A Little Bit More About Martin Mullane

At the beginning of the year, I decided to tackle the case of Martin Mullane. Martin appears in the 1869 San Francisco city directory living with my great-great grandfather T.J. Mullane. Other than knowing Martin was a tailor and likely T.J.'s older brother, I hadn't been able to find out much more information. I tracked him through the city directories up until 1880 when he disappears. I had to go back and see if I could find Martin in any census records.

The Mullanes have been very hard to locate in the census records, largely due to the misspelling of their last name. After some digging, I was able to find Martin in the 1870 Census listed as Martin Melane. Finally! That record gave me a lot more information. Martin was married to a woman named Mary, which should make things interesting since T.J.'s wife was also named Mary and they named their daughter (my great-grandmother) Mary! Such fun! Martin and Mary have three sons, Peter age 6 who was born in Ohio, Martin age 3 who was born in California, and Christopher age 1 who was also born in California. I will assume both Martin, Jr. and Christopher were born in San Francisco. Those names match up with the names I found in the 1890s voter registrations, so my guess that they were Martin's sons was correct.

There are a number of other families enumerated in the same building, but since the 1870 Census doesn't record street addresses, I don't know if there are several families living together or if they are living in an apartment building of some kind. The really interesting bit I found is a few lines down from Martin and his family there is another Mary Melane, age 23, who is a washerwoman with a son who is about 9 months old named John. I believe this is my great-great grandmother Mary Manning Mullane, but there's no sign of T.J. with them. Well, that makes for yet another Mullane mystery to figure out. Where the heck was T.J. when the 1870 Census was taken?

Finding this record, allowed me to trace Martin's family a bit more, and I located them in the 1880 Census record living on Shipley Street. Mary Mullane is listed as a widow when the census was taken in June 1880, and since I had records for Martin in the 1879 and 1880 San Francisco city directories, I suspected he may have died earlier in the year. The 1880 Census has a mortality record of anyone who had died over the previous year, so I went to see if I could find Martin in those records, and he turns up twice! Martin died in March 1880 of tuberculosis. I still haven't figured out where he was buried and there aren't any San Francisco papers available on line for 1880, so it will require a trip to a library with microfilm to see if I can find a death notice.

Knowing that Martin had died, I turned to see what I could learn about his wife and sons. The records I found for Mary stop in 1883, so that was a bit of a dead end. I was able to track Peter Mullane until 1904 when he died from tetanus. Peter was a woodworker who worked in mills in and around San Francisco. It doesn't appear that he married or had any children. Martin Francis Mullane went on to become a tailor like his father, but I can't find any record of him after 1898. I did find a Martin Mullane in the Calvary records at sfgenealogy.com who died in March 1900 who is about the same age as Martin Francis Mullane, but I couldn't find a death notice in either the San Francisco Call or San Francisco Chronicle that matched up with the date to confirm if it is the same Martin Mullane, so I don't know if it's the one I'm looking for. The youngest son of Martin and Mary Mullane, Christopher J. Mullane, became a peddler and I've been able to track him up to 1913.

So, as always with the Mullanes, there are a bunch of new puzzles and mysteries to work out and people to track down. I still need to find evidence that the elder Martin Mullane is indeed the older brother of my great-great grandfather T.J. as I believe he is. Knowing that his son Peter was born in Ohio gives me another lead to follow, so that will be part of my next steps along the Mullane branch. My preliminary searches thus far haven't turned up any Mullanes in Ohio, but I've not done much more than a cursory search. It also makes me wonder if Martin fought in the US Civil War. My direct ancestors all seem to have been in California for most of the war and I haven't found anyone who fought in the war, but with Martin living in Ohio which was more more located where the war was going on may have enlisted at some point.

Finding John Murray

When I first discovered my great-great grandmother Bridget Murray in the 1900 census, she was listed as a widow and living with her five children. Who was her husband? What happened to him? As I dug around in the records looking for Bridget, I found several possibilities for her husband. There was a James & Bridget Murray in the 1870 census, but that Bridget was a bit older than the one in 1900 and they had no children. There was a “Bridget Murray, widow (Thos.)” in the 1915 San Francisco City Directory, but is that the same Bridget I’d been tracking? The best option I found was a John and Bridget Murray in the 1870 census. The age for Bridget was about right and they had a son named John who was 1 year old, which would be about right for the John Henry I found in the 1900 census. Still, I needed to confirm which one of these candidates was the correct one.

When I found Bridget’s death notice in a 1907 edition of the San Francisco Call, I was able to eliminate two of my three candidates. According to the notice, she was the widow of John Murray. Excellent, that meant I could go back to the 1870 census record I’d found and try to determine if this was indeed the right John & Bridget Murray.

1870 Census Record for John & Bridget Murray
(ancestry.com)

When I looked at the 1870 census record, I jotted down all the information listed. John & Bridget and their son John Henry were living with another couple – John and Margaret Feechan. I could read that John Feechan was a shoemaker, but could not decipher the listed occupation for John Murray. I looked at the writing for the other records on the page and still couldn’t quite decipher the word. The best I could come up with was “Nephalstener” which made no sense whatsoever. Obviously there’s no such word as “nephalstener”, but maybe there’s some odd 19^th century occupation that I can’t quite figure out, maybe the “p” is an “f”, maybe it’s supposed to be two words? Well, that’s another item to figure out in the long list of things to figure out. While muddling over this, however, I did get further confirmation that I was on the right track when the death certificate I’d ordered for my great-grandfather Marshall arrived in the mail – his parents were listed as John Murray and Bridget McDonough.

Back to tracking down John in the census, I had discovered a second source for San Francisco City directories that included years not available at Ancestry.com, but the search function left much to be desired and meant a more manual search. I decided to start with the 1870 directory since that would hopefully match up with the census record. Unfortunately the 1870 census records didn’t include house addresses, so that meant logging all of the John Murrays in the directory and try to cross-reference them through the years. There were 17 John Murrays listed in the 1870 directory, but the 14^th entry was intriguing. This John Murray was living at the “corner of Leavenworth and Broadway” and was an upholsterer. Hmm, let’s look at that 1870 census again, could “nephalstener” actually be “upholsterer”? Now that I have a word to compare it to, it’s clear that it is upholsterer. To be extra sure that I’d found the right John Murray, I flipped back in the directory looking for John Feechan. I didn’t find a John Feechan, but I did find a John Feehan living at Leavenworth and Broadway. Well, it looks like I found the right one.

I followed John Murray through the years, but he disappears after 1891. In 1894 Bridget shows up as widow living on Tehama, which is where I found her in 1900. I haven’t located an 1893 directory yet and there are 5 different listings for “Bridget Murray, widow” in the 1892 directory but none are for addresses that I am certain are the right family. My best guess then is that John Murray died between 1891-1892.

Having found John Murray from the 1870s on, I decided to look backwards and see if I can figure out when he arrived in San Francisco. He first appears in 1867 working as mattress maker at the Occidental Laundry. Since I know he is married with a child by 1870, I wonder when he and Bridget met – was it in San Francisco or back in Ireland? Starting with the 1867 directory, I decide to look for Bridget under her maiden name, McDonough. Jackpot on the first try – Bridget McDonough is working as a laundress at the Occidental Laundry.

So now I’ve gotten more information and have time lines to search for other information. Each piece of the puzzle makes the picture clearer than it was before. Bridget McDonough and John Murray worked at the Occidental Laundry prior to September 1867 (the date the directory was published.) They were married with a one year old son by June of 1870 (when the census was taken), which makes it likely they were married in 1867 or 1868. There is one bit of curiosity though, neither John nor Bridget show up in the 1868 city directory, but John pops back up in the 1869-70 directory and appears consistently through 1891. Were they missed when the directory information was collected or were they living elsewhere that year? If they were living elsewhere, where were they and why?