New Clues for the McDonoughs

Early in my research I sent off for a copy of my great-grandmother Bridget McDonough Murray's death certificate. I got a response back indicating the record couldn't be found. Then I discovered a copy of the California Death Index which included images of the index which had the death certificate number listed. I decided I'd try again once I got further on in my research and could mail in everything I needed. It took longer than I planned, but about a month ago I indeed sent off a request for Bridget's death certificate along with a print out of the CA Death Index page with her record highlighted. Hopefully, I'd have better luck this time.  Well, I did.

A few days ago I got an envelope in the mail from the California Department of Vital Records. As always, I got excited about what I might find in the envelope this time and I rushed inside with the mail and groceries to see what it was.  It was, of course, Bridget's death certificate. Finally.

It didn't really hold many surprises as I know when and where she was born and died and where she was subsequently buried. Learning her cause of death was helpful (pulmonary edema), but not of any major interest beyond adding to the various and sundry heart conditions that seem to run through both the Murray and Coleman branches of the family. I learned that her daughter Mary (Mollie) was also living with her and her two sons Marshall and Joseph which I had assumed but couldn't prove.

But the one big bit of information that I was hoping to find was there -- the names of Bridget's parents. I got half lucky I guess because her parents names are listed as Patrick and Mary McDonough. Drat, no maiden name for her mother to help narrow things down a bit further.

Learning Bridget's father's name, however, gives me further reason to investigate the Patrick McDonough I found living a few blocks from Bridget in the 1880 US Census. I may have to send off for his death certificate too, but for now I'm still searching on line resources to see if I can turn up anything of use.

Having this bit of information also makes me want to try to get Bridget and John Murray's marriage record again. I've hit a few stumbling blocks trying to get it over the years, so it's time to try again. I know it should exist, it's just a matter of getting to the record as it's not available on line. Rather frustrating.

Searching for McDonoughs and Finding Scandal

Over the course of my research, I've gone off trying to see if I can locate any relatives of my great great grandmother Bridget McDonough Murray. The only lead I have discovered to date is a reference in her death notice that "Chelsea, Mass., papers please copy" which would suggest she had family of some sort in Massachusetts. I've also discovered some records in San Francisco for some McDonoughs who may or may not be connected to Bridget. The connections at this point are very tenuous, and really mostly supposition on my part. 

In the 1880 Census, there is a Patrick McDonough living at 2026 Filbert St. which is just 2 blocks from where John and Bridget Murray lived at 6 Harry Place. Patrick was born in about 1835 in Ireland, which is about 5 years before Bridget was born, so they are close enough in age to be siblings. I have no evidence whatsoever that Patrick and Bridget are related in any way, but on the chance that there might be a connection I have taken a look to see if I can find something that would prove one way or another if there was any relation.

Patrick married a woman named Honora Connor in Philadelphia in about 1858, though I suspect that date may be fudged a little bit as I found Patrick and Honora living in the household of a Martin Murphy in the 1860 census and they are not yet married. To further support this, the oldest of their seven children, John H. McDonough was born in about 1860 in Philadelphia. Patrick and Honora are in California by the time their daughter Mary E. McDonough is born in 1864. Bridget McDonough arrived in San Francisco some time between 1864 and 1867, so again a tenuous connection.

Unfortunately, tenuous connections are all I have at this point as I have found no evidence to indicate any family relation between Bridget and Patrick. However, in my periodic checks on Patrick McDonough's family, I stumbled on some really interesting information about a couple of his sons. The youngest two of Patrick and Honora's children were Thomas and Peter McDonough, and when I did a search on their names at newspapers.com I was flooded with news stories, particularly about Peter.

From what I've uncovered through these articles, it seems that Thomas and Peter owned a saloon and also operated as bail bondsmen. Neither of those occupations seem particularly unusual for the sons of an immigrant in the late 1890s/early 1900s, and when you take into consideration that Patrick was a police officer the bail bondsmen makes some sense as I would imagine they were familiar with the operations of the police department and courts of the time.

Their story starts getting interesting in 1909, when a story appears in the San Francisco Call with the headline "GLEAN HARVEST FROM CROOKS IN BAIL BOND FEES." The sub-headlines go on to read "McDonough Brothers accused before police commission of impeding justice" and "Effort being made to have liquor license of saloon keepers revoked." From what I can tell in the article, being a bail bondsman in 1909 was not a particularly approved of occupation. The assistant district attorney was expected "to declare that the saloon's co-operation with criminals has seriously handicapped the prosecution of offenders."

In 1912, Peter and Thomas seem to have had a falling out which resulted in Thomas retaining the saloon and Peter operating as "a bond and money broker with offices in the Bank of Italy building, entirely separate and disassociated from the saloon business owned and carried on by my brother." That quote appeared in an article in the San Francisco Chronicle in July 1913 wherein Peter was denying accusations of bribing police officers.

The stories continue on through the 1920s and 1930s and include tales of bribery, corruption, graft, and prohibition violations. I've not delved too deeply in all of these reports as it's a major rabbit hole to fall down, especially since the bits of the stories I've read are so fascinating and would easily take up days if not weeks of reading and research. The online availability of San Francisco based newspapers ends in the early 1920s which also limits my ability to follow up on all of the scandalous news (which includes accusations of bribing a judge in 1920) just through online sources. There is even one story that includes one of Patrick's grandsons, Harry Rice. The latest bit I've been able to find was an AP story that appeared in the San Bernardino County Sun in November 1937 that reported Peter McDonough was going to lose his license as a bail bondsman for being a "fountainhead of corruption." Peter does turn up in the 1940 census as a bail bond broker, so I don't know if that means he regained his license or that it was his former occupation. Peter died in 1947 at the age of 75.

Should my periodic attempts to find McDonoughs turn up a connection between Bridget McDonough Murray and Patrick McDonough somewhere down the line, you can bet I will delve in to all of the stories about Thomas and Peter!

Answering and Reviewing Some Questions, Part 1

I realized that over the four years since I started this blog I had posed a bunch of different questions that I may have not answered in a follow up post, so I decided to go back through the 40 or so posts I have written and see what I may have forgotten to update.  I'll also try to put in quick links to questions that were answered in case something was missed.  This will be a multi-part post and one that will appear from time to time as I move along in my research since I suspect there will be more instances of me plowing ahead and forgetting to update all the answers I find and/or forgetting to go back and look at some other questions.

The First Month of Digging brought up a lot of questions and I think I've answered most of them by now.  Some questions, like what happened to my Murray family relatives during and immediately following the 1906 earthquake and fire will probably remain a mystery.  That kind of information is usually found in family stories and I know of none.  Many of the other questions that I pondered in that first month have been answered though.

• What was Bridget's husband's name?  When did he die?
• Who is Joseph's wife? Why isn't she living with him in 1920?
• What happened to Mary and Nellie? Did they marry?
• Who were my great-grandmother's parents? Did she have any siblings?

The question of where in Ireland were my Murray great-great grandparents were from is answered in passing in several posts.  Both Bridget McDonough Murray and John Murray's death notices contained the useful information that they were born in counties Sligo and Galway respectively.  That decidedly narrows down where in Ireland I'll need to look for other points of reference, but with the challenge that is inherent in Irish records it will be difficult to find such common names with out being able to narrow them down to a parish or townland.

When did they come to California is another partially answered question.  Based on what I've been able to find in the San Francisco city directories and the 1900 census record has given me a rough estimate.  In the 1900 census, Bridget shows up as having arrived in the US in 1866.  I first find her with a certainty in the 1867 city directory working at the Occidental Laundry.  However I also found a Bridget McDonough working at the Russ House laundry in 1864 with several other McDonoughs.  I'm not 100% sure that's "my" Bridget, so I've put that record in my "maybe" file for now.  John Murray first shows up in the city directories in 1862 working at Easton's laundry.  So I have a reasonable timeline for both of them arriving in California.  But what about the question of when they arrived in the United States?  While it's possible they both emigrated from Ireland directly to California, it's more likely they arrived in the US on the east coast before moving across the country.  I haven't, to date, found any definitive records of the arrival of either Bridget or John.  The best lead I have is for Bridget as her death notice asked that papers in Chelsea, Massachusetts be notified.  That leads me to believe there was some kind of family in Massachusetts and that Bridget may have landed in Boston before moving west.  As for John -- that's definitely going to be a needle in haystack.  John Murray is a common enough name and the immigration records of the 1860s contain very little information that would allow me to identify one John Murray from another with any certainty.  The most interesting part of this question though gives rise to another question.  If John and Bridget arrived on the east coast sometime between 1860-1866, what was traveling across the entire continent in the middle of the US Civil War like?

The question of what happened to my great grandfather's older brother John Henry is another open question.  I only have spotty records for him.  After finding him living with the rest of the family in 1900-01, I have very little hard evidence on him.  He witnessed my great grandparents' wedding in 1918 and I know he's buried at Holy Cross Cemetery with his brother Joseph, so I know he died in 1930.  Those are the only hard records I have for him.  Again, with a name like John Murray, it's a bit tricky tracking him down.  I have a couple of possibilities in census records, but nothing definite.

I haven't quite found all of the Murrays in the 1910 census.  Bridget and Nellie (Ella) have died by 1910 and I'm pretty sure I've found Mollie living with her husband.  The brothers, however, are a bit more of a challenge.  I have a reasonable guess for Joseph, but nothing for either Marshall or John Henry, so that's one area I need to keep looking.

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The Mystery of Mary Mullane introduced me to my first real puzzler of the family -- that my great grandmother was married to someone named Denis Edward Hayes before she married my great grandfather Marshall.  Edward Hayes seems to have dropped out of the records after the 1910 census and I haven't a clue what happened to him.  Based on what I do know, I'm guessing Edward Hayes abandoned my great grandmother sometime around 1910.  My great grandparents weren't married until 1918, four years after my grandfather was born and the information my great grandmother provided for the marriage license wasn't entirely truthful.  Both of those facts lead me to believe Edward Hayes ran off.  I haven't put a bunch of effort in to tracking him down, but do have some potential leads to follow up.  The best of those is from the 1940 census which has an Edward Hayes who is the right age and divorced living at the Napa State Hospital, but with such a big gap between records I can't be certain I've got the right person.  And, like Joseph Murray's wife Agnes, has me wondering what put him in the state hospital in the first place! 

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More McDonoughs was my first lead on some possible relatives of my great-great grandmother Bridget McDonough Murray.  I found a Patrick McDonough living near the Murrays in the 1880 census and other searches turned up a Thomas and Betsey McDonough working with a Bridget McDonough at the Russ House in 1864.  I haven't spent much time on the McDonoughs recently, so I haven't found any connection between any of these people to my great-great grandmother.  I did spend some time on them when they first turned up then set it aside for a few months.  When I went back and took a look at the work I'd done, I discovered I'd made several mistakes and gotten different families mixed up so had to scrap a lot of what I did and go back to the beginning.  I think what I've gathered to date is accurate, but it is pretty limited and I've as yet to make any connections.

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.

Second and Third Field Trips

As summer rolled in, I found myself spending less time digging into the family history than I did during the winter and spring.  I have done some poking around here and there, but haven't turned up a whole lot of new information that has any definitiveness to it.  But that doesn't mean I haven't kept poking around at things either and some of the research I've needed to do required access to records not accessible on line, which definitely slows down the process.

However, I did get a chance to make a couple of field trips during the month of July.  The first was a fortunate happenstance when my cousin invited the family over for her daughter's second birthday.  Since this is the cousin who lives a block from where our great great grandparents lived from 1877-1890, I made a special point to bring my camera and planned to take a quick stroll down the street.  Unfortunately, I forgot to put the battery back in my camera after I had taken it out to charge it!  Thankfully, my mother had her iPhone with her, so I was able to borrow it when we took a stroll down the street.

Numbers 2 & 4 Harris Place,
the approximate location
of  John & Bridget Murray's home from 1877 -1890

The house my great great grandparents lived in is no longer there, but I was able to take a picture of the houses that are on the site now.  John and Bridget Murray and their family lived at 6 Harry Place, so I took pictures of the flats that are at 2 & 4 Harris Place and 8 & 10 Harris Place.

1815 Union Street - location of John Murray's last place of employment

John Murray worked at the Occidental Laundry for most of his life in San Francisco, but the only address I had for the laundry was "Filbert between Gough and Octavia", so I wasn't able to take a picture of that (the block is mostly residential now, with a couple mom & pop type storefronts.)  I did have an address for the last location that John worked and it was also within a short walking distance on Union Street, so I strolled up there to take a look at what is there now.  The building looks to have been remodeled considerably since 1890, but the storefront looks like it might be from the original building. The original building probably looked something like the yellow one to the right in the picture.

My next field trip came at the end of July when Mom and I trekked up to Holy Cross cemetery to see if we could find Marshall and Mary Murray, my great grandparents.  Mom was also going to show me where some of the relatives on her side were buried that I couldn't find on my previous trip.

My Theler great great grandparents

On my initial trip to Holy Cross in April, I had located the approximate location for my great great grandmother Bridget McDonough Murray and her daughter Nellie and, based on the notes from my mother, they were buried in the same section as my Theler great great grandparents.  Mom and I headed up there first, and Mom realized that she had mismarked her map. The Thelers weren't in Section M, but in Section K which is down the hill.  That explains why I couldn't find them on my first trip!

Joseph & Maggie Kenny, my great grandparents

After finding the Thelers, Mom and I headed over to Section V to try and find Marshall and Mary.  As I mentioned before, the numbering makes no sense (on the rare occaisions when we could actually find numbers on the headstones) and after traipsing back and forth over the whole section, we couldn't locate their grave.  We decided we'd ask at the office for some more information, but before we went back down to the office, we went over to Section U to find my Kenny great grandparents.  We located them fairly quickly and hopped in the car to go back to the office, only to discover that a funeral procession was pulling in.  We decided to skip the office for now and plan for another trip.

142 Bosworth St. where my
Coleman great grandparents lived

14 Marsily St. where my Coleman
great grandparents lived when my
grandmother was born in 1914

Once we left Holy Cross, Mom and I drove up to San Francisco to find the house Nana grew up in on Bosworth Street.  We found it quickly and when we got out of the car to walk around the neighborhood a little bit, I noticed that the house was on the corner of Bosworth and Marsily St.  The Colemans lived on Marsily Street before they moved to New Jersey, so Mom and I walked up the street and took a look at that house also.  It looked to be fairly original to what the house probably looked like in the early 1900s when my Coleman ancestors lived there.

While we were walking around the neighborhood, my mother told me a story I'd never heard before.  Apparently my father's oldest brother fell out of the first floor window and severely broke his leg when he was about 2 years old.  When we got home, my father elaborated on the story some what -- the owner of the grocery store saw that my uncle was about to fall and ran across to try to catch him.  If I'd known that part of the story, I would have taken a picture of the small grocery store that is still across the street!

1880 Census

As you may recall, the Murray family was missing in the 1880 census -- the pages I believed they were recorded on were missing from the microfilm. I sent an email to the National Archives in Washington, DC asking if they still existed and if so how I could obtain a copy. About a week later I received a reply that the original pages were not stored in DC and I should direct my query to the Missouri State Archives. This struck me as a bit odd, but I followed the link provided and submitted the query again. I got a response back that they only kept records for Missouri (which makes sense) and I should contact the California State Archives (which also makes sense.) 

I sent off my query for a third time, and on Wednesday I came home from work to find a message on my machine from the CA Secretary of State. They had found the pages and would send them to me at the address I had provided in my email request. Well, that sounds promising! (Not to mention surprising -- I expected to have to pay for copies!)  I didn't want to get my hopes up in case what was sent was the first four available pages (5-8) rather than the pages I was looking for (1-4.) 

I arrived home tonight to find an envelope from the CA Secretary of State in my mailbox, and inside were four sets of 11" x 17" pages stapled together in groups of two. I looked at the top of the first page, and found "Page No. 1, Enumeration District 196, San Francisco." Woo hoo! I scanned down the first page and saw Harry Place on lines 8-18 -- wow, they should appear on page 1! They're not on the first sheet, so I turn to the second sheet for lines 19-50. Line 20 -- there they are! John (age 38), works at a laundry, Bridget (37) is keeping house, John H. (11) and Mary A. (9) are at school, and Marshall E. (5) and Ellen A. (2) are at home. Joseph isn't born yet.

This confirms a few things for me, the first being that the 1870 census record that I found was indeed the right family. It looks like Mollie's proper name was Mary, so I'll have to keep searching on both names. Nellie apparently shaved a few years off her age when she married Edward Nelson since she shows up as 2 years old in June 1880. Since she was born in July, that would mean she was born in 1877, which is a year earlier than the age for her in the 1900 census. I have 8 other sheets of paper covering pages 2-4 of the Enumeration District and I plan to look them over to see if there are any other clues that might be useful. So glad to know I was on the right track and was able to find my family despite the missing records.

Death Certificate Discoveries and Disappointments

Back in February after I discovered the death notices for Bridget McDonough Murray and Ella (Nellie) Murray Nelson, I sent off for their death certificates in the hope that I could learn more about them. A couple of weeks ago I came home to find a plain white envelope from the Department of Public Health in my mailbox. I opened it up and saw that it was the death certificate for Nellie. As I read it over, I found that it had a lot of useful information.

According to the certificate, Nellie was born on July 4, 1883 which would have made her 25 when she died on March 4, 1909. According to the 1900 census record, she was born in July 1878 and figuring out her birth date is one of the things I was hoping to learn from the 1880 census record, but at least I have the day and a range for the year. According to the death certificate, she died in childbirth and from what I can decipher it doesn't appear that she delivered the child. Having spent a lot of time combing through the birth/marriage/death notice sections of the San Francisco Call, it didn't come as a surprise (and actually was what I suspected happened) as death in childbirth was fairly common. It's amazing how far we've come in the 100 or so years since Nellie's death. Where once it was commonplace for women to die in childbirth, it is now a rare circumstance (at least in the more developed parts of the world.)

I also learned that she and her husband Edward Nelson were living at the Overton Hotel in Santa Rosa, but had only been living in Santa Rosa for 4 months at the time of her death. I'll have to figure out where they were before then as I've yet to find a definitive record of them in San Francisco. I suspect Edward was working for the hotel because in the 1910 census I found a record for an Edward Nelson who is listed as widowed and is living with several other people with job titles like "porter" and "housekeeper." The death certificate also has Nellie's parents listed as John Murray and Bridget Donohue, but I suspect that is an error as the information would most likely have come from Edward. I'll make a note of it just in case though.

As you can see, there is a lot of information that can be learned from a single piece of paper. So you can imagine my excitement when, a week after Nellie's death certificate arrived I came home to find another plain white envelope from the Department of Public Health. When I opened it up the cover page informed me it was in response to my inquiry about Bridget Murray. Alas, when I turned to the second page I found it was a notice that the death certificate could not be found. Well darn. I had hoped that Bridget's death certificate would help identify her parents and thus allow me to dig up more on the McDonoughs. For now, I'll have to see if the other McDonoughs I've identified are relatives and try to track down the relative in Chelsea, Massachusetts and hope one of those will lead me to the family back in Ireland.

I've not given up all hope on finding Bridget's death certificate as I have found a record for her in the California Death Index for 1905-1939, so I hope that by requesting the record again and providing the additional information I found it will help dig up the record. It's still possible I'll be disappointed again and that the record has been lost in the 105 years since her death, but if there's one family trait that I've inherited it is Irish stubbornness!

More McDonoughs?

I have spent more time than I could have imagined staring at census records from 1880 looking for the Murray family.  As I've mentioned earlier, the pages I expected them to turn up on are currently missing.  However, one benefit of the scrutiny I've given to this particular set of records has pointed me in another direction while I await an answer from the National Archives.  I noticed that there is a Patrick McDonough living on Filbert in 1880, in the same Enumeration District where I expected to find John and Bridget Murray.  Since Patrick McDonough lived so near the Murrays, I wondered, could he be related to Bridget?  Maybe a brother?  Patrick McDonough is 45 in the census record and a native of Ireland, which would make him about 5 or 6 years older than Bridget, so it's a possibility.

I decided to track Patrick backwards to see if he was indeed related to Bridget and started paging back through the San Francisco City Directories.  When I got to the 1864-1865 directory (printed in Oct 1864), I made an interesting discovery -- a Bridget McDonough working as an ironer at the Russ House Laundry.  Is this "my" Bridget?  It would seem likely, since in the 1867 directory she was working as a laundress and according to the 1900 census she arrived in the US in 1866, which is close enough in time to think they are one and the same.  Another discovery in the 1864-65 directory is a Betsey McDonough working as a domestic at the Russ House Laundry and a Thomas McDonough working as a porter at the Russ House.  Could these be other relatives?  None of the Russ House McDonoughs appear in the 1865-66 city directory (printed in Dec 1865), but there is a Thomas working as a laborer in 1867.  Whether or not that is the same Thomas, I'll need to look further.

I've only begun digging on these possibilities, so it is too soon to tell if they are indeed relatives.  The Russ House McDonoughs would seem a good possibility but I'm having a bit of difficulty tracking them in my preliminary searches.  Patrick McDonough is a little more iffy.  A closer look at his census record from 1880 shows his oldest son, John H. McDonough, was born in Pennsylvania in about 1860, which would have him in the US quite a bit before Bridget. That wouldn't be a reason to eliminate him as it is quite possible that he came over earlier and assisted Bridget's immigration.  I'll need to do some more digging, especially in the 1860 census of Pennsylvania to see if I can turn up Patrick and his family.

I was a bit curious about the Russ House since it clearly appeared to be a hotel in the 1860s, but I wasn't familiar with it. So I did a quick search and found this.  It helped to learn that the original building no longer exists, so I'm not a complete failure as a fourth generation San Franciscan (ok, we'll add an "-ish" to that since I've never lived within the city limits of San Francisco.)  Alas, that the rebuilt Russ Building was the tallest building in San Francisco into the mid-1960s is probably something I should know.

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.)

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?