Continuing my promise to update the blog more regularly and a bit about the research and discoveries I made in 2019 and 2020, we go back and take a look at my great-great grandfather John Murray. As a quick reminder, John was born in Ireland in about 1840, immigrated to the US, and appears in San Francisco by 1862 where he met my great-great grandmother Bridget McDonough whom he married in 1868. John worked as an upholsterer at various laundries until his death in 1890 of cirrhosis.
I found a death notice for John in the San Francisco Call in 2017 that indicated he was from County Galway. That was a pretty good lead -- it narrowed down where I would need to search for a John Murray in Ireland, which is a daunting task as it is! Still, John Murray is a pretty common name, so it's going to be a needle in a haystack kind of search to dig up more information on him.
Once again, the addition of the San Francisco Examiner to Newspapers.com brought some more light into the search. Another new death notice, this one including two key facts. The first is that John is listed as "a native of the parish of Aughrim, County Galway, Ireland." Well, that definitely narrows down the search a bit! The second item is a request of "New York papers, please copy." That would indicate he had family in New York and possibly arrived in the US through New York City.
The New York lead was a bit thinner, so I've set that aside for the moment since I don't have any names, dates, or specific places to go with it and passenger lists of the 1850s and 1860s are pretty sparse on information beyond name and place of origin making it difficult to pin down my John Murray. Knowing the parish of origin in County Galway, however, was a huge clue, so I went off to see if I could find anything there.
The National Library of Ireland has their collection of Catholic Parish Registers available online for free, which makes them terrific to check out. They're also available through Ancestry.com which has indexed them to make them more searchable, though this wasn't the case when I first discovered John Murray's parish of origin. I browsed through the available records for Aughrim parish and found a John Murry born 9 Oct 1838 to James Murry and "Wenefride" (likely Winifred) McLaughlin, baptized 11 Oct 1838 by Patrick Walsh, CC and his godparents were listed as Pat and Mary Murry. There are no baptismal records from 13 Dec 1838 to 17 May 1840, so this may not be the correct John Murray, but it is a starting point for possible connections, especially since I didn't find any other John Murrays born between 1838-1842, which is the range of years the records I have found indicate he was born. The only other possibility in the records is a John Murray born in June 1836 to a Michael Murray and Bridget Drew with godparents named John Murray and Catherine Barrett.
Not having any records for all of 1839 and half of 1840 means that I can't be 100% certain I've found the right John Murray, but I do have some names I can search on and see if I can make any connections. I'm going to focus my search on the first John Murry/Murray as he has the closest birthdate option. Alas, the Ancestry.com search doesn't search on parents’ names in the Parish Registers, so I'll have to search through them manually to see if James and Winifred had any other children baptized in Aughrim parish. Unfortunately, there are no marriage records included for Aughrim in the registers, so I can't search there either and the Aughrim baptismal records only go back to 1828, which is just 12 years before I believe John Murray was born, so it's not likely his parents would be in the records.
The search continues.
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