Another Mullane Mystery -- Thomas M. Mullane

In Answering and Reviewing Questions, Part 2, I mentioned I had recently discovered a death notice for Thomas Michael Mullane, one of my great-grandmother Mary Mullane Murray's younger brothers. The surprising bit of information that I discovered from that was that Thomas was married to a woman named Jennie. I set off to find out more about Jennie and what might have happened to her, and the first thing I turned up was a census record from 1900. Thomas and Jennie were living on Sixth Street in San Francisco with their one month old son, Thomas, Jr. and had been married for a year. That was even more surprising news! There was no mention of a child in Thomas's death notice in 1910, so was he left out or had he also died?

I then went to check the 1910 census and discovered it was taken in April -- a month after Thomas died. That meant looking for Jennie as a widow with a nearly 10 year old son.  Neither turned up. I checked the city directories and the death notice for an address and turned up 111 or 111 1/2 Germania Street. With that information I could identify the enumeration district for the 1910 census and search the images directly. I found 111 Germania, but not Jennie and Thomas, Jr. Looking at some of the other records on the page, I suspect 111 1/2 was missed as there are records for 109 1/2 and 107A. It's also possible that Jennie and her son have gone to live with her family, but as yet I don't know Jennie's maiden name to look for her there.

So, I tried to see if I could find a record of Jennie and Thomas's marriage in 1899. My best bet for that would be newspapers (and I am eternally grateful that both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Call are available on line for these kinds of searches!)  Off to newspapers.com to run my search and I get a couple of hits on Thomas M. Mullane in June 1899 -- fantastic! Well, not so fast.

I took a look at the articles and they aren't a marriage notice, but brief articles on the theft of some shoes! A shop owner named H.C. Lucke reported an on-going theft of shoes from his shop. The name looked familiar to me, so I went back to my records and saw that Thomas Mullane was listed as working for Mr. Lucke in the 1896-1898 city directories!

The article that appears in the Call says that Thomas Mullane (spelled Mulane), age 23, had worked for Mr. Lucke for seven years. It seems Thomas and one of his co-workers had been stealing "only the most expensive makes" of shoes that cost "from $7 and upward" over a period of two months and giving or selling them to friends and acquaintances. When they were arrested, the police found "a dozen fine pair of patent leather shoes" and both men promptly confessed. Thomas's partner in crime, a Charles Rochette, had worked for Mr. Lucke for about three months and had been hired "as an act of charity."

For such a brief article, it contained a lot of information. For example, Mr. Rochette was married "to an estimable young woman" and resided at 217 Eighth Street. For my purpose, however, the line for Thomas was more promising as he was "unmarried" per this article.  So as of June 9, 1899, Thomas is not married. His son, Thomas, Jr. was born on May 10, 1900. That gives me a window to search for a marriage notice for Thomas and Jennie. Nothing has turned up on my searches, so I'm going to have to look at the papers manually.  I'm also going to need to follow up on the arrest of Thomas Mullane to see if there's any notice of punishment. The articles I found just say he was booked into the city prison for petty larceny, so I'm not sure how much time, if any, he would be in jail.

I'm also puzzled about why I haven't been able to turn up anything on Thomas, Jr. after 1900. He isn't mentioned in the death notice for his father, and I can't find any record at all beyond his birth notice. It's possible he died before his father, but I haven't turned him up in the California Death Indexes. The death indexes don't begin until 1905, so if he died as a young child he wouldn't be there, but I'm also not finding a burial record at Holy Cross. While it's possible that if he did die between 1900-1905 that he wasn't buried at Holy Cross, that seems a little unusual. His father is buried there in the family plot, so it would make sense if he were buried there too. Another possibility is that his mother Jennie remarried and her new husband adopted Thomas Jr. thus giving him a different last name.

It's going to take some digging and slogging through pages of newspapers and city directories to see if I can turn anything up on Thomas, Jennie, and Thomas Jr. Fortunately, I can do most of that research on line so I won't have to wait to gain access to the records I'm looking for. It will probably take some time though, particularly going through the newspapers as it's easy to miss things if you don't pay attention. Hopefully I'll be able to work out this puzzle and find out what happened!

Answering and Reviewing Some Questions, Part 2

In my last post, I started answering and following up on some of the questions I have discussed in earlier posts on this blog.  This post continues the review of past entries with updates and current status.

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When I was reviewing the 1940 Census trying to locate my family, I realized one of the reasons I'd had difficulty finding my grandparents and great-grandparents was that neither Marshall nor Edward Murray were working in occupations I had expected them to be.  The most curious discovery was that my grandfather Edward had appeared in several 1930s directories as a "reporter".  A reporter?  Grandpa Murray was a teamster, what's this reporter business?  I asked my father about it and he said yes, his father had worked for a newspaper.  Dad wasn't sure which one and thought he might have been a photographer.  I'll need to do some digging to see if I can find out what exactly Grandpa Murray was doing when he worked at a newspaper.  Dad also said that his father didn't graduate from high school, but according to the 1940 census he had completed 12 years of school.  My grandmother was the informant on that, so presumably she knew whether or not my grandfather had graduated.

I still haven't figured out for certain how my great grandfather paid for the house on Natoma.  I'm still guessing there was a life insurance payment after my great grandmother died in July, 1940, but I haven't found any evidence of that yet.  I'm not entirely sure where I might find that information either, so it's an item of interest that sits on a back burner for now.

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Muddling Through the Mullanes was my first attempt at clarifying the Mullane relationships, and fortunately my best guess assumptions proved correct.  That means that my great grandmother Mary Mullane's brothers had a lot of loss. Her brothers Phillip, Edward, and Patrick all lost children between 1905 and 1917.

The first child lost was Phillip's daughter Maria Nora Mullane who died on August 28, 1905 at the age of 2 months, 22 days old.  I was able to find a copy of her burial record from Holy Cross at sfgenealogy.com and it appears she died from enteritis (at least that's the best guess I can come up with as the handwritten record is atrocious!)

Edward was the next brother to lose a child.  On January 8, 1915, Edward and his wife Margaret lost their son Thomas Joseph Mullane.  He was only about three and a half.  I don't have a copy of his death certificate and the records at sfgenealogy.com only go up to January, 1911.  My best guess would be some kind of illness.

Edward lost his second child, a daughter named Margaret a little over a year later on June 20, 1916.  Margaret was only three months old at the time of her death.

The next child lost was Patrick's daughter Myrtle Marie Mullane.  She died on July 3 or 4, 1916 (the death notice and headstone say July 3, the CA Death Index says July 4) in Sonoma County.  Her death notice says "in Verano", which I'm guessing is El Verano.  El Verano is a resort town just outside of Sonoma city near several hot springs.  Based on the date of her death, I'm guessing the family were on vacation for the Independence Day holiday when she died.  Again, I don't have a copy of her death certificate, but I'm guessing there was some sort of accident.

The family tragedies didn't end there.  Phillip and his wife Mary lost two of their three sons in 1917.  First Edward Ignatius on February 25 then Phillip Clayton just a month later on March 27.  Edward was about thirteen and a half and died within days of my great grandfather Marshall Murray's sister Mollie (Mary) Murray Johnson.  Phillip was a few months shy of his tenth birthday.  Again, I would need copies of their death certificates to know how they died, but based on the proximities of their respective deaths, I would guess some contagious illness was the cause.  Whether it was the flu, tuberculosis, measles, or some other illness that is much more survivable and preventable today is something left to be determined.

The losses in the Mullane family during this time weren't limited to the children of my great granduncles.  My great grandmother had 6 or 7 brothers, and three of them also died between 1905-1917.  Thomas Michael Mullane died on March 19, 1910 of tuberculosis.  I only recently discovered his death notice in the San Francisco Chronicle and discovered he was married to a woman named Jennie, so I will need to follow up on her.  Oldest brother John Martin Mullane also died of tuberculosis a year later on April 15, 1911.  It doesn't appear that he ever married.  Finally Edward (George) Washington Mullane died not long after his daughter Margaret on January 16, 1917, also of tuberculosis.  The coroner's report of his death indicated he had suffered from tuberculosis "for some time", so it's possible that with so many family members with tuberculosis that some of the children were exposed to it and also died from it.

That is quite a lot of loss in over about a 12 year period and again reminds me of how much has changed over the past century.  Today, tuberculosis is pretty rare in the United States and can be treated with antibiotics (though it appears that a drug resistant form has developed in recent years making it more difficult to treat.)  I decided to take a quick look at the leading causes of death in 1910 -- about the midpoint for the many Mullane deaths.  According to the Centers for Disease Control, the leading causes of death for adults between 20-50 are tuberculosis and typhoid (excluding the high percentage of deaths related to post-partum infections) and for children 10 and under it's diarrhea/enteritis and bronchopnuemonia.  In 2010, the leading causes of death are cancer and heart disease (presumably this is for adults, I wasn't able to find an easy split.) Similarly, in 1915 the infant mortality rate was about 100 per every 1,000 live births or 10% of all children.  By 2013 (the most recent date I was able to find) the number has dropped to 5.6 infant deaths per every 1,000 live births or just 0.56%.  It's good to be reminded every once and a while just how much progress has been made over the last 100 years.  Sometimes it's all too easy to take for granted the advances modern medicine and technology have given rather than being amazed at the progress that has been made.

Muddling through the Mullanes

After a recent lull in my researching, I decided to focus a little more energy on the family tree. I've gotten to a bit of a sticking point on the Murray branch, so I thought I'd look into the Mullanes. I don't have a lot of definitive information about the Mullane branch of the family tree. I know my great grandmother's name was Mary Josephine Mullane and she married my great grandfather Marshall Edward Murray sometime prior to 1914 when my grandfather Edward was born. I also know she had at least two brothers, Phillip and Patrick, as they were mentioned in her death notice in the San Francisco Chronicle. Finally, Mary Mullane's mother's maiden name was Manning.

After that, things get confusing. The only Mary Josephine Mullane I have been able to find to date lived on Belcher Street in the late 1890s/early 1900s. This Mary Mullane, however, is married to a Denis Edward Hayes in the 1900 and 1910 censuses. If this is the right Mary Mullane, then in 1900 she was living with her husband and two brothers, Joseph and Patrick, and in 1910 she and Mr. Hayes are living with another brother, John. Through the San Francisco city directories, I have also found a Timothy, Thomas, Phillip, and Edward Mullane living at the same address on Belcher.

Now, the first rule of genealogy is not to assume anything. Documentation is crucial to correctly identifying the correct family members. However, with the lack of solid information, I needed to start somewhere and decided to see what I could find on the Belcher Street Mullanes. I left Mary alone since I've already been tearing my hair out trying to figure out if she is indeed the correct Mary Mullane and focused on what I am assuming are the brothers.

From what I've found so far, the Mullanes had a rough time of it in the early 20th century. Patrick Mullane married a woman named Ella Mary (last name unknown) and in about 1907 they had a daughter Myrtle. Myrtle only appears in the 1910 census though. When Patrick and Ella show up again in 1920, there is no sign of Myrtle. Since she would have been about 13 in 1920, I decided to take a look at the California Death Index for 1905-1929. There's a Myrtle Mullane who died in 1916 at age 9. From what I can tell so far, Patrick and Ella had no other children. Phillip Mullane married a Mary Greeley in 1902 and they had at least 4 children. In the 1910 cenus, they have two sons Edward and Clayton, but according to the census record Mary had given birth to three children. By the 1920 census Phillip and Mary show up, but with only one son and his name is Leonard, age 7. Since Edward and Clayton would have been 16 and 12 in 1920, I looked for them in the CA Death Index, and found an Edward, age 13, who died in 1917. I didn't find a Clayton Mullane, but I did find a Phillip C Mullane, age 9, who also died in 1917. I'd have to order the death certificate to be certain that Phillip C Mullane and Clayton Mullane are the same person, but their ages are similar and Phillip C Mullane died in San Francisco. As for the fourth unknown child indicated in the 1910 census, I found a birth notice for a daughter born to a Phillip Mullane in 1905 in the San Francisco Call, but couldn't find any death record that might correspond to a girl born in 1905 who died before 1910. If these are the Patrick and Phillip Mullane identified in my great grandmother's death notice, then they had a really tough time.

John Mullane died in 1911, based on a death notice I found in the San Francisco Call. That death notice indicated brother Thomas had predeceased him, probably in 1910 (again referencing the CA Death Index.) From what I can tell neither married. I haven't found much on Joseph and Timothy Mullane yet, which leaves Edward. Edward married a woman named Margaret Shanahan (I think) in about 1908. They had three sons, Edward (b 1909), John (b 1911), and Raymond (b 1914.) This was a record I was most interested to find. Recently, one of my father's Coleman cousins contacted me as she is also doing research on the family tree. In comparing notes, she mentioned that she had known one of my father's Mullane cousins in high school. Based on the information she gave me, I believe this cousin is a descendant of the elder Edward Mullane.

I'm still waiting on Mary Mullane's death certificate, which I'm hoping will list her parents' names and help me sort out all of this muddled mess, but based on the bits of information I've found, I do feel I'm on the right track. Hopefully I'll have similar luck to what occurred with the Murrays and the missing 1880 census and I have identified the right family with out all the details filled in.