gleaned the correct name for a Mary Kelly's husband: James.

What seems strange to me is that I cannot seem to locate either the Kelly family or Catherine's husband, John Stevens, in the 1850 census, in the area in Indiana where they later settled. Nor yet can I find them in any ship's passenger records between that census date and 1854, the year Catherine gave birth to her oldest son, James. The presumption, of course, is that Catherine and John Stevens were married after they both arrived in Indiana—but where are the marriage records? It would be nice to fix a date to this event.

Furthermore, just how did they arrive in Lafayette, Indiana? Many researchers, starting out, assume most immigrants arrived at New York harbor—or, given the affinity of the Irish for the city of Boston, consider that second option. The truth is that there were many ports up and down the Atlantic seaboard which welcomed in immigrants, depending on the time period.

The trouble is, in the case of either the Kelly family or John Stevens, that sought after arrival record might not be found in the passenger records for any of those Atlantic ports. From a copy of the first immigration form completed by John Stevens in Lafayette—his Declaration of Intention—he indicated that his port of arrival was actually New Orleans.

Could John have traveled with the Kelly family? Is it possible that he met them in passage from his native Ireland? He gave a date for his arrival, along with the identification of his port of arrival, and yet, I've never been able to locate a record of his arrival in New Orleans in any ship's records. Nor, following this line of reasoning, have I been able to find any possible mentions of a Kelly family.

There are several reasons why, on my last attempt to find these individuals, I may have fallen short of my goal. For one, seeking names as common as Kelly and Stevens present a challenge, especially when so many names were listed only with an initial instead of given name. More challenging than that, though, is the fact that last time I looked, there were several gaps in the records for that time period I'm interested in.

Still, records keep getting added to digitized collections, and it is always worth the effort to re-check those places which we've searched before, after a span of several years. It is likely time to explore what can be found about New Orleans passenger records now, and see if there have been any updates since I last passed this research way.

A Son who Never Knew his Mother

 

William Stevens was born on March 28, 1858, in the little town of Lafayette in western Indiana. He had no idea at that point, of course, what would become of his mother only five weeks later. Her death on May third of that same year meant her son would grow up never knowing his own mother.

Despite such a loss, William and his two older brothers did have a way to learn a bit more about their mother, Catherine Kelly Stevens. As was repeated so many times over throughout history during those previous centuries lacking so many medical advancements we now benefit from, the extended family stepped in to fill the void for child care of bereaved youngsters. In Catherine's case, her many siblings still at home with their mother lived close enough to make such a difference.

Only two years after Catherine's passing in 1858, the census record shows us William and his brothers James and John were living in the household of Matthew Kelly, along with his seventy year old mother Mary and his three siblings. The Kelly household was in Adams Township in nearby Warren County, not far over the county line from Tippecanoe County, where the boys' father, John Stevens, lived.

Whether the infant William had lived with his grandmother from the start of his life is difficult to determine. However, I did discover yet another Kelly sibling who did live in Lafayette: Matthew's sister Bridget.

Bridget Kelly had married Michael Creahan and, not many months after her sister Catherine gave birth to William, she welcomed her firstborn, a daughter, Ellen—or Ella, as she came to be called. Though there are no records to show us whether this might be so, perhaps Bridget nursed her sister's infant son along with her own daughter.

If nothing else, due to Bridget's own untimely death in 1869, there were indications that one of her children and William both found a second home elsewhere than their father's house. The 1880 census, back at the Matthew Kelly household, helps reconstruct William's story.

Even though he was not part of the direct line I was researching, following William through the census records, decade by decade, helped piece together the story of his deceased mother's roots—an ironic twist, considering William himself may have known next to nothing about his own mother.

While past attempts to trace the stories of these Kelly aunts and uncles did little more to divulge the secrets of this Kelly family's past, it is always worth the effort to review our brick wall ancestors periodically. Maybe this time, with July's research goal of finding more about Catherine Kelly's roots, we can press our way beyond that roadblock, if only a little bit more. 

 

Heat Wave = Genealogy Time

 

What is it about us avid researchers? When we entered the uncertain times of this (hopefully waning) pandemic, the accompanying side bar to that bad news included comments about how many people turned their attention to researching their family history. Perhaps misery loved company, and we drew inspiration from the hardships our ancestors suffered.

I'm not sure I can say the same this weekend, sitting in air conditioned luxury when temperatures soared to one hundred ten degrees outside my kitchen window. It's hardly like I put my kitchen to good use yesterday in a heat wave like this—unlike my ancestors, who had little choice in the matter. About the only use my kitchen served this weekend was to afford me a view of the outdoor thermometer which was perched in the shade, not the one outside the living room window, melting in the direct line of the setting sun.

So this was the weekend to hunker down and work on genealogy. Since both last month and this involved research on my husband's families, it will come as no surprise that it was that tree which showed the most advancement for this biweekly progress check. With an addition of 310 names, that tree now includes documentation on 22,014 individuals.

With all the focus on my husband's tree lately, not much happened to results for my own side of the family. Right now, that tree sits at 26,138—a respectable accomplishment, to be sure, but gaining only twenty six individuals in the past two weeks, since all my focus went elsewhere. Of course, my family tree will again share the limelight, when research goals swing back to my father's side of the family in the fourth quarter of this year.

One surprise in this biweekly sequence was the big change in the match count coming out of Family Tree DNA. Granted, FTDNA adjusted their algorithm, and is now using Build 37 of the human reference genome, but I was surprised to see a resultant extra 468 DNA matches in my account, plus 678 more for my husband's test at that company. Really? Can I believe my eyes? Or is this just the after-effect of a heat wave coupled with an earthquake? Guess we Californians really know how to rock and roll. 

Yearning for the Interactive

 

Last night, our family did something different. We waited until the sun dipped behind the tree line and the day's heat wave abated enough for us to gather, face to face outdoors, with some friends. That was something we hadn't done in such a long time, it felt almost awkward. There were no volume controls to adjust when the person at the far end of the circle mumbled into her mask, and no record buttons to press to capture that funny story for replay later. We just did something that, decades ago, used to come naturally to friends: we hung out.

We need to get back to doing that again, more often.

Perhaps it is the lingering Zoom fatigue which dimmed my enthusiasm for this past week's breaking news that RootsTech will once again be offered, free for all, virtually, come next March third through fifth. Or perhaps I'm jaded by the over-abundance of online learning opportunities. After all, I've still got over a dozen sessions from last year's RootsTech event yet to view in my queue—to say nothing of the multiple learning resources afforded us by other genealogy sites. As much as I love learning, I can't seem to find the motivation to log in and give a listen.

On the other hand, I would love to develop a way to conduct sessions online in which everyone could have some input—not a talking head being watched by a gallery of other attentive heads, but a collaborative experience with the give and take of many people sharing what they know and what they've found. A hands-on workshop. An interactive experience—as in learning as a two way street. The give and take of a live genealogy event, the kind we used to enjoy before our world got turned upside down, even if it is packaged up in a teleconferencing format.

We just really need people. To connect. Even if we're stuck in a digital domain. Surely, someone is creative enough to come up with an alternative.

What I Know About Catherine

 

It is surprising, despite thinking we know very little about a specific ancestor, how many details we can come up with, given a little diligence in searching. That turns out to be the case for our research goal for July: learning more about my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Catherine Kelly Stevens.

First, the obvious: Catherine married Irish immigrant John Stevens some time in the early 1850s, likely in or around Lafayette in Tippecanoe County, Indiana. For something as basic as that detail, though, I lack direct evidence; I had to discover it via one of those W. P. A. projects. Even then, I found the detail in a document for her son, not herself—besides, the transcription for her maiden name was "Riley" rather than Kelly.

In fact, most everything I know about Catherine came to me thanks to records pertaining to her three sons. James, the firstborn—at least of the three I was able to find—was born in 1854. That detail was owing only to a transcription of a family Bible entry—a Bible which, passed down through the generations, was sadly lost in a house fire. John Kelly Stevens, the middle son, became my father-in-law's direct line, providing with his life story far more details than just the date of his 1856 birth. It was third-born William, though, from whose information I could glean the few details necessary to connect Catherine to the previous generation.

The reason William became such a research key—something I wouldn't have learned without plodding methodically through every document I could find on the entire family unit—was owing to his young age when his mother died in 1858. Though we don't often see such scenarios played out in our own generation, back in his time, there were several infants who, if they unwittingly survived such a tragic loss as the death of their mother, grew up without the woman who gave them life.

In such a case, some of these infants were raised by surrogate mothers. Many times, the woman who stepped in to fill the void may have been a subsequent wife of the widower. In other cases, it might have been another family member.

In John Stevens' case, though he chose to find another wife to raise not only his six week old infant son but also the two older boys, the culmination of that search in 1860 likely meant that infant William bonded to another "mother." Fortunately, that surrogate mother was a member of the deceased Catherine's own family—not only providing love and security for the bereaved baby, but a research trail for us to follow. We'll meet the family who raised William next week, and re-examine details about the Kelly family to see whether any further clue can shed light on our brick wall Catherine.

Name Twins in the Family Tree

 

I don't expect you would be surprised—would you?—if I told you my father-in-law's Irish family sported not one but two ancestors by the name of Catherine Kelly. Both of them immigrated to Indiana. And that's not the end of their similarities.

We've discussed the family of the one Catherine Kelly in my Twelve Most Wanted ancestors for 2020. It was she who, having become second wife of John Kelly Stevens in a quiet 1883 marriage ceremony in Fort Wayne, became the second of his wives to lose her life after giving birth to his child. (Note: his third wife wisely chose only to raise his other children.)

For this month's goal of my Twelve Most Wanted for 2021, we'll be shifting to begin three months of tackling research challenges among my father-in-law's ancestors. First off will be the other Catherine Kelly. This woman was not John Kelly Stevens' second wife, but the mother who bestowed him his middle name, her maiden name. Strangely she, too, lost her life early, following the birth of her third son—with the result that not only did John Kelly Stevens lose two of his three wives to such a tragic outcome, but his mother as well.

I know very little about this elder Catherine. Included in what I do know is family lore that she came from Dublin, but I have found no substantiation for such a claim. Still, so many times I've gone back to revisit a brick wall ancestor's challenge, only to find with this latest review, a new resource supplants those question marks with answers.

With hopes for the same outcome for this Catherine Kelly, we'll begin tomorrow with a brief introduction to Catherine herself—brief, of course, simply because there has been so little to discover about her short life. We'll then take some time to review her family constellation and explore those few details about her siblings. From there, we'll launch out into the deep unknown of her roots somewhere in Ireland before 1850—a challenge in itself. Hopefully, by the end of the month, we'll emerge with a research victory of some sort, no matter how small it may be.

If nothing else, at least we can try.  

The Proliferation of Orphan Photos

 

The school tradition, in the past half century or so, of printing sheets of wallet-sized photos of elementary grade students will likely proliferate into an extreme case of unidentified—or orphan—photos in many of our inherited family picture collections.

Just think of it: little Janey comes home with an envelope stuffed with pages of miniatures for proud parents to snip and send far and wide. If grandma, grandpa, and all the doting aunts in the family carefully tuck away those miniature portraits for fifty years, who is next in line to inherit the multiplied echoes in each unidentified collection?

Fortunately, the sole remaining school photo in Marilyn Sowle Bean's forsaken collection did have a label—enough of a clue to help me discover just who claimed that earnest gaze and Mona Lisa half-smile. Above the recognizable handwriting of Marilyn herself was a child's signature, telling me instantly that whoever this was, she struggled with dyslexia.

"Carolyn Cublert" was the child's signature at the top of the photo's reverse, followed immediately by an adultlike correction, "Culbert."

Marilyn's due diligence with such labeling duties provides us the guidance to understand why the girl's photo was in her collection. "Aunt Verna's girl at about ten," Marilyn wrote, followed by the date, 1951. Verna was sister to Marilyn's mother, Olive Brague Sowle. Since Olive was the oldest of Oliver and Ragna Brague's nine children, she was seven years older than the couple's fifth child, Verna.

In what might have been seen, among high school sweethearts, as a couple made for each other led to the marriage of seventeen year old Verna to her beau from La Crosse, Wisconsin, named Vern. Vern and Verna were married in 1933—though not at home in La Crosse. Theirs was a marriage in Houston County, Minnesota—not only over the county line from La Crosse, but also across the state line.

Carolyn was the third child of Vern and Verna—and the last. By the time Carolyn was seven, her mother had married widower Arthur Hjelsand, who eventually, at least by some reports, adopted her three children as his own, adding yet another surname for Carolyn to struggle with.

I can't determine when, but at some point after that, Verna and Arthur moved their combined family to the Philadelphia area, where Carolyn's own 1963 marriage license application was published in the Philadelphia Inquirer under her adopted surname. For years after that, she and her husband resided in a New Jersey town, where they raised their only son, but by 1984, she had succumbed to cancer at the age of forty three.

Now knowing her story, I can see why that earnest gaze from the ten year old's photo strikes me as wistful—not only from her unfortunate end, but from the possibility that there may be no one to find who would treasure having that ten year old's photo once again. But for an unexpected disease, Carolyn would likely still be there in her community in New Jersey, perhaps passing her own photo collection on to her grandchildren, instead of being remembered only through a thumbnail sketch from her cousin's lost treasures rescued from a local antique store.

 

Above: Photo, along with its inscription on the reverse, of ten year old Carolyn Nancy Culbert, also known as Carolyn Hjelsand, as a student in La Crosse, Wisconsin, in 1951.