Yep... Still Irish

So, back in late 2017, my father and I both took Ancestry DNA tests. In the three or so years since the test results came back, Ancestry has updated their database a few times which has resulted in slight changes in my DNA profile. My first results came back and I had 83% Ireland/Scotland/Wales, 13% Great Britain, and the rest trace bits of continental Europe. A year or so later, those breakdowns became 97% Ireland/Scotland and 3% England, Wales, and Northwestern Europe. Dad's results went from 93% Ireland/Scotland and 3% England/Wales/Northwestern Europe to 98% Ireland/Scotland and 2% England/Wales/Northwestern Europe. So yeah, no matter how you slice and dice the test, we're Irish.

This past summer, Ancestry did another update to their database, and this time they've been able to filter out differences between Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales, along with other refinements. So, what does this mean this time? Well, Dad's results now show him as 100% Irish. Shocking, I know.

As for me, now my results show 95% Ireland, 2% Scotland, and 3% Germanic Europe. Yep... Still Irish. It was interesting, however, to see the 3% Germanic Europe appear, since we know there is German heritage on my mother's side of the family. The French bit, however, doesn't show up in this most recent update.

In addition to this, my mother also took an Ancestry DNA test last year (yep, she's my mom), and her results show up as 85% Ireland and 15% Scotland. No Germany. No France. The update at Ancestry occurred shortly after her original results came in, so I don't know what they originally were. Her older brother's results are similar, but one of her younger sisters has a bit of French show up in her profile. All in all though, it's pretty close.

Because there's such a significant Scottish percentage with my mother and her siblings, I'm guessing it's from our Muckle ancestry -- they're the Northern Ireland branch of the tree. I believe my uncle has even made some tenuous links to Muckles in Scotland, but I don't have that information handy.

One of the other updates made on this latest round also shows a connection to New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania settlers for both me and my father (I don't have management rights on my mother's test, so don't know if she shows anything similar.) Per the description on Ancestry "members of this community, are linked through shared ancestors. You probably have family who lived in this area for years—and maybe still do." At the moment, the only ancestors I'm aware of having lived in New Jersey are my Coleman great-grandparents and their children from about 1915-1920, so that's not the likely connection. It's possible that some of my Murray ancestors settled in the New Jersey/Pennsylvania area since my great-great grandfather John Murray's obituary asked that "New York papers, please copy," but to date I've not found any direct connection to New York.

The other bit of fun that came with the latest round of updates, is two of my cousins also submitted DNA tests and the results that came back are a bit amusing. Over the years, I actually have had 4 of my Dwyer first cousins submit samples to Ancestry, and all the results turn up as us being first cousins. The interesting bit comes in how much DNA I have in common with my cousins. In first place is one of my cousins in Alaska, the son of my mother's youngest sister. I wasn't particularly surprised by this as he looks somewhat like my brother and could easily pass himself off as such. The second place result is where things get interesting.

My mother's older brother married a woman from Guam, and both of their daughters took the Ancestry DNA test this past summer. Number two on the list of most in-common DNA -- yep, one of my half-Guamanian cousins. In fact, the one who looks entirely Pacific Islander. If you were to see the two of us sitting side by side, you wouldn't have a clue we were related, much less first cousins!

We shared a good chuckle when we realized this, and, in fact, that our blonde-haired, blue-eyed cousin is HER first place match. Just goes to show we're all much more connected than we think and how we look on the outside doesn't always match what you find on the inside.

So, Why So Silent?

I've been a bit neglectful of this blog the past year and a half. It's not that I don't have topics to write about (I have 17 different preliminary sketches in my pending posts file!) Nor is it that I've not been doing any family research (my tree has doubled in size in the last year!) Some of it has been that the research I've been doing has been hit and miss and I've not really focused on one path in a while. Some of it is having other things occupy my time and keeping me busy and/or mentally wiped out. Still, you'd think 8 months into a global pandemic that has people staying home more than normal I could have found some time to work on a few blog posts. Mainly, I just haven't had the "creative spark" lately and not up to writing,

So, I'm going to try to start focusing on this blog a bit more and updating with my more recent discoveries. A few things I've found out in the past year or so:

• Who the mysterious "J. Manning" was and where my Mannings most likely come from.
• A discovery on John Murray's origins.
  
• The Belduke/Bolduc/Boulduc line back to the 16th century! (Most of the research has been done by my uncle who's been researching the Dwyer/Kenny side of my family for the last 25 years or so, but wow! it was a lot to add!)
• Another DNA update -- I'm 3% German!

I'm sure there are a few more, plus there are those pending posts I need to finish. More on my grandparents and cousins for example. So with the holiday season approaching, which is a time I always seem to fall back into my family history, I'm going to work on updating this blog a bit. The posts may not hit until after the new year, but I'm going to make a bigger effort than I have of late.

Getting Sidetracked

I haven't spent as much time as I would have liked researching my Colemans and Murrays over the last several months.  In part this is due to needing some answers to some questions to get through a couple of walls, and in part to getting sidetracked on another genealogy project.  Earlier this year my sister-in-law, "Sissie" was contacted by someone doing estate research and it seems that a cousin of her mother's had passed away with out any heirs and so a search went out for living relatives.  Her mother passed away about twenty years ago and Sissie really didn't know much about her family history, so I offered to do some research to see what I could find out.

Armed with what little Sissie knew, including the name of the deceased cousin, I dove in to see what I could find.  I spent a chunk of the spring and summer looking for records and have managed to find quite a bit -- tracing her family back to before the US Civil War.  I know I can go further back too, but that will take a little more effort as I'm now looking at pre-1850 census records which only listed the names of the heads of households and makes matching families up a bit more challenging.  I've also found names of apparent relatives in several census records as Sissie's ancestors were mostly farmers and all lived near each other in and around Indiana and Kentucky.  That is a time intensive process that I've yet to really focus on.  So far, however, I've identified over 150 relatives in her tree -- a massive increase over what she already knew.

Sissie was particularly interested in any living relatives.  I told her those people would be a bit harder to identify because records of living people are protected by privacy laws and much harder to obtain.  However in my searching I kept running up against another family tree on Ancestry.com that had members of Sissie's family and, most particularly, information on one of her grandmother's sisters that I had been unable to find elsewhere.  After checking with Sissie, I sent a message off to the owner of the tree to see if the person could help fill in gaps.  My luck with such messaging has been hit and miss while working on my own tree, so I was pleasantly surprised when about two months later I actually got a response from the owner of the tree.  It turned out the owner of the tree is Sissie's second cousin!  I was personally thrilled beyond belief and was able to make an email introduction between the cousins.

Things have been pretty much on hold from then, but it has been a fun distraction for me.  Family tree research can get frustrating when you run up against brick walls caused by missing information or insufficient information, so it's nice to step back from one line and focus on another from time to time.  Having a whole separate tree to root around in when I get frustrated with the progress in my own tree is a great way to go off on another adventure.

Baseball and Family Ties

The Chicago Cubs just won their first World Series since 1908 and as a lifelong baseball fan, I am so happy for their fans who have waited so long. I grew up a fan of the San Francisco Giants who saw their own World Series drought of 56 years (52 of them in San Francisco) end in 2010 and was ecstatic that the team I'd been cheering for my entire life had finally won it all. The joy was somewhat tempered with a little bit of sadness though as the first person who I thought about when the last out was made was my grandfather Donald Dwyer, a life long baseball fan, and a die-hard Giants fan once the team moved to San Francisco from New York. Grandpa died in 2000 and never got a chance to see the Giants win a World Series in San Francisco (he did, however, see two World Series losses.) After I attended the victory parade in 2010, I stopped by my parents' house and visited with my mom who said she was thinking of buying some kind of memento and bringing it up to Holy Cross to leave at my grandparents' grave. I told her I was thinking of the same thing, and I'm sure several of my aunts, uncles, and cousins were thinking it also. I don't know that anyone ever did though.* I'm quite sure there are many Cubs fans feeling the same way today, though with an even deeper connection as their drought was nearly twice as long.

*I didn't leave a memento at Grandpa's grave. I did buy a commemorative brick
that is in Seals Plaza at AT&T Park as part of the "Champions Walk."

I also feel empathy for the Cleveland Indians fans who have now taken over the mantle of longest drought between World Series wins from the Cubs -- it's now at 68 years. They watched their team fall from a 3-1 series lead, and I know the disappointment weighs heavily. Even after my Giants have won 3 World Series, I still remember the awful feeling after they lost in 2002 and while the bitterness has faded there is still a pang of "what if" that lingers. (The "what if" for 1989 and the Earthquake Series isn't quite as strong as I suspect the Oakland Athletics would have won without the interruption as they were the better team, though I never would have admitted it then.)

Between connecting with how the fans of both teams are feeling now, I've also been thinking about how amazing it is that the sport of baseball can connect generations for so long. Much of the news coverage of the 2016 World Series was focused on three dates, 1948, 1945, and 1908. 1948 was the last year the Cleveland Indians won the World Series, 1945 was the last year the Chicago Cubs had appeared in the World Series, and 1908 was the last year the Cubs won the whole thing. Those Cubs dates are particularly mind-boggling to me. As a result, there were lots of stories about what life was like in those years, who was president, what famous people were alive, and so on and so forth. Thinking about things in history books wasn't what made me connect with how long it really had been. It wasn't until I started thinking about my own family history that the sense of time truly hit. Working backwards in time, these are the things that really hit me.
The Cleveland Indians last won the World Series on October 11, 1948. This was a full nine days before my aunt Diane Murray Earnshaw was born. Diane died in 2005 at a too young 57, yet the Indians did not win a World Series in that time. My mother's youngest sister would be born two months after the end of the 1948 World Series; my father's youngest sister wouldn't be born for another four and a half years. My great-grandfather Marshall Edward Murray passed away in May 1948, but I still had three living great-grandparents when the World Series ended, including my great-grandmother Maggie Muckle Kenny who would live 19 more years.

The Chicago Cubs lost the 1945 World Series which ended on October 10, 1945. My father would have just started kindergarten and my mother was a little over a month shy of three years old. The older of my mother's two younger sisters is only three months old, her younger brother hasn't been born yet. My father's younger brother Jackie was still living, his next youngest brother had yet to be born. That so many people I've known my entire life had yet to be born in 1945 and 1948 is amazing.

The date that gets me the most though is October 14, 1908 -- the date of the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. I look back at that date and know that none of my grandparents have been born -- it would be a good 18 months until Grandpa would be born. He lived for 90 years and not once in his long life did the Cubs win the World Series. In 1908, my great-grandmother Mary Mullane is still married to her first husband, Edward Hayes. My Coleman great-grandparents have only been married for 4 years (equaling how long Lizzie has been in the United States); my Dwyer great-grandparents have been married just 3 years. The fact that boggles my mind the most though is that at least 6 of my 16 great-great-grandparents are still living, and possibly 9 of 16 (still figuring out the Coleman/O'Leary side on those.) My great-great-grandmother Elizabeth McDevitt Kenny died a few weeks after the end of the World Series, and my great-great-grandmother Bridget McDonough Murray had been dead less than a year.  My great-great-grandparents were all born between about 1823 and 1855, before the U.S. Civil War, yet six of them were still alive in 1908!

Those are just some of the things that happened in my family during those years, and those kinds of occurrences happened in the families who grew up in and around Chicago and Cleveland. I know how much I thought about Grandpa after the Giants won in 2010 (and again in 2012 and 2014.) I am certain Cubs fans are thinking similar thoughts and looking back at all the people in their family who waited for this moment but never got a chance to see it. I am also certain Indians fans are doing the same thing and wondering when it will be their turn to celebrate.

Baseball has an amazing place in American history. With the founding of the National League in 1876, we have 140 years of people following teams from their cities in what has now become Major League baseball. And while some teams have come, gone, and/or changed cities and names, others have been added so that there are now 30 teams across the country for fans to support and hand down their love for sport from generation to generation. It is sharing family traditions, like cheering for a particular sports team, that strengthens and enriches family ties. Even if a person never met any of her great-great grandparents, she can know there are stories of when that ancestor was going to the baseball stadium to cheer on the same team years before. (And heck, if that person is a fan of the Chicago Cubs or Boston Red Sox, they've even gone to the same stadium!)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One last thought -- it's a story I always include when I talk about Grandpa and his love of baseball. When he was growing up in San Francisco, Major League Baseball had yet to come west of the Mississippi, so he was a die hard San Francisco Seals fan. One of the highlights in the history of the Seals was a young player from the heavily Italian North Beach section of town, a fellow named Joe DiMaggio who in 1933 had 61-game hitting streak. Occurring during the Great Depression, Grandpa got to witness a lot of that history. (I also include the story my uncle tells in that linked blog post as I was there when it happened, though not quite in the way described.) Wonder what ever happened to that DiMaggio fellow.

Holiday Traditions

Merry Christmas! I'm taking a brief break from the blog for the holidays, but there are new posts scheduled for the new year. But as Christmas is upon us, I thought I'd take a minute to reflect and remember the Christmas traditions over the years.

When my brother and I were kids in the 1970s and 1980s, Christmas was a pretty set schedule. Christmas Eve would be spent with the Dwyer family at Grandma and Grandpa's. Christmas morning was just for the four of us (or maybe five if we're talking about the early 70s when Dad's youngest sister lived with us) and Christmas dinner was with the Murray side of the family, usually at our house.

We started going to Grandma & Grandpa's on Christmas Eve about 1973 (if my recollection of family photos and home movies is correct.) By that time, there were 10 of us grandchildren of Don and Audley Dwyer -- the 5 Caseys, 2 Murrays, 2 Dwyer sisters, 1 Murphy. We kids were all sent downstairs to the big family room in the garage. It had once been the bedroom for my mother's two brothers, but changed over once they had moved out of the family home. The rules were simple -- no one was allowed upstairs until after dinner and presents. The lone exception to this rule was my oldest cousin Mark who would have been 13 when these parties started. The next closest kid was the oldest of his three younger sisters who was 9. I was his closest cousin at age 5. My 3 year old brother was his closest male relative. Yeah, pretty obvious why the 13 year old got to go upstairs with the grown ups. Now, we kids weren't left alone totally unsupervised -- especially in those early years -- the adults would rotate turns coming down and keeping an eye on us all. We did a pretty good job of keeping ourselves entertained since there were so many of us so close in age. I spent most of my time in those years with one of my Casey cousins who is only 10 months older than me. The Dwyer sisters were always so quiet and sat off to themselves that it wasn't until late in high school that I ever spent much time with them.

For the first few years, all of us got presents from every family. Since my mom was one of six kids, that meant five gifts plus one from Grandma and Grandpa.  We now call those years the "greed fests" because, as you can imagine, a bunch of kids opening six presents each was a bit chaotic. Mark, being the oldest, would hand out the gifts to us younger kids. The funniest part of this, is that every year we all pretty much sat in the same spots. The boys on the floor at Mark's feet, the Dwyer sisters sharing the overstuffed chair, me and the Casey girls on the couch. The gifts had to be handed out in a particular order -- since there were so many of us close in age it was pretty common for everyone to get a variation on the same gift. After a while, there got to be too many of us to do gifts for everyone reasonably, so we drew names and everyone got two gifts. One from the person who drew their name, one from Grandma and Grandpa (the latter tended to be checks as we got older.)

Before driving home from Grandma and Grandpa's, my brother and I often had to change in to our pajamas (at least while we were under 10 or so) and we'd drive home we would pass a Doggie Diner that was at the corner of Junipero Serra Blvd. and 19th Ave. and I would always be sad to see there were one or two people sitting in there on Christmas Eve. It made me appreciate at a very young age having a large, loving family to spend the holidays with.

Christmas morning in the 1970s was also very familiar year in and year out. My brother and I would get up early to see what Santa had left and wake up Mom and Dad pretty much like any other kids. Mom would heat up some eggnog or hot chocolate once we'd torn through all the presents. Usually about a half hour after we'd opened presents there would be a knock on the door -- my brother's two friends from across the street were on the doorstep to see what we'd gotten for Christmas. We moved away from that neighborhood in 1979, but even today if there's a knock on the door on Christmas morning we say "Oh it must be K and J!"

After opening the presents and running outside to play with our friends, the Murray clan would descend upon the house for more food and presents and family time. There were only six of us cousins until the late 1980s, so we weren't banished to the garage like with the Dwyer family, but we usually were in either my or my brother's bedrooms for the most part while the grown ups socialized in the living room. We began rotating houses some time in the 1980s, so Christmas dinner wasn't always at my parents' house, but it was usually spent the same way -- kids off doing something in one part of the house, adults in another.

As we got older, the traditions changed a bit. By the mid 1980s, there were 18 grandchildren on the Dwyer side, most of whom were in high school or older, so everyone ate and opened presents upstairs. The younger cousins still all went downstairs to run around and play, but we all ate and opened presents together. We continued the tradition as we all got older and my cousins started getting married and having families of their own. Getting together on Christmas Eve finally ended when my grandfather passed away in 2000.  Since then, we've had the Dwyer Family Christmas on the Sunday before Christmas -- usually at either my parents' house or at Mom's older brother's house. We stopped drawing names for gifts a few years ago too -- now just the youngest generation gets gifts generally from the grand-aunts and uncles.

Christmas dinner with the Murray family is largely unchanged, though the rotation of houses now includes those of my cousins. It's a tight squeeze with all of us most of the time, but we always make it work.

Christmas Eve is now just my immediate family. My brother, sister-in-law, and I go over to Mom and Dad's for dinner and then head to Mass. After Mass, my brother and sister-in-law head home and I go back and spend the night at Mom and Dad's. In recent  years, my dad's younger brother also stays with them, so I'm on the couch while he gets the guest room.  Christmas morning arrives and my brother and sister-in-law return for breakfast and presents before heading off to see her family. Mom and I play a round of Scrabble -- she usually wins -- and we get ready for the Murray family gathering. This year it will be at Mom and Dad's (hosted by me and my brother and sister-in-law who don't have big enough homes for the whole family) so we'll be a little busier cleaning and setting up for the family to arrive.

This is always my favorite time of the year because I am reminded just how fortunate I am to have such a large, close-knit, and loving family. My cousins are some of my closest friends and spending time with them and the rest of my family is always the best Christmas present I can imagine.

A Slow Year for Research

As you may have noticed from the paucity of posts this year, I’ve been a bit lax in my research in recent months. I’ve spent some time cleaning out my database and better organizing my files, but I’ve not spent a whole lot of time on searching for new records and documents.

That’s not to say I haven’t done any research or found new documents. After Uncle Eddie died last December, I wound up with some records that had been in his possession. Uncle Eddie (my father’s eldest brother) had been the executor for Aunt Eileen’s estate. Aunt Eileen was my grandmother’s oldest sister and she and Uncle Bill had no children, so her estate was left to her nieces and nephews. In the documents Uncle Eddie had, there was a copy of her will which listed her beneficiaries and contained addresses for them as of her death in 1998. Nothing in those documents was hugely revealing, though it was helpful in locating some past addresses of relatives.

The more interesting documents I received were ones that were indirectly related to Eileen’s estate. The key document was a copy of a baptismal record for my great grandmother Lizzie O’Leary Coleman. It wasn’t an original record of her baptism, but one that was provided by the parish in 1938. This record indicates that Lizzie was baptized in the parish of Ovens in the Diocese of Cork. My earlier discoveries had put her baptism in the parish of Ballinhassig, but as I had spent time looking for baptismal records I had uncovered a map of the various Catholic parishes in Ireland and knew that the parish of Ovens (or Ovens & Aglis) wasn’t far from Ballinhassig and Ballincollig parishes. I’m guessing that in the intervening years since my great grandmother was baptized (in 1873) and the record was provided (in 1938) the parishes merged.

This discovery helped reinforce my earlier discovery of Jeremiah O’Leary’s baptism in the Ovens and Aglis parish in 1825. While I’m not 100% certain that the record I found for Jeremiah is that of my great great grandfather, the odds are favorable.

Lizzie’s baptismal record matches up with the record I found on line – her parents are Jeremiah O’Leary and Mary Looney and her godparents are Timothy Riordan and Mary Looney. I’ve yet to figure out who the second Mary Looney is, but that’s a trail to follow. The one additional item I learned is the name of the priest who baptized her – Reverend Carson Murphy. Whether these clues lead to any other information remains to be seen.

I also wound up with a lot of information on Uncle Bill’s side of the family as his family records were among Aunt Eileen’s papers. While the Doheneys are only relatives by marriage, it’s interesting information to have and may prove useful further on down the line as my research continues.

I also finally received a copy of my great grandmother Mary Mullane Murray’s death certificate. It confirmed that I have been tracking the correct Mullane family from San Francisco over the last year and a half. Mary’s parents are listed as Mary Manning and Timothy Mullane, which are the names I had found in the census, city directories, and newspapers. It also confirms my thought that Mary was less than honest on her marriage license application! Her death certificate indicates that Timothy Mullane was born in England, which conflicts with the census information I found showing him born in Ireland. Seeing how this information would have been provided by my great grandfather Marshall Murray, I suspect it was his best guess. Nonetheless, it may be another clue on places to search.

According to her death certificate, Mary died of chronic myocarditis brought on by high blood pressure. She also had a chronic ventral hernia and something illegible due to atrophy of her abdominal muscles. All in all sounds like a heart condition to me.

I’ve also dug around and believe I’ve found a few more Mullane and O’Leary descendants that are still living in the San Francisco Bay Area where much of the family has remained over the past 150 years. I’m still working out some verifications and double checking the records, but there looks to be quite a few distant cousins in the area.

So while I’ve not been as diligent in my research this year as I was last year, I have still made some strides in finding out where my family came from and where they’ve wound up. Hopefully as the autumn progresses I will find a bit more time to follow up on some of the leads I’ve discovered.

Kiss Me I'm Irish!

I haven't done much research since the holidays, so haven't had much to share here for a bit. With St. Patrick's Day upon us, I thought I'd do a quick look to see just how Irish I am. To date, none of my research on my paternal side has countered the belief that I am 100% Irish on that side. I believe I've identified all eight of my great great grandparents and all eight were born in Ireland.

On my maternal side, I have to go back an extra generation to my 3x great grandparents to find all the countries of origin. On that side, thanks to the research done by my uncle, we know that thirteen of my sixteen great great great grandparents were born in Ireland. I have two 3x great grandparents who were born in Germany and one who was born in Quebec, Canada. My French Canadian great great great grandfather Joseph Belduke married Mary Kiely who was born in Ireland. This makes my great great grandmother Emily Belduke half Irish and half French Canadian. (Getting all of the Quebecois back to France goes much further back than the rest of my ancestors as my uncle has manged to trace the Beldukes back to the early 17th Century. My 8x great grandfather Louis Bolduc was the first born on the North American continent in 1669!)

Add up the number of Irish (and half-Irish) great great grandparents on both sides of the family, and the total is 14.5 of 16. That makes me 90.63% Irish, 6.25% German, and 3.13% French Canadian. There's a scene in the movie "Stripes" where Bill Murray's character says "We're Americans... You know what that means? Do ya? That means that our forefathers were kicked out of every decent country in the world. ... We're mutts." And it's pretty much true -- Americans can trace their ancestry back to every corner of the world. So I have to admit, I'm pretty amazed that after having ancestors living in the United States for at least 100 years, that I am still overwhelmingly Irish American.

Between what my uncle has uncovered on my maternal side and what I have uncovered on my paternal side, I am able to trace my family back to seven of the 32 counties of Ireland (including both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland) -- Galway, Sligo, Cork, Tipperary, Tyrone, Down, and Roscommon. Those counties cover the North, West, and South points of the island and three of the four provinces. I still need to know where the Mullanes and Mannings originated and I'm not sure if my uncle has figured out where the Kennys are from (I don't have it in my records!)

A Year of Searching

Last January, I decided to start researching my paternal ancestors – the Coleman and Murray branches of my family tree. When I started out, I had only the barest of information and a total of 71 names plugged into my family tree. Granted there were a few more people than those 71 that I knew existed. I knew most of my father’s first cousins were married and had children for starters. What I didn’t know was all their names or ages, and so they weren’t immediately added to the tree. I’m still gathering some of that information, but now I’ve got a list of 213 names and a much fuller looking tree.

There is still a lot of information I need to gather on my living relatives, but I know so much more now than I did just a year ago. And I’ve gone from knowing next to nothing about my ancestors, to having a picture of who they were and how they lived. I’ve learned my great grandfather Marshall Murray had five siblings and that both of his parents emigrated from Ireland – his mother from County Sligo and his father from County Galway. While I don’t know much more about my great great grandparents’ families, I do have paths to chase down to see if I can find out more. I do know my great great grandfather John Murray worked as an upholsterer upon arriving in San Francisco in about 1865 and that he met my great great grandmother Bridget McDonough while she was working as a laundress at the same laundry.

I’m still trying to learn more about my great grandfather’s siblings, and that is proving to be a challenge, but if I figured out what happened to one sister over the course of my first year of research, I am optimistic I can find out what happened to the other four siblings.

I’m fairly confident I’ve found my great grandmother Mary Mullane’s family, and while there are many puzzles to work out among the Mullanes I know that my grandfather had a few cousins who lived into adulthood and have children of their own.

On the Coleman/O’Leary side, I was able to find so much information from Ireland that I was stunned. When I began I expected that finding records from Ireland would be much more difficult, but I lucked out considerably by having my ancestors come from County Cork and the availability of some of the church records on line. Those records have given me leads not only on my great grandparents’ siblings, but their parents, aunts, uncles, and (possibly) grandparents (my great great great grandparents!) I’m still trying to verify some of that information, but the start looks promising.

While looking at my family history, I’ve also had to look more at world history. What was happening where my family was living while they were living? How did those events impact their lives? How have familiar places changed over the years since my ancestors walked the same streets I have? I’ve learned quite a bit. I think I’m finally getting the point of all those school assignments I had over the years!

Shortly after I began my search last January, I picked up a new CD by Bruce Springsteen. There were two songs on that CD that keep running through my head as I dig through the past to find out who my family was. The first is called “We Are Alive” and the chorus is:

We are alive
And though our bodies lie
Alone here in the dark
Our spirits rise
To carry the fire and light the spark
To stand shoulder to shoulder
And heart to heart 

The song is about many things, but mostly about people who struggled to make a better life for themselves and their families. It rings very true to me, especially when coupled with the second track, “American Land.” That song is about the hope and promise of America and, oddly enough, has a Celtic feel to it. It opens with:

What is this land America, so many travel there
I’m going now while I’m still young my darling meet me there
Wish me luck my lovely, I’ll send for you when I can
And we’ll make our home in the American Land.

 

Thinking about my ancestors who left the only home they’d known to travel thousands of miles away to find a better life knowing that they’d likely never see their home again is amazing to me. I can’t imagine what that would be like. I’ve long joked that my ancestors got it right on the first try – they settled in San Francisco and never left. Over 150 years later, and most of my family is still in the greater San Francisco Bay Area. Oh, I’m sure some as yet figured out second, third, and fourth cousins have long since left the area, but between my extended family on my maternal side and the extended family on my paternal family I don’t have to travel far to find family. The idea of moving half a world away never to return is something beyond my comprehension.

 

Learning more about those people and what they went through to make a better life for their family and, ultimately, me is something I am eager to learn. I am their legacy and what does that mean. People I’ve never known yet have informed who I am. Those spirits do rise and stand behind me as I move forward.

 

I can’t wait to see what the next year of searching brings!

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.