First Field Trip

As useful as the internet has become in the 21^st century, it can’t do everything. I long knew that this trip through the past would require making trips to libraries and cemeteries and who knows what else. So with a little vacation time, I planned my first outing to find some information in person.

The Murrays aren’t turning up in the 1880 census for San Francisco. I’ve found what I am fairly confident is their address for that year: 6 Harry (now Harris) Place. It’s a one-block street off Laguna between Filbert and Greenwich, so it would be easy to miss in an enumeration of the census. I don’t think that’s what happened. After going half blind scrolling through pages and pages of images for the 1880 census trying to find Harry Place, I was able to find a site that helps find census enumeration districts by street name. That sped up my search tremendously – Harry Place was in the 196^th enumeration district. I was pretty sure I had already looked at that set of images on line, but I went back and took a closer look. I discovered that the on line images for the 196^th enumeration district start on page five with the 40^th family visited! Well no wonder I wasn’t finding them – there are four pages missing from the digitized images. The new question is were those pages not digitized for some reason or are they missing? The only way to find that out was to go to the National Archives in San Bruno and take a look at the microfilm and see for myself. Being a federal agency meant it was only open during weekdays, which meant I needed a vacation day to go check out the microfilm.

On my last day of vacation, I drove up to San Bruno and took a look at the microfilm. It took me longer to find the right roll and get it on the reader than it did to scroll through the film to find out if the pages were there. Alas, pages one through four were missing from the microfilm also. Damn. I asked the librarian at the help desk if she knew what might have happened to those four pages, but her answer was about as good as my best guess – they may have been appended to a different part of the census. Since I’ve scrolled through pretty much the entire 12^th Ward of San Francisco on line, plus about half of the other images (which is considerable as there were 229 enumeration districts for San Francisco in 1880 and each averages about 20 pages) and the names aren’t turning up in a search, I’m doubtful the pages were put on to microfilm. Does that mean the pages no longer exist or simply that they were skipped when being put on microfilm? I’m hoping the latter and have sent a request to the National Archives in DC to find out.

The second part of my field trip meant heading up to Colma and wandering around Holy Cross Cemetery. From the death notices I’ve found, I knew Bridget McDonough Murray, Ella (Nellie) Murray Nelson, Marshall and Mary Murray were all buried there, but of course I didn’t know exactly where. I had hoped that Mom could come out with me and help look for the Murrays while also showing me where some of the rest of the families were (both her side and Dad’s,) but she wasn’t able to join me. Mom did have some notes on where the graves were, so I took that information with me and drove on up to Colma.

The first stop, naturally, was the cemetery office to inquire about the gravesites. Bridget and Nellie were buried in the same gravesite, but there was no mention of John. I asked the fellow at the desk if anyone else was buried in that gravesite and he said there was someone buried in 1912, but there was no first name to help identify who it was. Could John have been relocated from some place else? I believe he died in November 1890, so it is possible as burials within San Francisco city limits weren’t stopped until 1900. I asked if there was a John Murray buried around November 1890, and the closest he could give me was a John Murray who was buried in January 1890, so that didn’t help. I did manage to impress the fellow at the desk with the dates and information I had already though! He looked up Marshall Murray for me and jotted down the information for that gravesite on the map with Bridget and Nellie and off I went to see who I could find.

I drove first to Section M where Bridget and Nellie were buried. It took a while and quite a bit of tracking through the section to figure out where the row numbering started and how the plots were numbered. If I counted correctly, there wasn’t a gravestone for Bridget and Nellie and the unknown third Murray as was the case for much of this section. According to my mother’s notes, my Theler great-great grandparents are also buried in that section, but I couldn’t find them.

Nana and Grandpa Murray's
gravestone at Holy Cross Cemetery

Since section M isn’t too far from where several of my aunts are buried, I headed up there and paid my respects before heading back down the hill to find Nana and Grandpa Murray. Mom’s notes were more helpful for this stop and I found their graves fairly quickly.

Next it was over to Section V for Marshall (and presumably Mary, I forgot to ask) Murray. This section was much more complicated to figure out as there is a road that curves through it, so the graves run both horizontally and somewhat vertically along the road. I could not figure out the numbering at all and was unable to locate their grave. Most of the plots in this section have headstones, so I’m fairly confident that a second trip to go through the section more methodically than I did should turn them up.

Daniel & Elizabeth Coleman's
gravestone at Holy Cross Cemetery

Second to last stop was to find the Colemans in Section T. Mom’s notes were again helpful and had the row and number and, in this section, the graves were much more clearly marked with numbers. My father’s older brother Dan is buried here with his grandparents (my great-grandparents.)

The Dwyer clan gravestone
at Holy Cross Cemetery

On the way out, I made my final stop at the one gravesite I could find in my sleep – that of my Dwyer grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great grandparents as well as a few other sundry relatives (it’s a big plot.) They’re located right in the front section of the cemetery near the office and not far from such San Francisco and California luminaries as the Aliotos and the Browns. Who knew the Dwyers were so posh? (In actuality, the original plot was moved out of San Francisco when burials within the city limits were stopped in 1900 and many folks were relocated to Holy Cross in Colma and thus these graves are among the first in the cemetery.)

The Name Game

I knew when I started digging in to the family tree I was likely to run in to duplicate names. Even without the information on my mother’s family that my uncle has collected over the years (which includes at least one great grandaunt being named after a deceased older sister) I could have guessed I’d run into duplication just by looking around at my living relatives. There are names that repeat across the board on both sides, some are deliberate while others are coincidence and others still are just common names found in millions of families. My current favorite – the daughter of one of my second cousins on my mother’s side has the same first name as the daughter of one of my first cousins on my father’s side. I got very confused on Facebook one day wondering why my first cousin was posting baby pictures of her now six-year-old daughter before I realized, wrong cousin.

Still, it’s one thing to be able to keep track of living people with similar names, but a whole different animal when it comes to keeping track of ancestors with similar names. More than once in the past few months, I’ve found a record for one relative and attached it to the other and later realized I’d gotten confused. Usually, it’s something like finding a record for my grandmother’s brother Daniel and associating it with their father Daniel or it’s the whole Marshall Edward/Edward Marshall scenario of my grandfather and great-grandfather. My latest discoveries, however, are going to give me no end of fits.

After talking with my father’s cousin recently, I was able to confirm my earlier suspicion that the John Coleman I’d found in the 1900 census was my great-grandfather Daniel’s older brother. John Coleman married Sadie (Sarah) Meyers in about 1895 and they had five children who survived long enough to turn up in public records: Gladys, John, Ileen/Aileen, Marion, and Noel. Now we take a quick look at my grandmother’s family. Her siblings were John, Eileen, Daniel, and Margaret. Notice any similarities? I know my grandmother’s brother John was born in about 1905 and died sometime between 1910 and 1918, so I don’t expect to run into many conflicts with my grandmother’s cousin John who was born in about 1899 and who I’ve been able to track up to 1930 so far. However, when I saw Ileen’s name pop up and that she was born in about 1904 my first response was “you’ve got to be kidding me.”  Aunt Eileen, you see, was born in 1907. First cousins, born three years apart, in the same geographic region with nearly identical names. This is going to give me fits I’m sure, especially since the elder cousin spells her name both Ileen and Aileen in the records I’ve found thus far (and I’m praying that they aren’t actually two different people.)

On the upside, I suspect it’s also a clue – family lore has my great-great grandmother’s name as Ellen, could she perhaps also be Eileen? It may also reduce some research time as both names will likely show up in the same searches. Still, you can imagine the confusion that will arise as I search for information on the following people:

John Murray (my great-great grandfather)
John Henry Murray (my great granduncle)
Marshall Edward Murray (my great-grandfather)
Edward Marshall Murray (my grandfather)
John Coleman (my great-great grandfather)
John J. Coleman (my great granduncle)
John Coleman (my grandmother’s first cousin)
John Coleman (my grandmother’s brother)
Eileen Coleman Doheney (my grandaunt)
Ileen/Aileen Coleman (my grandmother’s first cousin)
Daniel Patrick Coleman (my great-grandfather)
Daniel Jerome Coleman (my granduncle)
Elizabeth O’Leary Coleman (my great-grandmother)
Elizabeth Coleman Murray (my grandmother)

Not confusing at all. Nope.

I think I need a glass of wine.