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.

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

Eureka!

After a month and a half of poking around in the family history I realize, I’ve got the bug. Each new discovery gives me a little thrill of excitement and opens up a whole set of questions I want to find answers to. I had planned on spending one weekend a month checking out the family history, but a bout of flu in late January zapped my energy so I spent more time than I had expected digging around to see what I could find. I followed a few trails to nowhere and a few others that might be somewhere but there just isn’t enough solid information to be sure yet. I really wanted to figure out where the Murray clan was in 1910, but wasn’t getting much of anywhere, so I turned my attention to the Colemans if only to get source material for what I already knew.

I found my great grandfather Daniel Coleman in the 1900 census living on Folsom Street in San Francisco. At first glance at the record, it looked like he was living with a family named Alexander, a fellow sailor. As I looked more closely at the page, however, I noticed the name “Coleman” a few lines above the Alexander family, and I realize that there is another family living at the same address. John Coleman, his wife Sadie, and children Gladys and John are also living at the same address as Daniel Coleman. Daniel is listed as a lodger, but I suspect that he and the elder John are brothers. Both are sailors and their ages are about 4 years apart and I think Daniel’s father’s name was also John, so it’s a good bet. I’ll have to check out that record a little bit more, but there are some more possible relatives.

The Coleman clan appears again in the 1910 and 1930 censuses in San Francisco. Daniel has married Elizabeth O’Leary by 1910 and they have 3 children – John, Eileen, & Daniel. By 1930 my grandmother Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret are born. I knew the family lived in New Jersey for a while and Aunt Margaret was born there, so I figured they’d be there in the 1920 census. My first few searches turned up frustratingly empty until I try a search on Aunt Eileen – BINGO! I get a thrill of excitement as I look over the record and realize it's the right family. There is the Coleman family living in Jersey City, just across the river from New York City. I suspect whomever talked to the census taker was not a member of the family as lots of the information is inaccurate (having all of the children being born in New Jersey for example) which would explain why I was having problems finding them. Oldest brother John has died by this time (something I already knew) so it’s a family of six.

Having found the Colemans in New Jersey, I turned my attention back to the Murrays in San Francisco. I was determined to find out what happened to my great-great grandmother Bridget Murray. I started checking out other genealogy sites focusing on her death record. From the 1900 census, I knew she was born in February 1841 in Ireland and the last confirmed record I could find for her was in the San Francisco city directory in 1907 when she would have been 66, so I looked for any death records between 1907 and 1920. I have learned quickly that birth dates were a guideline for the Murray family (I have found records for my great-grandfather Marshall that indicated he was born anywhere between 1873 and 1880) so when I found a mortuary record for a Bridget Murray living on Tehama Street in 1915 that matched up with a Bridget Murray I’d found in the city directory in 1915 that I hadn’t been able to eliminate from my list I thought nothing that the birth year was off by 20 years. The mortuary record didn’t have enough information for me to confirm or exclude this Bridget from my family tree, but it did indicate there was a death notice for her posted in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The San Francisco Chronicle is only available on line back to the mid 1990s, so obviously this was going to mean a trip to the library and pulling out microfilm. Thank goodness I’d learned this method of research way back in high school in the dark ages before the internet! A trip to the San Mateo Main Library was all that was needed to confirm whether or not this was indeed my great-great grandmother. I pulled the appropriate roll of film and scrolled to the date I’d found on-line. Reading the death notices in the 1915 Chronicle was not an easy task – the print is really small and I could only zoom in so much. I had to practically press my nose to the glass to read “…Bridget Murray beloved mother of Eugene, Joseph, Thomas, Stephen, and Frank Murray…”  Damn, wrong Bridget. Again. I printed out the page anyway just so I’d have a reference for the wrong Bridget in case I ran into her again.

Meanwhile, in between searching for family members, I was also searching for resources to find my family members. One of the ones I discovered was the Library of Congress. They have a large collection of old newspapers available and searchable on line. One of the papers is the now defunct San Francisco Call. On a whim, I decided to see how good the search function was, so I entered Bridget Murray and the years 1900 to 1920 to see what I might turn up. Imagine my joy when 23 different pages popped up! My joy faded a bit when the first three records I found were for real estate transactions. All of the records I’d found for the Murrays indicated they were renters and working class – they likely couldn’t afford to buy and sell multiple properties. The fourth record I found was a 1909 death notice for an Ella Agnes Nelson. Who? That can’t be the right family. But wait… “…beloved daughter of the late John and Bridget Murray, and loving sister of John, Mollie, Marshall, and Joseph Murray.” The brothers’ names are right, the mother’s name is right, but the two sisters don’t quite match up with the Nellie and Mary I found in the 1900 census. I’ll save that record to look at later and see what else has turned up. Going on a hunch from Ella’s death notice, I scanned the other results of my search and noticed another record that looked like the birth/marriage/death notice section and was from 1907. I opened that record up and JACKPOT! This Bridget Murray lived at the last address I had that I was sure was hers and her children were listed as “John, Mollie, Marshall E., and Joseph Murray and Mrs. Edward Nelson.” That not only meant I had the right family, it meant I had a LOT more information.

According to the death notice, Bridget’s husband was named John; she was born in County Sligo Ireland, and she was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery! I had suspected she was buried at Holy Cross since it’s the main Catholic cemetery near San Francisco and pretty much all the rest of my relatives have been buried there over the last 100 or so years, but it was fantastic to have confirmation of this. The death notice also asked that papers in Chelsea, Massachusetts be copied, so it looks like I have another lead to track down.

Of course, Bridget’s death record also meant that the death record I found for Ella Agnes Nelson was also the right family, which would make her Nellie. She and her husband Edward were living in Santa Rosa, California, so I’ll have to dig around and see what I find for her there – if anything at all. I’ll also have to figure out her age – not a surprising issue I know – as in the 1900 census she’s listed as having been born in 1878 which would make her 31 in 1909, but the death notice looks to have her as 23 or 25 (again the print is small and difficult to read.)

Finding Bridget and Nellie gave me quite a thrill and I did a little happy dance in my living room. Oh yes, I’m definitely hooked on this maze of mysteries. And still more new leads and trails to follow. Who is this Edward Nelson? Did he and Nellie have any children? What happened to my great-great grandfather John? And now that Mary is Mollie, will I be able to find her as well? I also realize I need to get in touch with my father’s cousin who is supposed to be working on the Coleman family tree to see if my theory about the John Coleman I found living with my great grandfather is correct. Many paths through the maze, and what fun they are to follow!

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.