Enticing Immigrants

 

What brought our immigrant ancestors to America? Many people who consider that question assume their families made the journey merely in hopes of finding a fresh start in a better place. While that may have been true, it wasn't a notion which simply occurred to people without any added prompting. There were others out there, making the reverse journey in hopes of attracting settlers to their specific prospects. Whether for employment, purchase of land, or other reasons, you can be sure there were people out there, promoting their project to anyone willing to take the risk to settle in America.

In trying to determine just what brought my father-in-law's Kelly family to Indiana, it hasn't been lost on me that there were at least two possible beacons blaring the way to Indiana for Irish immigrants. One was the availability of fertile agricultural land near newly-opened shipping routes. The other was the opportunity for gainful employment through either the canal projects in the earlier years of the nineteenth century, or the railroad projects of the latter part of that century.

We've already noticed the agricultural opportunities in western Indiana advocated by Connecticut businessman Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, but what I hadn't yet mentioned is Ellsworth's efforts to advertise 200-acre parcels of the land he was selling. How far and wide that promotional effort stretched, I can't say, but it provides only one of several such advertising efforts bringing people to the midwest.

While the call of agricultural opportunity might have seemed the most reasonable for mid-century Irish immigrants, who in their homeland were primarily experienced with farming rather than trades, this might not have been the most-heeded call for the Irish to settle in western Indiana. More likely—depending on the time frame—would have been the help wanted ads for laborers to build the canals or railroads crisscrossing the area.

The Wabash and Erie Canal, for instance, was the impetus for growth in many cities along its towpath, Lafayette being one of them. The canal reached Lafayette by 1843, but many Irish laborers were already working on the state's canal system much earlier. By 1837, there were already a thousand laborers working on Indiana's canals, most of them of Irish origin.

Later calls for large numbers of laborers were due to the demands of railroads, not only in Indiana, but across the nation. In Lafayette, one railroad, the Monon, operated mostly within the state of Indiana—but work on such projects began later in the 1850s.

Although I don't yet have the date of the Kelly family's immigration, it is likely that the call of the railroads would not be what drew the family to Indiana, based on some inferences that they had arrived earlier in that decade. Still, it would be useful to catalog any occupational references we can glean for each member of the Kelly family during their years in Indiana. Tomorrow, we'll see if that provides any insight or connect them with others from specific regions in Ireland.

Above: 1847 poster selling parcels of farmland along the Wabash River valley in western Indiana; courtesy Wikipedia; in the public domain.

  

Gleaning Inferences

 

Have you ever noticed, in researching your Irish ancestors, that the older they got, the faster they seemed to age? Judging by the records, in tracing my father-in-law's ancestors through each decade's enumerations, his Irish relatives so preferred being young that they lingered at those beneficial ages far longer than their non-Irish neighbors might have done—but once they approached a respectable old age, they really accelerated their aging process. How amazing to have aged only seven years in the time span between two enumerations—their working years kept them so young!—only to catch up with those ponderous senior ages all in a rush before finishing their race at a ripe old age.

Those were the ancestors whose biographical reports kept me on my toes. Those were the ones I couldn't trust to provide one simple report of their age for the hapless census taker. I had to trace ancestors like those through every decade's report, just to make sure I had a clear picture of their year of birth.

Such details became important when I couldn't find any passenger records to help me trace the family line back to Ireland. After all, what else can I use to confirm I have the right Mary Kelly? There has to be some other constant identifier I can use.

It has turned out to be quite the challenge to trace the moves of my father-in-law's great grandmother's Kelly family in Indiana, just by the few records they left in their wake upon arrival in their new homeland. Unlike other Irish immigrants in my father-in-law's line who proudly provided lasting details of the home they left behind—such as William Flanagan's impressive grave marker claiming his origin in "Parish Ballygran" in County Limerick—the Kelly family had no such tradition.

I'm not left with nothing, however, on this trail of the Kelly family. This is when I resort to inferences—those hints gleaned by reading between the lines on the few documents I can find. Because I can't simply use records for Catherine Kelly—remember, she was the sister who, married to John Stevens, died after the birth of her son William—I turn instead to whatever reports I can find on her siblings. But because of the unreliability of the self-reported ages these ancestors provided over the decades, even those documents need to be considered in the aggregate.

To start with, Catherine Kelly Stevens had at least five siblings: Matthew, Rose, Bridget, Thomas, and Ann. Each one of them, as Catherine had been, were born in Ireland. From that simple detail, we can glean a possible earliest point at which the Kelly family could have left Ireland—if, that is, we can determine just when the last Kelly child was born. And that is where the problem over self-reported ages is introduced into our research quandary.

The youngest, Ann, eventually married a son of another Irish immigrant couple, Joseph and Mary Doyle, who in 1860 were living in Shelby Township in Tippecanoe County. In the 1860 census, living the next county over in Pine Village, Ann reported her age as twenty one. So did Barnard Doyle, in his parents' household.

After their marriage in Tippecanoe County in 1872, the next census showed Ann's age as thirty nine, instead of the expected forty one. Of course, after that point, we are handicapped in our survey by the missing 1890 census, but by 1900, Ann was reporting her age as fifty four, when we might have expected to see a more sedate sixty one. By the time of the 1910 census, Ann was living with her widowed daughter in law, who likely had no idea what age to report, and thus left the entry blank.

With just those few ages we are able to glean from census records—assuming any of them are correct reports—Ann could have been born in Ireland as early as 1839 or as late as 1846. Thus, even if Ann's family decided to leave home with a newborn infant, they couldn't have arrived in America before 1839.

Taking the harvesting of available records even further, it might theoretically be possible to look to the 1900 census to glean reported dates of immigration for the Kelly siblings. Ann herself reported arrival on American shores in 1860, but we already have doubts about that. Her appearance in the 1860 census in Indiana when the enumeration was taken in June doesn't rule out that report, but makes me doubt it for other reasons, prime of which is her sister's death in Indiana after her third son in 1858.

Her siblings, however, don't cooperate with this effort, at least on the immigration count. Matthew, the oldest, died in 1895. Next oldest sibling Rose died even earlier than that, in 1888—though her obituary mentioned that she had been in Lafayette for "over thirty years." Next younger sister, Bridget, died even earlier than the other two, like her sister Catherine succumbing to complications of childbirth in 1869. And next-to-youngest Thomas Kelly, like his brother Matthew, died in 1895.

While that doesn't pinpoint a date of arrival for the Kelly family, inferences from four decades' census enumerations at least provide a limited span of years for their immigration. This opens up possibilities while restricting us from a more impossibly broad search. There are, however, a few other considerations concerning details we can glean on the Kelly family's reports. We'll keep exploring those, tomorrow. 

Letting DNA Direct the Connections

 

For the most part, my family history pursuits have been directed by documentation—a paper chase back through the generations, confirming familial connections via the evidence of birth records, marriage records, death certificates and wills.

Then came DNA and the ability to deduce relationships through the keys of genetic genealogy. That pedigree chart began expanding sideways, gaining collateral lines in each generation—all the better to confirm relationships with that burgeoning DNA match count at the five DNA companies where my husband and I tested.

It's no surprise, given the nearly seven years since we took our first DNA tests, that those trees have grown exponentially. Since today marks one of my biweekly counts, I can say that my husband's family tree has, in the past two weeks, gained 605 individuals, and now stands at 22,619 individuals. That mainly is owing to the fact that this month, I've been focusing on a research goal regarding my father-in-law's family.

As a corollary to that documentation process, every week I look through the new DNA matches in each of our accounts. On the Ancestry DNA account, in particular, I try to link new matches to the right tree, and flag that DNA match's profile page in my tree. In addition, now that Ancestry has added a section to allow subscribers to indicate whether a match is on the paternal or maternal side of the tree—and indicate how close the confirmed relationship is—I try to keep as many of those new matches correctly designated as possible.

This means finding the right place in all those collateral lines to add the DNA match. I might, for instance, have the grandparent of that DNA match already included in my tree, but not the specific matching individual, which means some updating is in order on the tree.

Once that is taken care of, the next step is to select the "shared matches" tab at the top of each match's screen. With that step, I can easily locate any other distant cousins who belong on the same branch, and link their DNA match to their profile page in my tree.

Step by step, letting the DNA matches guide my work of filling in the branches in the tree, I get a more complete picture of the family's many lines. The more individuals I'm able to connect in this spaghetti bowl of thousands of DNA matches, the easier it becomes to see how others relate, as well. Each separate task—researching the paper trail, and connecting the genetic genealogy results—blends with the others to accelerate the process. Not to mention, there is a certain sense of gratification to see how many matches now bear the insignia of a linked relationship in my tree.

 

Three Young Siblings

 

Not all the photographs we rescue from antique shops are hundred year old gems. Some abandoned family collections include more recent treasures.

Such was the case when a thoughtful fellow researcher alerted me to the cache of family photos at a local antique shop belonging to my former mother-in-law. When I went to the store to rescue what I could find of Marilyn Sowle Bean's collection, there were many pictures of family members whom I remembered including in the tree I built for her family.

There were, however, many others I didn't recognize. Some of them emerged from the "who is this?" pile and staked their claim in the "known family" pile as I sorted through each picture in tandem with building out the collateral lines in Marilyn's family tree. Considering Marilyn was born in 1928, most all of her relatives are now long gone. Matching names and faces would have been a challenge, had it not been for Marilyn's persistent habit of labeling everything.

Remembering that Marilyn, an only child of a woman who was oldest of nine children of Oliver and Ragna Brague, grew up in southern California without meeting many of her mother's siblings back in Wisconsin—let alone her cousins—I was surprised to see how many photos she had of her mother's nieces and nephews. While the miles may have prevented the families from getting together in person, I suspect a lot of letter writing took place over the years, accompanied with family photographs.

One such photo, likely sent first to Marilyn's mother and eventually passed to Marilyn, was of three young children born to her mother's youngest sibling. That baby brother, Daryll Brague, was born only a few months after Marilyn, herself, putting Marilyn in the unusual position of being older than her own uncle.

Just as Marilyn would have done, her mother was likely the person who affixed the careful label naming the three children, followed by the explanation of whose children they were—Daryll and his wife Harriet—and, most importantly, the date the picture was taken.

I wonder whether Marilyn ever got to meet her young Wisconsin cousins—or even her aunts and uncles who were nearly the same age as she was. The two branches of the family seemed so separated, by the point at which I knew them. I wonder, too, whether any of them still have a copy of this 1962 photograph, and pull it out of its spot in their family albums to compare facial details with the most recent arrivals among their great-grandchildren.

 

Deep and Wide

 

As we take a deeper dive into the history of the James Kelly family's chosen American home in western Indiana, we need to ferret out any clues about the arrival of these brick wall ancestors. Turns out that whether the Kelly family came to the Lafayette area intact as a family, or through a serial process of immigration, not only will gleaning inferences about the family constellation help us, but so will the history of the founding of this Indiana city.

One thing is certain: when the city of Lafayette was founded in 1825, the city fathers had in mind the usefulness of the nearby Wabash River, with good reason. Up through the mid 1700s, French traders' routes from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico took advantage of travel on the Wabash. While it is now no longer considered navigable to the extent of previous centuries, up through the mid 1800s, the Wabash was accessible by steamship for a considerable distance north of where it joins the Ohio River.

Lafayette, situated on the southeast bank of the Wabash River, became one of the river's shipping centers. Adding to that profitable advantage, by 1843, Lafayette became one of the stops on the Wabash and Erie Canal. The benefit of that situation to local farmers cannot be overlooked, as the route of the canal was credited with growing several of the cities along its towpath, including Lafayette. Farmers who had previously expected minimal returns for sale of their crops—unless they could be transported to larger markets—now had opened to them the opportunity to sell to a wider market. In one example of that time period, a bushel of wheat which, at best, could command a sale price of forty five cents now could be sold for a dollar each.

Water was not only the answer to commerce and especially agricultural trade, but it was the primary route for transportation of settlers. For us in modern times, it may be difficult to change our mindset about travel from that of the land routes of roads or railways to that of waterways, but as researchers it is important for us to think in terms of available navigable water routes.

The impact of river travel is an important consideration when we are exploring how our immigrant ancestors arrived at their seemingly isolated destinations. In looking to the FamilySearch wiki to find an article specifically speaking to immigration to the state of Indiana, I found it significant that the report indicated, for arrivals before 1850, that "most immigrants" reached Indiana by a water route. Not surprisingly, the result was that, of the three main regions of the state receiving in-bound settlers, land along the Wabash River figured prominently. 

With an influx of settlers plus the means to favorably augment trade, it followed naturally that someone would see the value in promoting sales of land for agriculture nearby. That became the third draw by 1838 when land speculator Henry Leavitt Ellsworth published a booklet designed to promote investment in the region's agricultural advantages. By 1845, Ellsworth put his money where his mouth was, and moved from his native Connecticut to oversee sales of the ninety three thousand acres he had purchased around Lafayette.

While all those benefits of the Lafayette area make promotion seem a logical move for the young city, we still need to ask ourselves what the motivation might have been that drew such immigrants as the Kelly family to this—rather than any other—location. Far beyond the generic promise of profitable farming, we need to examine just what the Kelly family—and other Irish immigrants like them—might have found attractive about a relatively new region such as the Wabash River area near Lafayette. We'll consider more details about what drew the Irish to Indiana when we return to this topic on Monday.

 

Above: The Wabash River is clearly featured in this 1868 "bird's eye" map of the City of Lafayette, distributed by the Chicago Lithographing Company from artwork by A. Ruger; courtesy United States Library of Congress via Wikipedia; in the public domain.

Collecting Questions

 

Some may see genealogy as an effort to collect facts about their forebears, and in some ways, perhaps it is. But if that act of collecting remains limited to names and dates of key events—birth, marriage, death—we're not only missing some of the most important details about an ancestor's life, we're missing out on the excitement, wonder, and plain ol' fun of getting to know our family's stories.

In the case of my father in law's great-grandmother, Catherine Kelly Stevens, it turns out that all I can collect is questions. And there are plenty of them.

Perhaps that is a good thing. Otherwise, I'd have been satisfied with the tale of her tragic, shortened life—born somewhere in Ireland before a devastating famine, uprooted from her homeland and enduring a difficult passage across an ocean to America, then settling with her family in western Indiana only to marry, bear three sons, and die young, before any governmental record-keeping could catch up with her.

Even though there are minimal records which seem to indicate that her parents were James and Mary Kelly and her siblings Matthew, Rose, Thomas, Ann, and Bridget, finding documentation on their existence in and around Lafayette, Indiana, was not enough. The more I've thought about this research dilemma—I'm hoping to push back the family line just one more generation to their specific location in Ireland—the more I realize there are several aberrations from the "normal" Irish immigrant story.

It is those "aberrations" which may hold the key to actually attaining my research goal.

For one thing, why did the Kelly family end up in Indiana? Reading most material written about the waves of Irish immigration to North America, it is obvious that the major destinations, leading up to the early 1850s, were either eastern Canadian ports or the American ports of New York and Boston. Indiana is not exactly the kind of spot one thinks of when imagining the quintessential Irish immigrant.

In addition, the one thing immigrants came to America for was to obtain a better future for themselves and their families. That translates into decent jobs—or at least a plot of land suitable for farming. What type of work did the Kelly family hope to attain by coming to Indiana? There had to be a connection between the motivation to come here and the abilities these immigrants brought with them. Of this, I currently know nothing.

The one thing I do know about the Kelly family's condition upon arrival was their religion: they were Catholic. By virtue of their religion, their immigration choices may have been directed far differently than had they been, say, of a Protestant persuasion.

Similar to that might be a clue about their native tongue. While we assume the Irish, being part of the kingdom of Great Britain, spoke English, in the 1850s (not to mention before that decade), there were many Irish who did not speak English—or spoke very little of it at all. If there is any way to glean indications of their mother tongue, that might help in providing clues about why the Kelly family chose to settle in Indiana, rather than an eastern, coastal city where many of their fellow countrymen would have lived.

One of my main questions, though, is this: How did they get there? What route brought the Kelly family to Lafayette? The city—back in 1850 only a town of six thousand people—was founded only twenty five years before that point. How would anyone from Ireland even have known to travel to such a small, insignificant destination?

As it turns out, delving into the history of such small locales—especially if they eventually claimed our ancestors as their residents—helps broaden our understanding of why our ancestors might have made the immigration choices they made. Clues embedded in a city's history—or transportation's history, or occupational or religious history—help us get into the heads of our ancestors. Those clues may not make it entirely clear what choices our ancestors made, or even why they made such choices, but as we'll see this week, those details will lead us at least closer to some research possibilities.

Any step closer to our research goals is well worth the effort. Not to mention, each detail we glean about the "big picture" of life-as-they-lived-it will illuminate our ancestors' stories, gifting us with a greater appreciation for the challenges they faced within the framework of the times in which they lived—not assumptions simply lifted from our own era. As we finish out this month's research goal of finding more about Catherine Kelly's origin in Ireland, we'll examine what can be discovered about the bigger picture of Irish immigration specifically to Indiana. 

Wait! Don't Quit Yet!

 

When you've checked every resource you can think of to find that elusive brick wall ancestor—and found nothing new—it is tempting to assume you will never find the answer you are seeking, and give up the chase. The paper trail can only reach so far, leading us step by step from our own immediate relative back through the generations, especially when we are seeking an immigrant ancestor. With a common surname. From a country that everyone left in droves, all at the same time. And then, the chain is broken.

That is the frustrating realization I've come to, in my quest to reach back just one more generation from my father-in-law's great-grandmother, Catherine Kelly Stevens. All evidence of her existence dropped off earlier than the birth of her eldest son James in 1854. And shortly after she gave birth to her third son William in 1858, once again records of her passing seemed to be swallowed up by time.

Embedded within her life story, though, are shreds of evidence we can sift through to piece together a narrative. It won't necessarily come to us by virtue of carefully preserved records, but we can glean details by inferences left by her extended family. We've already discovered that in the listing of her three sons in her siblings' household rather than her husband's home for the census subsequent to her passing.

Still, that is not enough to grant me my goal of finding her origin in Ireland. There likely won't be any further tangible resources to find such a detail. So, should I give up? Not necessarily.

When I realized that my research dilemma seems to generate more questions than answers, I began taking a closer look at those questions. They led me further and further away from the detail-oriented laser focus of finding answers specific to the minutiae of the who, the what, the when, and especially the where, and closer to the overarching scenario that led the Kelly family away from Ireland and to the unlikely landing place of Lafayette, Indiana.

The questions also reminded me that part of my search so far had been informed by guesses—educated guesses, to be sure, but suppositions on my part, rather than solid evidence. That realization prompted me to play a guessing game of "What If?"

What if...the Kelly family arrived in Indiana much earlier than I thought?

What if...Catherine met and married her husband, John Stevens, somewhere other than Lafayette?

What if...there were other Kelly siblings whose life story might reveal the clues I'm seeking?

Beyond those questions, I could see the need to delve deeper into the underlying and broader historical basis—the events and timeline which caught up not only the Kelly and Stevens families, but impacted a broad swath of humanity through then-current events. What were the historic impedances keeping them from choosing one immigration pathway, or redirecting them to paths less traveled? Were there others who faced these same difficulties? Could it be that the Kelly family didn't just pop up with the novel idea to travel to Lafayette instead of, say, Boston? Perhaps they traveled with others—or followed others—to this unusual destination, leaving me an as yet unseen trail of Friends, Associates, and Neighbors. 

There was clearly a lot yet to be learned about immigration in general—and Indiana's Irish specifically—which might further inform my search. Before I can choose the finality of giving up on this search for the Kelly family, there's some due diligence to attend to, first.