13 June 2007

The Irish in America

My grandfather always said that there was a sister born after he and his twin Peg and before his brother George. During our sojourn at the Family History Center, I found a baby that could very well be her. An un-named female born in August 1889 in Cleveland.

We weren't so lucky with the rest of our travails in the Library. We didn't conclusively find anyone who could be my great-grandmother. The geneaologist was all hot for there being a relationship between the furrier who hired Aunt Lil and paid Uncle Andrew's tuition being a relative, but that didn't pan out (though we did track down a relative of his and my aunt had a nice chat with the furrier's grandson).

We found lots of families in the censi with the right Christian names and one of the accepted Anglicised spellings of the surname, but none of them had enough right for them to be my great-grandmother's family.

It seems like we ruled out a lot of dead-ends and that in itself could be a triumph, but it was quite deflating considering the high hopes we had at the start.

We definitely need to find a needle in a haystack and we just didn't have any luck in this go-round.

I tried to encourage my aunt to keep looking so that we could rule out further avenues. But with her daughter at home in the hospital and the progress not being what we had hoped, we called it a day.

After two solid days doing research, we headed back up the mountain prepared for a storm scheduled to keep us lodgebound the next day.

No comments: