Following Up on John Coleman's Children -- Aileen Gertrude Coleman

John and Sadie Coleman had five children who survived into adulthood. The second of their four daughters was named Aileen Gertrude Coleman and she was born in about 1904. Aileen has been an interesting relative to track down, and only in part due to having to separate her records from that of my grandmother's older sister Eileen Dolores Coleman who was born in 1907. I still haven't found a common Coleman ancestor to attribute the two cousins being so similarly named. The closest would be their grandmother Ellen Ross Coleman.

As with all of John and Sadie's children, there has been some challenge in finding out what happened to them over the course of their lives, a matter made more complicated by multiple name changes due to marriage and divorce. Aileen is no different. When I first found Aileen in the 1930 Census, she was listed as Aileen Myers and divorced. She and her son, Raymond (then 3 years old) had moved back home with her mother and siblings. In the 1940 Census, she is again living with her mother and son, but this time her name is Aileen Stiles. She is listed as married, but there is no husband living with her.

So now I had to set out to find two husbands for Aileen. Based on the information I had, I put an approximate timeline on her first marriage to be about 1925 and her divorce must have taken place between about 1927 and 1930. I dug around and eventually found a marriage record for Aileen's first marriage. She married Leslie Louis Myers on October 31, 1925 at St. Andrews Church in Oakland. Their son, Raymond Lester Myers, was born about six months later on May 2, 1926. Since it would appear Aileen was pregnant when she and Leslie Myers married, perhaps things fell apart because of the "shotgun wedding" aspect.

I started looking to see if I could find any record of their divorce and while I've yet to find a confirmed documentation for the date of their divorce, I did find the reason why. While searching through the Oakland Tribune for divorce notices, I found a couple of articles in January 1929 that indicated Leslie had been arrested for embezzlement. According to the January 7, 1929 edition of the Oakland Tribune, Leslie Myers had forged and sold $2000 worth of stock certificates while working as an assistant bookkeeper at the Montgomery and California Street branch of the Bank of Italy (which would later become the Bank of America) due to "destitute circumstances and illness of his wife and baby." He surrendered himself to the San Francisco police on January 5 and "told police he was a 'two-time embezzler,' having taken $1500 from an Oakland Loan company two years ago." Leslie was apparently on probation for the earlier embezzlement which was nearing it's completion as he had repaid most of the money he had stolen. (While the article doesn't state as much, I would imagine the repayments from his first embezzlement came from money he obtained from the second one.) A follow up article in the January 23, 1929 edition of the Oakland Tribune reported that Leslie Myers was sentenced to five years in federal prison. Sure enough, the next time I found Leslie Myers was in the 1930 Census in the federal prison at McNeil Island in Washington. His record shows him as married, so I'm guessing the divorce was in progress around the time of the census or the prison official who completed the census form did not have a current file on Leslie Myers marital status. Leslie Myers died in July 1977.

Now it was time to find Aileen's second husband, Mr. Stiles and determine what happened to him. Why isn't he living with Aileen in the 1940 Census? It's a little too early for him to have gone off to fight in World War II, though that could have been a possibility if he'd gone to Canada or the UK which were already involved in the fighting by then. I needed to back track then and see if I could find any record of an Aileen Stiles between 1930 and 1940. That's where the city directories and voter registries came in handy, and I eventually found Aileen Stiles in a 1932 voter register in Oakland. Mr. Stiles wasn't listed on that record, but there was another register for 1934 and this time I found her with her husband Nelson H. Stiles, a truck driver. The latest record I was able to find of them living together was a 1938 voter register. I went off to the newspapers then to see what I could find and I eventually turned up a notice of a divorce granted to Aileen Stiles from Nelson H. Stiles in the July 4, 1941 edition of the Oakland Tribune.

After her second divorce, Aileen went back to using the name Aileen Myers, presumably because that was the same last name as her son's. I'm still looking into Aileen to find out what happened to her after she divorced for the second time. Right now, I've been able to track her until about 1956 through city directories. I have yet to find a death record for her and I have found very little information on her son Raymond. So there a couple more puzzles to work out.

A Slow Year for Research

As you may have noticed from the paucity of posts this year, I’ve been a bit lax in my research in recent months. I’ve spent some time cleaning out my database and better organizing my files, but I’ve not spent a whole lot of time on searching for new records and documents.

That’s not to say I haven’t done any research or found new documents. After Uncle Eddie died last December, I wound up with some records that had been in his possession. Uncle Eddie (my father’s eldest brother) had been the executor for Aunt Eileen’s estate. Aunt Eileen was my grandmother’s oldest sister and she and Uncle Bill had no children, so her estate was left to her nieces and nephews. In the documents Uncle Eddie had, there was a copy of her will which listed her beneficiaries and contained addresses for them as of her death in 1998. Nothing in those documents was hugely revealing, though it was helpful in locating some past addresses of relatives.

The more interesting documents I received were ones that were indirectly related to Eileen’s estate. The key document was a copy of a baptismal record for my great grandmother Lizzie O’Leary Coleman. It wasn’t an original record of her baptism, but one that was provided by the parish in 1938. This record indicates that Lizzie was baptized in the parish of Ovens in the Diocese of Cork. My earlier discoveries had put her baptism in the parish of Ballinhassig, but as I had spent time looking for baptismal records I had uncovered a map of the various Catholic parishes in Ireland and knew that the parish of Ovens (or Ovens & Aglis) wasn’t far from Ballinhassig and Ballincollig parishes. I’m guessing that in the intervening years since my great grandmother was baptized (in 1873) and the record was provided (in 1938) the parishes merged.

This discovery helped reinforce my earlier discovery of Jeremiah O’Leary’s baptism in the Ovens and Aglis parish in 1825. While I’m not 100% certain that the record I found for Jeremiah is that of my great great grandfather, the odds are favorable.

Lizzie’s baptismal record matches up with the record I found on line – her parents are Jeremiah O’Leary and Mary Looney and her godparents are Timothy Riordan and Mary Looney. I’ve yet to figure out who the second Mary Looney is, but that’s a trail to follow. The one additional item I learned is the name of the priest who baptized her – Reverend Carson Murphy. Whether these clues lead to any other information remains to be seen.

I also wound up with a lot of information on Uncle Bill’s side of the family as his family records were among Aunt Eileen’s papers. While the Doheneys are only relatives by marriage, it’s interesting information to have and may prove useful further on down the line as my research continues.

I also finally received a copy of my great grandmother Mary Mullane Murray’s death certificate. It confirmed that I have been tracking the correct Mullane family from San Francisco over the last year and a half. Mary’s parents are listed as Mary Manning and Timothy Mullane, which are the names I had found in the census, city directories, and newspapers. It also confirms my thought that Mary was less than honest on her marriage license application! Her death certificate indicates that Timothy Mullane was born in England, which conflicts with the census information I found showing him born in Ireland. Seeing how this information would have been provided by my great grandfather Marshall Murray, I suspect it was his best guess. Nonetheless, it may be another clue on places to search.

According to her death certificate, Mary died of chronic myocarditis brought on by high blood pressure. She also had a chronic ventral hernia and something illegible due to atrophy of her abdominal muscles. All in all sounds like a heart condition to me.

I’ve also dug around and believe I’ve found a few more Mullane and O’Leary descendants that are still living in the San Francisco Bay Area where much of the family has remained over the past 150 years. I’m still working out some verifications and double checking the records, but there looks to be quite a few distant cousins in the area.

So while I’ve not been as diligent in my research this year as I was last year, I have still made some strides in finding out where my family came from and where they’ve wound up. Hopefully as the autumn progresses I will find a bit more time to follow up on some of the leads I’ve discovered.

More Photos

I've been in the process of setting up a new computer this week, so didn't upload all the pictures I received from Letty and Cici (partly because I needed to install a new scanner to copy a few of them.) Here are the rest with what information is available. I have uploaded them as I received them save for some minor cropping of white space. I plan on cleaning up what I can of them (saved as a revised version!)

Lizzie O'Leary (standing) with
her sister Polly and mother Mary
about 1903 Ireland

John Alexander Coleman
1905-1913
Daniel & Lizzie's oldest child

Daniel J. Coleman (Uncle Dan)
about 1920

Eileen, Lizzie, Daniel J.
& Elizabeth (Bess) Coleman

Margaret, Daniel P., &  Lizzie Coleman
aboard ship about 1920

Margaret, Daniel P., & Lizzie again

Daniel J. & Elizabeth (Bess) Coleman
(we won't ask what Nana did to her hair)

Family Photos

Growing up I spent a lot of time at my maternal grandparents' house, which had a large room downstairs off the garage.  When my mother was growing up, this room belonged to her two brothers, but I knew it as the family room where Grandma kept a lot of the toys for her many grandchildren. When my grandparents converted it from a bedroom to a family room, they hung a variety of pictures on the wall. Most of the pictures were early photographs of their parents and grandparents. I never really knew who was who in those pictures, but I always knew they were family and the stories related to the various people pictured.

After my grandparents and my grandaunt Elise (my grandfather Dwyer's sister) passed away, my mother's older brother and cousin started going through the family photo albums and scanning pictures for the rest of the family to share. So over the years I've acquired copies of pictures of my grandparents as children (though mostly of my grandfather), my mother and her siblings throughout the years, and so forth and so on. There are lots and lots of pictures of the Dwyer side of my family.

The Murray side, however, is a completely different scenario. For most of my life I've only ever seen about a dozen photographs of anyone on my father's side of the family that were taken before my parents were married. There are a couple of pictures of my dad in high school, a few more from when he was in the army, a picture of Nana and Grandpa Murray taken when my uncle Ed was ordained a priest, another of my father and three of his four brothers taken when my dad was about five, and one or two of my father’s brother Dan after a hunting trip. That’s it. The Dwyer family was big on photography. The Murray family, not so much, and for all I knew there were no other photographs.

At this point in the story, it has become necessary to talk about living people. When I started this blog, I decided not to name any living people, however the narrative starts getting confusing if I keep referring to several people as “cousin.” For this reason, I will be using aliases when referring to living relatives as I continue the story.

About five years ago, however, my father's cousin Letty sent some pictures to Uncle Eddie. He asked one of my cousins to duplicate them for the rest of the family, and suddenly I had about a half dozen new photographs. They look to have been taken in about 1942, based on the one shot with my father in it. There are two pictures that are particularly good. The first is of Nana and Grandpa Murray who are in their late 20s and standing arm in arm in front of the summer rental house they were staying in. The second photo is of my great grandmother Lizzie O'Leary Coleman with Grandpa Murray, my father, and his two older brothers Ed and Dan. Lizzie is wearing a hat in the picture, which makes it difficult to see her face, but it’s nice to see a picture of my grandfather as a young man and my father sucking his thumb!

Lizzie O'Leary & Daniel  
Coleman (seated)
on their wedding
day in 1904

These new found photos are precious to me, and I have the two I mentioned framed and hanging on my living room wall. Then about two months ago, my father's cousin Cici, with whom I have been corresponding about my Coleman/O'Leary research, sent me a scanned file of a photograph of Lizzie O'Leary and Daniel Coleman on their wedding day! Holy smokes!  There are more photographs!

Lizzie O'Leary on her wedding day

When I told her I had received the photo with out any problems, she sent me several more. I have also been in contact with Letty about my research and she too sent me some photos, in this case, hard copies. Some of the pictures I received from Letty were duplicates of the ones I received from Cici, but all told, I now had about a dozen photographs from about 1900-1920 of my Coleman relatives! Wow!

Lizzie O'Leary Coleman 
at her house in Bernal Heights 

Granted, photography has only been around for a little over 150 years and mass-produced cameras weren't readily available until the end of the 19^th century, but it is amazing what having a photograph of someone can inspire. The questions about who the person was, what did she do for a living, what was life like for him, and so much   more just multiply when you have an image of a relative long past. Having these few family photographs further cements that these people existed and had lives and hopes and dreams like we all do and that they aren't just stories of forgotten ghosts.

 

The Colemans on board ship circa 1920
Uncle Dan, Lizzie,
Aunt Margaret (on Lizzie's lap),
Daniel, and Nana

Aunt Eileen & Uncle Dan
I'm guessing their
First Communion
circa 1915

Back to Holy Cross

Two trips to Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma and I hadn’t been able to find my great grandparents Marshall and Mary Murray. I had been told at the office they were buried in Section V, but I could not find them and trying to figure out the section numbering was beyond frustrating. Then a couple of weeks ago I discovered that the folks at SFGenealogy.com had a searchable database of Holy Cross Cemetery available for 1887-2001. I plugged Marshall and Mary in and up popped their records – in Section U! No wonder I couldn’t find them! I entered in the names of various other family members buried at Holy Cross over the past 100 or so years and they all turned up where I expected them to and I logged the specifics for some where I only had the section noted.

My great grand parents
Marshall and Mary Murray

So I headed back up to Holy Cross with a list of names and gravesites to find. I knew that my Kenny great grandparents were also in Section U and from the database they were in Row 14, Grave 134. Marshall & Mary were in Row 23, Grave 59. Mom had shown me where the Kennys were on our last visit so I parked near their graves and counted down the aisle until I got to grave 59. Then I made a right turn and counted rows up until I hit row 23. I was only off a couple of markers and there were Marshall and Mary – finally!

Aunt Eileen & Uncle Bill Doheney

My list for section U also included my grandmother’s sister Eileen Coleman Doheney and her husband Bill. They were fairly easy to find right along the road at the top of the section. Aunt Eileen and Uncle Bill are buried with Uncle Bill’s sister Gertrude and mother Annie.

Nana’s aunt Ellen O’Leary Ford and her husband John Joseph Ford are buried in Section V with their daughter Catherine and her husband Edward Ambrose Dwyer. It was a pretty hot day, so I only did a cursory look for the Fords in Section V and will go back to look for them another day.

My father's younger brother
Jackie Murray who died at age 2

Next it was over to the children’s section to look for my father’s younger brother Jackie (John Joseph Murray.) I’d bypassed this section on previous visits since I only had a general section and not a row and grave number. It’s very sad walking through the rows and seeing lives ended so young. I found Jackie’s grave in fairly short order.

My father's second cousin
Mary Catherine Ford

Since the children’s section is close to the newer crypts where my father’s second cousin Mary Catherine Ford was buried, I walked down there too. Mary Catherine was the daughter of Arthur Patrick Ford and died of cancer in 1999 at the age of 58.

I’ve found several other relatives in the on line database and will make another trek up to Colma in the coming months to document their locations. The database was able to clear up a couple of mysteries. Nana had an older brother John who died as a child. I knew it was sometime between the 1910 census (where John appears) and 1918 when Aunt Margaret was born, but didn’t have a specific date. It turns out that John died in 1913 and is buried with his parents. The database also helped confirm a marriage record I’d found for Catherine Ford Dwyer – in Washington DC! No wonder I was having problems finding her husband in San Francisco. I’m not sure if Edward Dwyer died in San Francisco or in the Washington DC area, but at least I’ve got a name and date to help figure it out! Finally, I have a suspicion that my great grandmother’s brother, Arthur O’Leary might have lived in San Francisco as he was mentioned in Ellen O'Leary Ford's death notice. There are several Arthur O’Learys buried at Holy Cross, four who died after Ellen in 1932. Two of those four show up in the CA Death Index from 1940-1997, and one of those two was born outside of the US. I’ll need to do a bit more digging there also, but it’s a place to start.

The Name Game

I knew when I started digging in to the family tree I was likely to run in to duplicate names. Even without the information on my mother’s family that my uncle has collected over the years (which includes at least one great grandaunt being named after a deceased older sister) I could have guessed I’d run into duplication just by looking around at my living relatives. There are names that repeat across the board on both sides, some are deliberate while others are coincidence and others still are just common names found in millions of families. My current favorite – the daughter of one of my second cousins on my mother’s side has the same first name as the daughter of one of my first cousins on my father’s side. I got very confused on Facebook one day wondering why my first cousin was posting baby pictures of her now six-year-old daughter before I realized, wrong cousin.

Still, it’s one thing to be able to keep track of living people with similar names, but a whole different animal when it comes to keeping track of ancestors with similar names. More than once in the past few months, I’ve found a record for one relative and attached it to the other and later realized I’d gotten confused. Usually, it’s something like finding a record for my grandmother’s brother Daniel and associating it with their father Daniel or it’s the whole Marshall Edward/Edward Marshall scenario of my grandfather and great-grandfather. My latest discoveries, however, are going to give me no end of fits.

After talking with my father’s cousin recently, I was able to confirm my earlier suspicion that the John Coleman I’d found in the 1900 census was my great-grandfather Daniel’s older brother. John Coleman married Sadie (Sarah) Meyers in about 1895 and they had five children who survived long enough to turn up in public records: Gladys, John, Ileen/Aileen, Marion, and Noel. Now we take a quick look at my grandmother’s family. Her siblings were John, Eileen, Daniel, and Margaret. Notice any similarities? I know my grandmother’s brother John was born in about 1905 and died sometime between 1910 and 1918, so I don’t expect to run into many conflicts with my grandmother’s cousin John who was born in about 1899 and who I’ve been able to track up to 1930 so far. However, when I saw Ileen’s name pop up and that she was born in about 1904 my first response was “you’ve got to be kidding me.”  Aunt Eileen, you see, was born in 1907. First cousins, born three years apart, in the same geographic region with nearly identical names. This is going to give me fits I’m sure, especially since the elder cousin spells her name both Ileen and Aileen in the records I’ve found thus far (and I’m praying that they aren’t actually two different people.)

On the upside, I suspect it’s also a clue – family lore has my great-great grandmother’s name as Ellen, could she perhaps also be Eileen? It may also reduce some research time as both names will likely show up in the same searches. Still, you can imagine the confusion that will arise as I search for information on the following people:

John Murray (my great-great grandfather)
John Henry Murray (my great granduncle)
Marshall Edward Murray (my great-grandfather)
Edward Marshall Murray (my grandfather)
John Coleman (my great-great grandfather)
John J. Coleman (my great granduncle)
John Coleman (my grandmother’s first cousin)
John Coleman (my grandmother’s brother)
Eileen Coleman Doheney (my grandaunt)
Ileen/Aileen Coleman (my grandmother’s first cousin)
Daniel Patrick Coleman (my great-grandfather)
Daniel Jerome Coleman (my granduncle)
Elizabeth O’Leary Coleman (my great-grandmother)
Elizabeth Coleman Murray (my grandmother)

Not confusing at all. Nope.

I think I need a glass of wine.