O’Learys and O’Looneys – Oh My!

After about seven months of working on my family tree, I decided it was time to see what I could find out about my grandmother’s side of the family. Nana was born Elizabeth Coleman, the fourth child of Daniel Coleman and Elizabeth (Lizzie) O’Leary. Daniel was a merchant sailor who eventually became a ship’s captain, and, according to family lore, his father John Coleman was a lighthouse keeper in Kinsale, Ireland.  Lizzie O’Leary was born in Ballincollig, Ireland and was about 10 years younger than Daniel. Again according to family lore, Lizzie’s brother was a schoolteacher who worked with Daniel’s sister Margaret and they were introduced to each other via their siblings. The story also goes that Daniel courted Lizzie for about 10 years before they were married. According to census records I found, Daniel was living in San Francisco by 1900 and Lizzie joined him there in 1904. I found a record of their marriage license in the San Francisco Call dated July 12, 1904 (which is also how I learned my great grandmother went by the name “Lizzie”.) I’m not certain where in San Francisco Lizzie and Daniel were married, but again going on family lore, think it was St. Phillip’s.

According to the stories told by Aunt Margaret (Nana's sister), Lizzie had two brothers and two sisters and she was in the middle. Her older sister Ellen married a Mr. Ford, younger sister Polly remained in Ireland. Her older brother (name unknown) was the schoolteacher who introduced her to Daniel and her younger brother Jeremiah fought in World War I and died shortly thereafter while living with Lizzie and Daniel when they were in New Jersey.

That was everything I knew when I started out looking in to the O’Leary side of the family tree. As I’ve mentioned earlier, I was recently contacted by one of my father’s Coleman cousins who is also looking into the family tree, and her questions about what I knew prompted me to do two things: (1) ask if she knew the names of Lizzie’s parents and (2) dig up some of my notes. I was delighted when she responded with the names of my great great grandparents – Jeremiah O’Leary and Mary O’Looney. (O’Looney?  Well, that certainly explains a few things about the family!) That will help a bunch in trying to dig up some records from Ireland.

Getting in to my notes, one I found was an email I’d sent to my mother several months ago asking about digging in to her wedding invitation list to see if there were any relatives on Dad’s side of the family that I should look in to. I called Mom to ask if I could come over and look for the list. Mom said she didn’t think she had a list of who she invited to her wedding, but I knew I had seen one several years ago when I was putting together a scrapbook for her and my father’s 40^th wedding anniversary.

I went over to my parents’ house and Mom was convinced that there was no such list, but she’d help me go through some of the boxes she had stored in the closet of my old bedroom. We pulled out the boxes that looked most likely to have what I was looking for – the repurposed shoe and gift boxes – rather than the nice photo boxes. The first couple of boxes didn’t have what I was looking for, but the third box I opened had a repurposed plastic bag that was filled with cards. I pulled one out and it was a congratulatory card for my parents’ wedding; other cards were responses to the wedding invitation. Okay, maybe what I remembered finding was this bag of cards and not a list of names. I started digging through the cards and asking Mom who people were for names I didn’t recognize. I soon found a card from a Mrs. Dennis O’Leary who lived in Burlingame. Bingo! When I spoke to another of my father’s cousins a few months ago, she mentioned visiting “some O’Leary cousins in Burlingame.” I set that card aside and kept digging through the bag. A few more cards came out that my mom identified as “someone your dad invited” and I set those aside too. Towards the bottom of the bag I pulled out several sheets of paper. A-ha! I’d found it, the invitation list I had remembered seeing a few years ago. The reason my mom didn’t remember it was because it wasn’t the list of everyone invited to their wedding, but the list that Nana had given her for Dad’s side of the family! Woo hoo! This was exactly the kind of thing I was looking for. There were actually two versions of the list – one that Nana had written out by hand (that also had hand written notes by my mother and someone else – either my father or his older brother from the handwriting) and one that was typed up. There were also a couple of other, shorter lists, but those names were mostly family friends.

I scanned over the list and noted the first page was mostly names I knew – Nana’s brother and sisters and their families and a couple of family friends. Page two had a couple of interesting names – Mr. & Mrs. A. Ford and Mr. & Mrs. J. Ford. These should be Ellen’s sons, Nana’s first cousins. I also had the address for Mrs. Catherine Dwyer who was not a relative from my mother’s side of the family, but a cousin of Nana’s. Three names of people I knew to be Nana’s cousins, complete with addresses for 1965. Woo hoo a place to start searching!

The handwritten list is 4 pages long with about fifty names written on it, about half of whom I recognize. The other half I’ll have to figure out with my parents and then start digging on the names that we can’t readily identify. I did get a start on the three names and addresses I had and think I have found about two dozen O’Leary relatives who are about my parents ages or younger. I’ve also done some preliminary searching on Jeremiah O’Leary and Mary O’Looney and may have some interesting information there too.  More on these items in another post!