Another Holy Cross Visit -- November 2015

It's fairly time consuming to head up to Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma to try to track down where all the many relatives I have buried there are located.  It helps tremendously that I have a list of locations from the Cemetery Index at SFGenealogy.com so have a list of where I need to go and which family members are buried near each other.  I always make a plan ahead of time as to which sections I'm going to visit and who I'm going to look for.  I had some time off last November, so I planned to spend a morning at Holy Cross.

For this visit, I planned to hit Sections J, K, and M which are more or less in the center of the cemetery.  I parked my car near the Priests Plot and paid a quick visit to Uncle Eddie and waved at Joe DiMaggio's grave in Section I before trekking through Section J looking for some of my Mullane relatives.

This was the first trip I remembered to stick my phone into my search bag (which usually contains gardening gloves, my camera, a bottle of water, a clipboard with my search list, and a gardening shovel in case uncovering a headstone requires a bit more work than my hands can manage) and it proved handy.  Section J is one of the older sections and the row numbering is somewhat perplexing.  After some cross-checking on the phone that I was headed in the right direction, I was able to find the grave I was looking for -- that of my great grandmother's brother Phillip J. Mullane and his wife and three children.  Phillip and Mary Agnes Greeley Mullane had four children, but only one lived to adulthood.  Edward, Nora/Norine, and Phillip Clayton are the only ones whose names appear on the headstone.

Next it was over to Section K to see if I could find Thomas Joseph Mullane and his mother Margaret Shanahan Mullane.  Margaret was married to my great grandmother's youngest brother Edward.  Edward is buried over in Section F with his parents and other family members, and based on what I've been able to find at SFGenealogy.com, it appears Thomas and Margaret are buried with some Shanahan relatives.  Unfortunately, I was unable to get properly oriented in this section and wasn't able to locate the grave.  It was particularly frustrating because my Theler great-great grandparents are also buried in Section K and I've located their grave previously and I couldn't find them either to help with my orientation.  I'll need to head back to find them.

I walked up the hill next to see if I would luck out in Section M and find a headstone for my grandfather's sister Mollie Murray Johnson.  I knew from a previous visit looking for her mother and sister in the section that there weren't a lot of headstones in this older part of the cemetery and that the ones that were there are much newer.  With so many rows containing very few headstones it was a trick trying to find the right approximate location.  I walked around the area I thought I should be looking for any headstone I could cross-reference on my phone and I couldn't find anything for Mollie.

Since it was a nice day and I had struck out on most of the folks I was looking for I decided I was close enough to walk up to the St. Rose of Lima section where several of my aunts are buried.  After saying hello to Helen, Diane, and Betty (all conveniently within a few rows of each other), I headed down the hill to the San Lorezno section and visit my aunt Pat and got my first look at my cousin Mark's headstone.  It was a little bit sad to walk through these sections as they all were people who impacted my life directly -- much more so than all of the other folks I had been looking for but had never met (or even knew about until recently!)  I miss them all.

As I headed back to my car I realized I was going to have to cut across Section G to get there, so I made my way down to Section G2 to make a quick visit with Nana and Grandpa Murray.  While this wasn't a particularly productive trip in locating ancestors, it was a nice way to spend a warm fall morning.

Answering and Reviewing Some Questions, Part 2

In my last post, I started answering and following up on some of the questions I have discussed in earlier posts on this blog.  This post continues the review of past entries with updates and current status.

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When I was reviewing the 1940 Census trying to locate my family, I realized one of the reasons I'd had difficulty finding my grandparents and great-grandparents was that neither Marshall nor Edward Murray were working in occupations I had expected them to be.  The most curious discovery was that my grandfather Edward had appeared in several 1930s directories as a "reporter".  A reporter?  Grandpa Murray was a teamster, what's this reporter business?  I asked my father about it and he said yes, his father had worked for a newspaper.  Dad wasn't sure which one and thought he might have been a photographer.  I'll need to do some digging to see if I can find out what exactly Grandpa Murray was doing when he worked at a newspaper.  Dad also said that his father didn't graduate from high school, but according to the 1940 census he had completed 12 years of school.  My grandmother was the informant on that, so presumably she knew whether or not my grandfather had graduated.

I still haven't figured out for certain how my great grandfather paid for the house on Natoma.  I'm still guessing there was a life insurance payment after my great grandmother died in July, 1940, but I haven't found any evidence of that yet.  I'm not entirely sure where I might find that information either, so it's an item of interest that sits on a back burner for now.

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Muddling Through the Mullanes was my first attempt at clarifying the Mullane relationships, and fortunately my best guess assumptions proved correct.  That means that my great grandmother Mary Mullane's brothers had a lot of loss. Her brothers Phillip, Edward, and Patrick all lost children between 1905 and 1917.

The first child lost was Phillip's daughter Maria Nora Mullane who died on August 28, 1905 at the age of 2 months, 22 days old.  I was able to find a copy of her burial record from Holy Cross at sfgenealogy.com and it appears she died from enteritis (at least that's the best guess I can come up with as the handwritten record is atrocious!)

Edward was the next brother to lose a child.  On January 8, 1915, Edward and his wife Margaret lost their son Thomas Joseph Mullane.  He was only about three and a half.  I don't have a copy of his death certificate and the records at sfgenealogy.com only go up to January, 1911.  My best guess would be some kind of illness.

Edward lost his second child, a daughter named Margaret a little over a year later on June 20, 1916.  Margaret was only three months old at the time of her death.

The next child lost was Patrick's daughter Myrtle Marie Mullane.  She died on July 3 or 4, 1916 (the death notice and headstone say July 3, the CA Death Index says July 4) in Sonoma County.  Her death notice says "in Verano", which I'm guessing is El Verano.  El Verano is a resort town just outside of Sonoma city near several hot springs.  Based on the date of her death, I'm guessing the family were on vacation for the Independence Day holiday when she died.  Again, I don't have a copy of her death certificate, but I'm guessing there was some sort of accident.

The family tragedies didn't end there.  Phillip and his wife Mary lost two of their three sons in 1917.  First Edward Ignatius on February 25 then Phillip Clayton just a month later on March 27.  Edward was about thirteen and a half and died within days of my great grandfather Marshall Murray's sister Mollie (Mary) Murray Johnson.  Phillip was a few months shy of his tenth birthday.  Again, I would need copies of their death certificates to know how they died, but based on the proximities of their respective deaths, I would guess some contagious illness was the cause.  Whether it was the flu, tuberculosis, measles, or some other illness that is much more survivable and preventable today is something left to be determined.

The losses in the Mullane family during this time weren't limited to the children of my great granduncles.  My great grandmother had 6 or 7 brothers, and three of them also died between 1905-1917.  Thomas Michael Mullane died on March 19, 1910 of tuberculosis.  I only recently discovered his death notice in the San Francisco Chronicle and discovered he was married to a woman named Jennie, so I will need to follow up on her.  Oldest brother John Martin Mullane also died of tuberculosis a year later on April 15, 1911.  It doesn't appear that he ever married.  Finally Edward (George) Washington Mullane died not long after his daughter Margaret on January 16, 1917, also of tuberculosis.  The coroner's report of his death indicated he had suffered from tuberculosis "for some time", so it's possible that with so many family members with tuberculosis that some of the children were exposed to it and also died from it.

That is quite a lot of loss in over about a 12 year period and again reminds me of how much has changed over the past century.  Today, tuberculosis is pretty rare in the United States and can be treated with antibiotics (though it appears that a drug resistant form has developed in recent years making it more difficult to treat.)  I decided to take a quick look at the leading causes of death in 1910 -- about the midpoint for the many Mullane deaths.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, the leading causes of death for adults between 20-50 are tuberculosis and typhoid (excluding the high percentage of deaths related to post-partum infections) and for children 10 and under it's diarrhea/enteritis and bronchopnuemonia.  In 2010, the leading causes of death are cancer and heart disease (presumably this is for adults, I wasn't able to find an easy split.) Similarly, in 1915 the infant mortality rate was about 100 per every 1,000 live births or 10% of all children.  By 2013 (the most recent date I was able to find) the number has dropped to 5.6 infant deaths per every 1,000 live births or just 0.56%.  It's good to be reminded every once and a while just how much progress has been made over the last 100 years.  Sometimes it's all too easy to take for granted the advances modern medicine and technology have given rather than being amazed at the progress that has been made.

More Mystifying Mary Mullane

Trying to find out about my great grandmother Mary Mullane has been quite a puzzle. To date, the only Mary Josephine Mullane I have found in San Francisco was married to a Dennis Edward Hayes in both the 1900 and 1910 censuses. My grandfather Edward Murray was born in 1914, which leaves a four-year gap between records and should have Mary Mullane and Marshall Murray married by 1913.

I sent off for her death record months ago, but haven’t received any response to the inquiry and may need to request it again as I’m hoping that will help me identify her parents and thus help clear up some of my confusion. I also sent off for the birth record for my grandfather, which provided some interesting, but again confusing, information.

For starters, my grandfather’s name is listed as John Marshall Edward Murray. Where on earth did “John” come from?! My best guess is that it was to honor my great great grandfather John Murray. From what I can tell, he never used John at any point in his life after that. And that’s not even the confusing part!

Towards the bottom of the birth certificate is a notation “Number of children born to this mother, including present birth.” That number is listed as two. Next to it is a notation “Number of children of this mother now living.” That number is listed as one. Well, ok, what’s that all about? There was a family story that my grandfather had an older sister who died as a child and that would match up with the birth certificate information. The question becomes, then, when was this sister born?

According to the 1900 and 1910 census records Mary Mullane Hayes had no children. If this Mary Mullane is the same Mary Mullane that married my great grandfather, then between April 1910 (when the census was taken) and May 1914 (when my grandfather was born) she would have had to have lost a husband, remarried, and had a daughter who subsequently died. That’s an awful lot in a fairly short time. It’s not impossible of course – a fairly reasonable scenario would be something like this:

  May 1910 – unknown daughter born to Mary & Edward Hayes
  1910 – unknown daughter dies in infancy
  1911 – Edward Hayes dies/abandons/divorces Mary
  1912 – Mary meets Marshall Murray
  1913 – Mary and Marshall are married
  May 1914 – Edward Murray is born

I have no evidence whatsoever to support that timeline, but it’s one that makes sense. Another scenario is that Edward Hayes dies before the unknown daughter and Mary marries Marshall then the daughter dies – a widow with a young child might be likely to marry sooner rather than later especially at that point in history.

Unfortunately, that’s all speculation. I’ve yet to find any record of Mary and Marshall’s marriage. I have no idea what happened to Edward Hayes. And I haven’t the faintest idea if the sister is a full sister or half-sister or when she was born or when she died. Heck, I don’t even know for certain if the other child was a girl!

I have been tracking down some other leads on the Mullanes, but I will save them for another post. I will say, this particular branch of the family tree is quite confounding!

Beginning to Search

It seems inevitable now that I should be the one to start digging into the Murray family tree. My curiosity in my family history was first sparked back in elementary school. It must have been in about third grade when I had to write my first “autobiography” for a class assignment. It was an assignment that would creep up again in seventh grade, and ninth grade, and my junior year of college. Find out about your family, where did they come from, what did they do, how does that relate to who you are. Most of them were pretty simple and straight forward – cover your parents, siblings, and grandparents and you’re done. Aunts, uncles and cousins were bonus material. Great-grandparents and beyond were definite extra credit. I was never a student who had the burning urge to go above and beyond the required assignment, so I essentially recycled the same information each time just with more sophistication.

Still, those assignments did strike up an interest in finding out more about my family history, but boy it would take a lot of work. Then about 15 years ago, my mother’s older brother, who had been doing considerable research on that side of the family, organized a Muckle Family Reunion and that got me interested more. I asked my uncle to copy me on the emails he was sending to my mother and her siblings about what he found out. That led to me receiving a lot of emails that made my brain hurt – in large part due to the “generational math” I had to keep doing since my uncle would reference new found family members in relation to his generation. It was one thing to remember that references to “Grandpa” were actually about my great-grandfather, but when he started in on aunts, uncles, and cousins I’d get hopelessly lost trying to figure out how I was related to these people. There were way too many names to keep track of by hand, so I downloaded a freeware genealogy program to input all the people and the info he passed along. Having a picture of who everyone was made it a lot easier to follow the emails!

Once I had all of the Dwyer/Kenny side of the family input to the freeware program, it was only logical to input the Murray/Coleman side too. Of course, this was the more difficult side to fill in. Nana died when I was 4, Grandpa Murray when I was 12, so there weren’t many family tales to fill in. Nana had two sisters and a brother who out lived her by many years, but they weren’t people I saw often. Except for one evening in the late 1990s when Aunt Margaret, Nana’s younger sister, was over to dinner with my parents. She started telling stories of her family and about half way through I realized that someone needed to grab a pen and notepad and start taking notes, so I did. That I hung on to them for years later is something that amazes me. I plugged in what I knew and asked Mom to help fill in some of the gaps with what she knew. Over the years, I would update the family tree with the information from my uncle and the usual family births, deaths, and marriages as they occurred.

It was a fairly passive way to keep track of the family tree, but I always had in the back of my mind that I’d do some real digging when I got some time. Even in the digital age, it was going to take some real leg work to get a lot of the information. Then, one day about 2 years ago, I was picking up some office supplies and I saw a copy of Family Tree Maker 2009 available on sale. It was a much more robust program than the freeware program I’d been using for close to a decade and I hadn’t been able to upgrade the freeware program in a while so I figured what the heck, and picked it up. The only downside was I was going to have to manually transfer all the data from the freeware program to Family Tree Maker – there wasn’t a clean way to do it otherwise.  That was going to take a while. I did the easy bit first – entering the immediate family – and I’d get to the rest of it as time permitted.

It took the better part of two years to get the data copied over from the freeware program. While it was somewhat time intensive, it was more a matter of only having small amounts of time to spend copying the data than the volume of data to be copied. Once I had the data in place, I decided that it was finally time to start getting serious about getting to work on the Murray/Coleman side of the tree. There was already so much information on the Dwyer/Kenny side from my uncle that I didn’t need to worry about researching a full half of my family! 2012 was to be the year to start digging in and seeing what I could find. One other nice part of Family Tree Maker is that it’s distributed by Ancestry.com, and if you have a paid membership you can access the data archives there and merge it into your family tree. So I decided to pony up for the US only membership and see how it went. Boy was I in for a surprise!

Coming Next:  The first month of digging.