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!

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.)

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.