Found Siblings

It's been a while since my last update. That's largely due to needing to do some off-line, in-person research. I'm not at a brick wall exactly, but at a barrier because there's information I need to go further and I have to go to where the information may be rather than having it instantly available at the tip of my keyboard. With a full-time job, that means in person research is limited to weekends and holidays for the most part, and, naturally, a lot of the places I need to access aren't open on weekends and holidays. I'll have to do some vacation planning to get to some of the information I need.

Still, I've managed to make some progress on a couple of puzzle pieces. You'll remember back in November I stumbled on a death record that I thought might be my great grandfather's older sister Mary (Mollie) in a database of funeral home records. Her age was off by quite a bit, but the rest of the information I found matched up with things I already knew. Mollie was married to a fellow named Charles Johnson and died in 1917 and buried at Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery in Colma. I was fairly confident that I'd found the right person, but wasn't 100% certain. I put the information I'd found in my records and went on searching for more information on Mollie and her husband Charles as well as continuing my on-going search to figure out what happened to my great grandfather's two brothers Joseph and John Henry.

While searching for a marriage notice for Mollie and Charles, I managed to stumble on a death notice for Joseph in the February 5, 1920 edition of the San Francisco Chronicle. The notice indicated he had died on February 3 and was the "loving brother of John and Marshall Edward Murray and the late Mollie Johnson and Ella Nelson." Well, all right then! The mention of Mollie Johnson helped confirm my belief that despite the nearly 10 year age discrepancy in the death record I'd found I had indeed located "my" Mollie. Joseph's death notice also indicated he too was buried at Holy Cross. Accessing the Holy Cross records that were available at sfgenealogy.com (currently off-line as of this writing) I found that Joseph was buried with a John H. Murray! Two siblings in one search! John Henry was buried on July 24, 1930, so I went back to the CA Death Index and located his death on July 21, 1930.

I've yet to order death certificates for any of the three siblings to see what bits of information they may provide (I'm particularly interested in seeing if I have correctly identified Joseph's wife.) I have located what I believe to be a marriage record for Mollie Murray and Charles Johnson, however, I'm not completely certain I've got the right record. This is because, once again, Mollie's age is way off and her husband's name is listed not at Charles Johnson but as Carl Johanson. I've done a little bit of digging on Charles/Carl and believe he Anglicized his name, but need to look a bit more to be certain.

In the course of working out a timeline for the siblings, I've discovered that Joseph, who was living with his brother Marshall (my great grandfather) when the 1920 census was taken, died only a couple of weeks after the census was recorded. That he was ill and (presumably) dying definitely helps explain why he was living with them if I've correctly identified his wife. Based on what I've found through the city directories and census, she's in the Napa State Hospital in 1920. Interestingly enough, there is no reference to his wife in the death notice, though the 1920 census record clearly indicates he was married.

I've also found what I believe to be a record for John Henry in the 1930 US Census. That instance has him at San Francisco General Hospital in April, 1930, just a few months before his death in July.

I still need to confirm where the Murray siblings were in 1910. If the marriage record I found for Mollie Murray and Carl Johanson is the correct couple, they were married in December 1909, so I need to look for them together. Joseph had not yet married when the 1910 census was taken (again, if I've correctly identified his wife, they were married shortly after the census was recorded) and John Henry, as best I can tell, never married. Looking for two unmarried men named John and Joseph is not the easiest of tasks! 

So, from what I have found thus far on the Murray side of the family, my great grandfather Marshall was the only one of the six siblings to both live to adulthood and have children of his own. Hopefully, once I'm able to get to some of the off-line records I need to access, I'll be able to find some leads to some Murray cousins.

Good Guessing

Just about a year ago, I found a death record for my great great grandfather John Murray. He died in November 1890 and the record I found of his death in the Calvary Cemetery records at sfgenealogy.com indicated his funeral was held at “S.B.” parish. Based on where the family lived in 1890 and taking a look at the “S.B.” Catholic churches in the San Francisco City Directory for 1890 I surmised that he was most likely buried out of St. Bridget’s (aka St. Bridgid’s) church at Van Ness and Broadway.

When I started my searching in early 2012, I found my great great grandparents living at “the corner of Leavenworth and Broadway” and did a Google search of Catholic churches near Leavenworth and Broadway to see if I could guess which would be the closest parish, and thus the most likely location where they may have gotten married. I doubted they were married at St. Peter & Paul’s in the heavily Italian North Beach, so thought perhaps Old St. Mary’s would be a good bet.

I didn’t follow up on those possibilities as I only had an approximate time frame for when they would have been married and with an uncertain date and an uncertain parish, well, that was too vague to track down. A couple of weeks ago, I hit yet another site with old newspapers digitized with the plan to cancel my subscription as I never used it. Before I did, though, I checked to see what newspapers they had. Sometime in the intervening months between when I subscribed to the site and my return to cancel the subscription, they had added copies of the San Francisco Bulletin from 1855-1891.  A new source to search!

I ran the usual surnames through the search engine and got a few different hits – including one in the July 20, 1868 edition. In the tiniest of print there was a short list of recent marriages including “In this city, July 19, at St. Bridget’s Church, by the Rev. J.P. Callaghan, John Murray to Bridget McDonough.”  Well what do you know?! It hadn’t occurred to me when looking for churches near John and Bridget to think of ones that had since closed! Duh! And even after finding out where John had been buried from, I didn’t put it all together.

So what does this get me? Well, besides the obvious lead to get information on the marriage of my great great grandparents, I’m guessing it is a safe bet that John and Bridget’s children were all baptized at St. Bridget’s also. Of course, this means I need to access the old records from St. Bridget’s. From what I’ve found, the original documents from St. Bridget’s are now at St. Vincent de Paul parish in San Francisco and the Archives for the Archdiocese of San Francisco are located at St. Patrick’s Seminary in Menlo Park. The archives will probably be the easier option for searching since the only birthdate of their six children I have any confidence in is for my great grandfather Marshall which means guessing on when they were baptized. That will have to be reserved for another field trip though, as the hours of access to the archives are pretty limited.

The Things You Find

One of the fun aspects about looking for historical records of my family is stumbling on random bits of history. After finding the mortuary records for several family members, I went looking for copies of their death notices in the newspaper archives.

Finding the birth, marriage, death notice section of the paper can sometimes be tricky when scanning the online images, so I'll often start at the first or second image and scroll through the pages to find what I'm looking for. In the process I've gotten a glimpse of various news stories, ads, and other items. Every so often I stumble on something fun or interesting -- a local crime, a scandalous divorce. In my recent perusings, I was scrolling through copies of the San Francisco Chronicle from 1905 and 1912. In the 1905 paper, I happened to stop on the sports page and notice the tiny box scores for the major leagues. In 1905, there was no Major League Baseball west of St. Louis, so most of the local sports coverage was college and minor league baseball. Still, I was curious how my now San Francisco Giants, then in New York, had done. I zoomed in on the tiny box score to see the Giants had beaten St. Louis 8-1. The only other bit included in the box score was the pitching battery. The winning pitcher in that game was legendary Giants Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson. I had to smile that of all the times I decided to stop and check the box scores I had stumbled on a game by one of the most prominent pitchers in baseball history.

The next interesting thing that I stumbled on was in 1912. Again I was just scrolling through the pages when a boldfaced "Titanic" caught my eye. I paused expecting to see some kind of outlandish advertisement. I was partly correct. It turns out I had stumbled on an ad for the never to happen return trip of the Titanic sailing out of New York. Having the perspective of 100 years of hindsight, I wondered what happened to the folks who had booked passage on that return trip. What were their thoughts on being on the other side of such a historic event.

There have been other things like this that I've stumbled upon perusing old newspapers and while right now my focus is on finding specific information, I do think I need to plan some time to go back and read some of those old papers in their entirety. The history lessons of my school years was so much remembering dates and places and names for exams that the day to day perspective of events got filtered out. Following my family tree through history is similar in some ways to reading a novel of historical fiction. It has presented history in a new light and made it all the more real than dry text books and lectures ever could.