Discovering the Rosses

When I started working on my paternal family tree research in early 2012 I found a lot of information about the Murray and Mullane branches of my tree. After a while, I turned my attention to Ireland to investigate the Colemans and O'Learys which included learning my great great grandfather Jeremiah O'Leary married a woman named Mary Looney. I managed to discover quite a bit of information about the Colemans, O'Learys, and (O)Looneys, but for some reason I never dug into the Ross branch of the tree.

My great great grandfather John Coleman was married to a woman named Ellen Ross. All I really knew about her was that she had died in childbirth and John eventually remarried which led to my great grandfather Daniel Coleman to join the English navy at fourteen. By finding baptismal records for John and Ellen's children and then a record for John's second marriage, I was able to determine Ellen died sometime between 1861 when her last child was born and 1865 when John remarried. I rather left things like that for quite some time with the only new information I uncovered being John and Ellen's marriage record in 1850.

While talking with one of my Coleman cousins recently, she mentioned she had some information on the Ross tree that she had discovered by checking out another family tree on Ancestry. I usually stay away from those trees as many of them are poorly sourced and just link in circles to other trees with no supporting documentation, but I went and checked out the tree she had mentioned and found it to be reasonably well sourced. Upon close inspection, it identified one of her brothers as Alexander Ross. I had seen that name before in Ellen and John's marriage record. That gave me reasonable confidence that this was the right family, and I started going through the details.

Ellen's parents were named Coleman Ross (go figure!) and Mary Walsh and she was one of ten children. (The tree I found on line listed eleven children, but one sister wasn't sourced like the others and I have yet to find any information about her, so I've deleted her from my tree for the time being.) The children I was able to identify with baptismal records were:

• Alexander Ross (b Mar 1828)
• Patrick Ross (b Feb 1829)
• John Ross (b Jan 1830)
• Michael Ross (b Feb 1831)
• Daniel Ross (b Dec 1834)
• Ellen Ross (b Dec 1835)
• Anne Ross (b Mar 1837)
• Clement Ross (b Aug 1839)
• Catherine Ross (b Jan 1841)
• Elizabeth Ross (b June 1843)

That's a lot of new people to follow up on and see what new information I can find. The only thing that gives me pause is Ellen's birth year in 1835. That would mean she was fourteen and a half when she married John Coleman in July 1850, which is a little young. However, that date coincides closely with the Great Famine (or Irish Potato Famine) that ran through the late 1840s, so that may have played a role in things.

I haven't spent a lot of time on this branch of the tree yet and will need to dig into Ellen's siblings to see if I can learn more. So far, I have only discovered Ellen's sister Elizabeth's marriage record to a man named Thomas Ogden.

The online tree also identified Coleman Ross's parents and siblings, but they are not sourced like Coleman Ross's family, so while I copied the names to see if I could find matches, I am taking the information I found with a big grain of salt. Per the online tree, Coleman's father was named Alexander Ross and was born in Scotland. That does match up with some family lore that Ellen's family was originally from Scotland, but there is no evidence supporting Alexander's birth or arrival in Ireland, so it's still supposition. Still, if the information in that tree is correct, Alexander and Ellen had six children:

• John Ross (b 1785)
• Coleman Ross (b 1789)
• Margaret Ross (b 1792)
• Alexander Ross, Jr. (b 1798)
• David Ross (b 1800)
• Mary Ross (b 1801)

The birth year for Coleman appears to be correct as I found a death record for him from 1873 indicating he was 84 when he died, but there are no records to document anything about the siblings. Since they were all born in the late 1700s and early 1800s, it may be difficult to find much about them. I have managed to find a little bit of information on a couple of Coleman's siblings thus far. Both Alexander and John appear in the Irish Tithe Applotment Books between 1823-1837 and are living in the same area as where the rest of the known Ross family appears. I actually found two records for an Alexander Ross in the 1825 Tithe Applotment records which indicate they leased land within about a mile of each other. That leads me to believe one may be Alexander, Sr. and the other is Alexander, Jr. That is reinforced by the notation for one Alexander as "Alex'r Ross (No. 2)", though it is possible it could just reference two plots of land leased by the same Alexander Ross. Alexander Ross, Sr. would likely be in his mid-60s or early 70s in 1825, so not out of the realm of possibility. John Ross's plot of land appears on the same record as Alexander Jr.'s, so I'm guessing they were nearby each other. I haven't found any maps to indicate where any of the plots of land are, but I haven't dug into that much yet either.

So, I have some leads on the Ross branch of the tree and that looks like it will be my 2019 project. It will be interesting to see what I can and can't prove based on the information gained so far. With dates going into the late 1700s, it may be challenging to find anything one way or the other with out actually going to Ireland, but I have found a few records so far that are helpful and may give me some more insight to others. If I can connect Alexander Ross, Sr. back to Scotland, that may be promising as there are more Scottish records than Irish in the time frame I'm interested in.

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.