Amy Johnson Crow has joined with Ancestry.com to issue a challenge - pick one ancestor each week and write about them. Focus your attention on one challenge rather than putz around researching whoever has the most Ancestry hints.
Sounds like a plan!
Aside from my dogged pursuit of the Missing Man (more later), this idea makes me dig deep into one person at a time, reviewing evidence collected to date, evaluating tenuous links, and following up on leads that may have been forgotten.
So here's the plan.
Start with
1. The Missing Man - Francis McCloskey, b 1840 Ireland, no death records found.
2. Katherine 'Bunny' Dougherty - Philadelphia - can I trace her forward? How about back to Ireland?
3. Frank McCloskey b 1896 - can I trace him forward? Find my first cousins?
4. The Missing Man again - search for his origins in Ireland.
Then pick others as they occur to me - that is, they bring themselves to my attention. Attention must be paid!
Friday, January 24, 2014
In the beginning...
Do you ever get the feeling that people are avoiding you? Hiding from you? Playing hide-and-seek?
It's not deliberate; they are just going about their daily lives without the slightest inkling that I am watching them from the distance of 150 years or more.
I'm talking about my relatives.
Not the Facebook-living, emailing, party-throwing relatives of contemporary life.
No, I'm talking about my ancestors.
At some point (OK, when my mother died), these ancestors became important to me.
I'd heard stories about them all my life but paid little attention.
I felt the loss when my grandparents died, but it all changed when Mother left us.
She was now one of the Ancestors. Attention must be paid! Not just to Mother, who will never be forgotten (never!) but to those who were important to her. All of those who went before now had a significance that I hadn't appreciated before.
So this journey began.
It is a journey where a search for a sailor turned into looking for a tailor then just trying to find the guy at all.
Looking for twins known mostly by nicknames.
Trying to untangle cousins who married cousins of the same name.
Looking for census records to find that they were destroyed in a war - sixty years worth of records!
And groaning to hear about a fire in Federal archives that destroyed seventy years of military records.
And then there's the Great Famine.
War, Famine, Fire - and yet we prevailed. We survived. Nay, we thrived.
Our happiness is built upon all of these stories.
So, Ancestors mine, please reveal yourself and let yourself be known.
I'm looking for you!
It's not deliberate; they are just going about their daily lives without the slightest inkling that I am watching them from the distance of 150 years or more.
I'm talking about my relatives.
Not the Facebook-living, emailing, party-throwing relatives of contemporary life.
No, I'm talking about my ancestors.
At some point (OK, when my mother died), these ancestors became important to me.
I'd heard stories about them all my life but paid little attention.
I felt the loss when my grandparents died, but it all changed when Mother left us.
She was now one of the Ancestors. Attention must be paid! Not just to Mother, who will never be forgotten (never!) but to those who were important to her. All of those who went before now had a significance that I hadn't appreciated before.
So this journey began.
It is a journey where a search for a sailor turned into looking for a tailor then just trying to find the guy at all.
Looking for twins known mostly by nicknames.
Trying to untangle cousins who married cousins of the same name.
Looking for census records to find that they were destroyed in a war - sixty years worth of records!
And groaning to hear about a fire in Federal archives that destroyed seventy years of military records.
And then there's the Great Famine.
War, Famine, Fire - and yet we prevailed. We survived. Nay, we thrived.
Our happiness is built upon all of these stories.
So, Ancestors mine, please reveal yourself and let yourself be known.
I'm looking for you!
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