When I started researching my Murray family tree, I had planned to spend a weekend a month doing research and tracking down people, places, and events. I found so many things so quickly in early 2012 that I found myself spending much more time than I had expected uncovering some of the mysteries of the Murray family. I put a lot of puzzle pieces in place, but as the framework got solidified, finding out more became more challenging and time consuming. With a full-time job and other obligations, research time dwindled down and now I am pretty much doing what I had originally planned -- spending about one weekend a month going over what I've found and what I need to find. At least that's about what it averages out. It also means I've been stuck at the same roadblock for a while as I need to access some records that are only accessible during limited hours on week days. Challenging to say the least.
So, while I've been unable to make as much progress as I'd like, I have been able to spend some time looking more closely at some records and finding connections between all sides of my family. The easiest ones come when I'm looking through city directories. While I'm looking for Murrays and Mullanes, I will frequently stumble on Muckles -- my great grandmother's family on my maternal side -- and so I gather their information also. One project I want to try to put together as I look at the city directories is to map out where everyone lived over the years -- with ancestors on both sides of my family tracing back to the 1860s in San Francisco, I'm certain there are times and places that the Dwyer lines and the Murray lines intersected despite not connecting until 100 years later. It's very likely that they attended the same churches and schools. Did they know each other? Even in passing?
Other times, I stumble on things completely by accident. While looking for the death notice for Mollie Murray Johnson (my great grandfather's sister) I noticed that Edward I Mullane's (my great grandmother's nephew) death notice also appeared in the same issue. I knew that Edward had died as a child, but I had yet to find a date for his death. Finding two records in one was a definite bonus. Of course, it also meant my great grandparents had to attend two funerals in two days for family members.
And then there are days like one I had recently while making a visit to Holy Cross Cemetery. Living in the same region as your ancestors over a span of 150+ years means that a lot of them wind up in the same cemetery. I've made several trips over the last few years trying to locate where everyone is at Holy Cross. There are about 40 separate sections, and to date, I know of relatives in at least half of them. This means each trip needs to be planned to cover certain sections at once. Older sections of the cemetery are a bit tricky in finding people and it can take a while to find the gravesite I'm looking for. My most recent visit, however, was to sections that mostly covered burials from about 1930-1960 (at least for the original plot purchases) and I was able to find 5 separate gravesites in the first 15 minutes of my visit. I was able to find relatives on both my maternal Dwyer/Kenny side and paternal Murray/Coleman side. My Kenny great-grandparents are buried in the same section as my Murray great-grandparents. My Coleman great-grandparents are in the section across the road, not too far from some of my Mullane relatives. There are O'Leary relatives buried a few rows away from Muckle relatives another section over.
The final, and definitely most difficult, intersection is when a last name from one branch of the tree shows up in the other. My grandmother's cousin Catherine Ford married a man name Edward Ambrose Dwyer. Edward Dwyer was from Syracuse, New York, so finding a connection with my Dwyer ancestors in San Francisco is a long shot, but is something I want to look in to further somewhere down the line. I also know from my uncle who has been researching the Dwyer/Kenny side of my family that there are some Colemans who married into the family. Neither of us has any idea if they're related to my great-grandfather Daniel Coleman. They're from different counties in Ireland, but it's also far enough back that I'll need to spend more time on the Coleman branch to see if there's a connection there too. These interstections are definitely for a later date and time when I've got more of the Murray/Coleman branches fleshed out.
