Good Guessing

Just about a year ago, I found a death record for my great great grandfather John Murray. He died in November 1890 and the record I found of his death in the Calvary Cemetery records at sfgenealogy.com indicated his funeral was held at “S.B.” parish. Based on where the family lived in 1890 and taking a look at the “S.B.” Catholic churches in the San Francisco City Directory for 1890 I surmised that he was most likely buried out of St. Bridget’s (aka St. Bridgid’s) church at Van Ness and Broadway.

When I started my searching in early 2012, I found my great great grandparents living at “the corner of Leavenworth and Broadway” and did a Google search of Catholic churches near Leavenworth and Broadway to see if I could guess which would be the closest parish, and thus the most likely location where they may have gotten married. I doubted they were married at St. Peter & Paul’s in the heavily Italian North Beach, so thought perhaps Old St. Mary’s would be a good bet.

I didn’t follow up on those possibilities as I only had an approximate time frame for when they would have been married and with an uncertain date and an uncertain parish, well, that was too vague to track down. A couple of weeks ago, I hit yet another site with old newspapers digitized with the plan to cancel my subscription as I never used it. Before I did, though, I checked to see what newspapers they had. Sometime in the intervening months between when I subscribed to the site and my return to cancel the subscription, they had added copies of the San Francisco Bulletin from 1855-1891.  A new source to search!

I ran the usual surnames through the search engine and got a few different hits – including one in the July 20, 1868 edition. In the tiniest of print there was a short list of recent marriages including “In this city, July 19, at St. Bridget’s Church, by the Rev. J.P. Callaghan, John Murray to Bridget McDonough.”  Well what do you know?! It hadn’t occurred to me when looking for churches near John and Bridget to think of ones that had since closed! Duh! And even after finding out where John had been buried from, I didn’t put it all together.

So what does this get me? Well, besides the obvious lead to get information on the marriage of my great great grandparents, I’m guessing it is a safe bet that John and Bridget’s children were all baptized at St. Bridget’s also. Of course, this means I need to access the old records from St. Bridget’s. From what I’ve found, the original documents from St. Bridget’s are now at St. Vincent de Paul parish in San Francisco and the Archives for the Archdiocese of San Francisco are located at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. The archives will probably be the easier option for searching since the only birthdate of their six children I have any confidence in is for my great grandfather Marshall which means guessing on when they were baptized. That will have to be reserved for another field trip though, as the hours of access to the archives are pretty limited.

The Things You Find

One of the fun aspects about looking for historical records of my family is stumbling on random bits of history. After finding the mortuary records for several family members, I went looking for copies of their death notices in the newspaper archives.

Finding the birth, marriage, death notice section of the paper can sometimes be tricky when scanning the online images, so I'll often start at the first or second image and scroll through the pages to find what I'm looking for. In the process I've gotten a glimpse of various news stories, ads, and other items. Every so often I stumble on something fun or interesting -- a local crime, a scandalous divorce. In my recent perusings, I was scrolling through copies of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1905 and 1912. In the 1905 paper, I happened to stop on the sports page and notice the tiny box scores for the major leagues. In 1905, there was no Major League Baseball west of St. Louis, so most of the local sports coverage was college and minor league baseball. Still, I was curious how my now San Francisco Giants, then in New York, had done. I zoomed in on the tiny box score to see the Giants had beaten St. Louis 8-1. The only other bit included in the box score was the pitching battery. The winning pitcher in that game was legendary Giants Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson. I had to smile that of all the times I decided to stop and check the box scores I had stumbled on a game by one of the most prominent pitchers in baseball history.

The next interesting thing that I stumbled on was in 1912. Again I was just scrolling through the pages when a boldfaced "Titanic" caught my eye. I paused expecting to see some kind of outlandish advertisement. I was partly correct. It turns out I had stumbled on an ad for the never to happen return trip of the Titanic sailing out of New York. Having the perspective of 100 years of hindsight, I wondered what happened to the folks who had booked passage on that return trip. What were their thoughts on being on the other side of such a historic event.

There have been other things like this that I've stumbled upon perusing old newspapers and while right now my focus is on finding specific information, I do think I need to plan some time to go back and read some of those old papers in their entirety. The history lessons of my school years was so much remembering dates and places and names for exams that the day to day perspective of events got filtered out. Following my family tree through history is similar in some ways to reading a novel of historical fiction. It has presented history in a new light and made it all the more real than dry text books and lectures ever could.

Maybe It's Mollie

I've still been a bit lax this year in my researching. I've spent more time organizing and making lists than doing any actual digging, but I have done some minor searching here and there looking for more information on the people I've already identified in the family tree.

One of the mysteries I've been trying to solve is what happened to my great grandfather Marshall's siblings. I found his missing sibling identified in the 1900 Census -- Lizzie -- earlier this year in old cemetery records for Calvary Cemetery, and I know his younger sister Nellie died in childbirth in 1909. That left figuring out what happened to his older brother John Henry, his younger brother Joseph, and his older sister Mary (aka Mollie.) I know Joseph is alive as late as 1920 since he is living with Marshall in the 1920 census. I know John Henry is alive as late as 1918 as his is a witness to Marshall's marriage to Mary Mullane. The best information I had on Mollie is her name appearing in Nellie's death notice in 1909. The only direct record I had, however, was when she appeared in the 1900 Census with the rest of her family.

After 1900, I've had a heck of a time finding what happened to Mollie. I don't know what she did for a living, so any possible leads in the city directories are just guesses. If she got married, I would need to know her husband's name to find her. In Nellie's death notice in 1909, she's referenced as Nellie's sister, Mollie Murray. Mollie was born in 1870, which would make her 39 in 1909, so my best guess based on that information was that she had never married. Still, I couldn't find any record that I could confirm was my Mollie (Mary) Murray.

I've recently spent some time going back to resources that I was aware of, but hadn't really utilized much. There are several sources of historical mortuary records available online and I decided to spend a bit of time running through them at sfgenealogy.com and familysearch.org. Mostly I was entering surnames of family members and seeing if anyone turned up in the records. I found a bunch of the Mullanes on the SF Genealogy site that matched up with records I'd already found, but didn't have much luck with any of the other surnames. Over at FamilySearch, however, I got a hit on Murray.

The record indicated the father's name was John Murray, so I looked over to see who the child was. Her name was Mollie Johnson and she died on February 25, 1917. Well, that's interesting. I clicked on the record and the attached image from the J.S. Godeau Funeral Records had details on the funeral and, quite helpfully, a copy of the death notice in the paper. I took a look at the record and the very brief death notice indicated that Mollie was the "beloved wife of Charles Johnson and sister of John, Joe, and Edward Murray."  Now, according to this record, Mollie was 38 years old, but based on the census records I have, Mollie should have been 46 or 47 years old in February 1917. Considering the liberties most of the Murrays took with their ages, I'm not going to discount this being the correct Mollie because of her age. Her father's name is correct as are the names of her three brothers. It would have been more helpful if my great grandfather had been referred to by his first name Marshall rather than his middle name Edward, but since he went by both, I'm not going to discount that bit either.

The funeral record indicated she died at home in Oakland and that the cause of death was pending an inquest. I would imagine that record would be found in the Alameda county records and with a death date and a married last name I can also check the state death records and try to obtain a copy of her death certificate. She's buried at Holy Cross like so many other family members, but it doesn't appear as if her husband Charles was buried with her. There is a Charles Johnson buried somewhat near her with a Mary Johnson, so it's possible he remarried and wound up buried with his second wife.  The name is a bit too common to be certain though.

I've done a little bit of searching on Charles Johnson to see if I can find a marriage record for he and Mollie, but so far no luck. I would imagine they got married in San Francisco or Oakland sometime between 1909 and 1917 based on the information I have so far, but nothing's turned up in my usual search locations as yet.

While I'm not 100% certain that I've found "my" Mollie, I again have a pretty good probability.