Second and Third Field Trips

As summer rolled in, I found myself spending less time digging into the family history than I did during the winter and spring.  I have done some poking around here and there, but haven't turned up a whole lot of new information that has any definitiveness to it.  But that doesn't mean I haven't kept poking around at things either and some of the research I've needed to do required access to records not accessible on line, which definitely slows down the process.

However, I did get a chance to make a couple of field trips during the month of July.  The first was a fortunate happenstance when my cousin invited the family over for her daughter's second birthday.  Since this is the cousin who lives a block from where our great great grandparents lived from 1877-1890, I made a special point to bring my camera and planned to take a quick stroll down the street.  Unfortunately, I forgot to put the battery back in my camera after I had taken it out to charge it!  Thankfully, my mother had her iPhone with her, so I was able to borrow it when we took a stroll down the street.

Numbers 2 & 4 Harris Place,
the approximate location
of  John & Bridget Murray's home from 1877 -1890

The house my great great grandparents lived in is no longer there, but I was able to take a picture of the houses that are on the site now.  John and Bridget Murray and their family lived at 6 Harry Place, so I took pictures of the flats that are at 2 & 4 Harris Place and 8 & 10 Harris Place.

1815 Union Street - location of John Murray's last place of employment

John Murray worked at the Occidental Laundry for most of his life in San Francisco, but the only address I had for the laundry was "Filbert between Gough and Octavia", so I wasn't able to take a picture of that (the block is mostly residential now, with a couple mom & pop type storefronts.)  I did have an address for the last location that John worked and it was also within a short walking distance on Union Street, so I strolled up there to take a look at what is there now.  The building looks to have been remodeled considerably since 1890, but the storefront looks like it might be from the original building. The original building probably looked something like the yellow one to the right in the picture.

My next field trip came at the end of July when Mom and I trekked up to Holy Cross cemetery to see if we could find Marshall and Mary Murray, my great grandparents.  Mom was also going to show me where some of the relatives on her side were buried that I couldn't find on my previous trip.

My Theler great great grandparents

On my initial trip to Holy Cross in April, I had located the approximate location for my great great grandmother Bridget McDonough Murray and her daughter Nellie and, based on the notes from my mother, they were buried in the same section as my Theler great great grandparents.  Mom and I headed up there first, and Mom realized that she had mismarked her map. The Thelers weren't in Section M, but in Section K which is down the hill.  That explains why I couldn't find them on my first trip!

Joseph & Maggie Kenny, my great grandparents

After finding the Thelers, Mom and I headed over to Section V to try and find Marshall and Mary.  As I mentioned before, the numbering makes no sense (on the rare occaisions when we could actually find numbers on the headstones) and after traipsing back and forth over the whole section, we couldn't locate their grave.  We decided we'd ask at the office for some more information, but before we went back down to the office, we went over to Section U to find my Kenny great grandparents.  We located them fairly quickly and hopped in the car to go back to the office, only to discover that a funeral procession was pulling in.  We decided to skip the office for now and plan for another trip.

142 Bosworth St. where my
Coleman great grandparents lived

14 Marsily St. where my Coleman
great grandparents lived when my
grandmother was born in 1914

Once we left Holy Cross, Mom and I drove up to San Francisco to find the house Nana grew up in on Bosworth Street.  We found it quickly and when we got out of the car to walk around the neighborhood a little bit, I noticed that the house was on the corner of Bosworth and Marsily St.  The Colemans lived on Marsily Street before they moved to New Jersey, so Mom and I walked up the street and took a look at that house also.  It looked to be fairly original to what the house probably looked like in the early 1900s when my Coleman ancestors lived there.

While we were walking around the neighborhood, my mother told me a story I'd never heard before.  Apparently my father's oldest brother fell out of the first floor window and severely broke his leg when he was about 2 years old.  When we got home, my father elaborated on the story some what -- the owner of the grocery store saw that my uncle was about to fall and ran across to try to catch him.  If I'd known that part of the story, I would have taken a picture of the small grocery store that is still across the street!

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.)