The Quest for Annie Moore of Ellis Island – As this is the last day of March which is both Women’s History Month and Irish-American Heritage Month, I’m sharing links for my book about Annie Moore, the Irish teenager who was the first to arrive at Ellis Island. If you enjoy sleuthing for pockets of history, I think this might appeal to you!

The Woman Who Refuses to Let History Disappear – Whoa! So grateful for this lovely profile by Christina Stanton! Henceforce, please refer to me as “the woman who refuses to let history disappear”!

Photo by Nahrizul Kadri on Unsplash

The post Genealogy Roundup, April 1 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Sultana as seen in original photo and after colorization and enhancement (via MyHeritage and Photoshop Elements)

The fact that this image exists is remarkable enough, but the story that spilled out of it is even more so. Included in a scrapbook of immigrant photos taken between 1890 and 1892 by E.W. Austin who worked at the Barge Office while Ellis Island was being constructed (well before the widely known Augustus Sherman and Lewis Hine collections), it’s clear that it meant more to him (or perhaps the recipient) than most as close inspection reveals that it had once been framed. And then there was the caption which was more detailed than usual: “Sultana Numeir, age 18 — Lebanon, Syria — speaks English & Spanish.”

Wondering whether I could pick up Sultana’s trail to learn what had become of this striking young woman, I received a quick assist when I realized a neighboring photo in the album also included Sultana. This one was described as “a family of 4 from Syria, Turkey — Two Hebrews from Oran, Algiers.”

Sultana with her mother, brother, and father along with two fellow travelers

It didn’t take long to find a matching family with a daughter named Sultana arriving around the expected time in New York passenger records. They had sailed from Italy which explains why the entries for Sultana and her brother said “figlia” and “figlio” (son and daughter) and their mother’s “moglie” (wife). Listed above them was their father/husband, Soliman Numeir.

Arrival record of Numeir family (Ancestry)

Ages were given for each and the family was entered as Moroccan. This last seemed a little odd since they were supposedly Syrian, but I’m accustomed to seeing contradictions in records of this vintage, so was still optimistic that this would give me enough to follow them forward in time.

I tried the usual resources for immigrants — census, naturalization, city directories, etc. — but came up empty. Where had they gone? Had they changed their name, moved elsewhere, or maybe returned home? Knowing it was a long shot, I turned to newspapers. Recent immigrants rarely made the papers unless there was trouble of some sort, but you never know and I was running out of options.

Much to my surprise, I found that Sultana had quickly made her mark. Sometimes solo and sometimes with her mother, she traveled to assorted East coast cities (Buffalo and Boston were particular favorites) where she would tell their story — mostly to Christian women’s groups — and sell embroideries.

Article about Sultana “Numier” (Buffalo Courier, 29 April 1892, Newspapers)

The family had left Syria due to “religious troubles” and gone to Morocco where they served as Christian missionaries. This explained why their arrival records had noted the Numeirs as Moroccan. Other details varied across the articles I found (not the least of which was their religion which rotated through Catholic, Protestant, and Unitarian), but Sultana was consistently described as a recent immigrant, fluent in several languages and seeking to further her own education as well as her brother’s, and who appreciated what America had to offer. She left a favorable impression and was considered attractive and a touch exotic — enough so that an artist painted a portrait of her in a “characteristic ‘eastern’ pose” that was put on public display.

Portrait of Sultana by Edward Glover Niles (The Boston Daily Globe, 3 March 1896, Newspapers)

Then her story took another curious turn in early 1895. Without warning, Sultana Francesca Neumeyer (the family had Germanized their surname) eloped and married a man named Edward Luther Perry in New York City. This resulted in a flurry of gossipy articles that barely disguised a fascination with what was regarded as a mixed race marriage.

Edward was a Harvard student described as a grind (“his acquaintances are few, his interest in the affairs of the college limited, his abode cheerless”) and “modest, unassuming and not inclined toward handsomeness.” In some respects, Sultana was treated more kindly (“beautiful, her manner vivacious, her accomplishments many”), but her biographical sketches also included doses of 1895-style racism and at times veered toward fiction. Depending on which version you read, she had been born in Cadiz or Madrid, Spain or Gibraltar. Her purportedly German father and Spanish mother (or parents of those respective heritages, even though both were Syrian) had toiled as missionaries in Morocco and Syria where “the sun imparted a charming duskiness to her skin, and the climate mellowed her temper.”¹ And she had either come to America at the age of three or three years ago.

This undesired attention prompted Sultana’s new in-laws to issue a “doth protest too much” response insisting that they were pleased with the marriage and that the couple had wed in New York to “prevent any unnecessary talk” during their son’s senior year at Harvard — a claim that, if true, clearly backfired.

Sultana’s in-laws’ response to the marriage (The Boston Daily Globe, 9 February 1895, Newspapers)

Some of the articles about Sultana and Edward’s February 1895 marriage said that they intended to go overseas as soon as he finished his studies, and this was corroborated by his application for a passport that May. Shortly after, they left for Sultana’s family’s hometown — now Zahlé, Lebanon.

It must have shocked everyone just months later to read in the same newspapers about Sultana’s death. Announced initially in Boston, her obituary would appear in papers across the country over the ensuing months. 22-year-old Sultana who had captivated so many in the five years since her arrival in America had succumbed to consumption on December 5th.

Announcement of Sultana’s death (The Boston Globe, 1 January 1896, Newspapers)

Her husband, Edward L. Perry, lingered for several months working with the Presbyterian Mission during the Hamidian (Armenian) Massacres, finally returning to the U.S. in August 1896. Less than a year later, he resumed his studies and remarried, starting a new family. He would later report in Harvard updates that he had “done absolutely nothing worthy of note.”

Harvard College Class of 1895, Fifth Report (Google Books)

So that’s the end of Sultana’s story. Or was it?

Sultana’s drama, it turned out, was not the only one playing out in the Numeir family. Sparked by later records pertaining to her mother that didn’t quite seem to make sense, I shifted my attention to Joseph, Sultana’s brother who had arrived with her that day in New York’s harbor.

Joseph was slippery to follow — partly because he casually bounced between his first and middle names of Joseph and John (which is why I’ll refer to him as JJ from this point). These two common names coupled with all the variations of Numeir that had cropped up (e.g., Neumeyer, Neumire, Newmyer, etc.) produced a frustrating number of candidates to sift through while trying to trace him. The reason I bothered, though, was his mother who resurfaced in America in the 1900s.

The whole family had disappeared by the time of the 1900 census, but Sultana and JJ’s mother, Mary, showed up again two years later — and she wasn’t alone. Now she had a “son” named John who had been born in 1895 in — depending on which source you consulted — the U.S., Syria, or England. His specifics shifted over time with him finally settling as John J. Neumeyer, grandson of Mary, born on 21 December 1895 in Hull, England. And to be clear, John wasn’t the one tweaking the details; his grandmother was.

Given her age, it made more sense for John to have been her grandson. It seems she had fibbed to make it easier to enter the country, but whose child was he? John had the Neumeyer name, suggesting he would have been JJ’s son, but was this a fabrication to facilitate her traveling with this youngster? And how and why did Hull, England enter the equation?

So began another research dive that would take me on an astonishing journey. Rather than retrace the quest step by step since it was complicated and anything but linear, I’ll share a condensed rendition of the saga of Sultana’s brother, JJ.

Around 1894, he married Mary E. Wood, an English immigrant. Soon after in January 1895, they had a daughter named Rose in upstate New York. He worked as a photographer (an interest possibly triggered by the photos E.W. Austin had taken of them upon arrival) and was doing well, so you might have thought they’d stay put. But in September of that year, the young family traveled across the Atlantic to England. Maybe his wife was homesick or they thought the prospects for his business were better there?

Not quite.

The family went to Lincolnshire, where JJ and Mary soon split. Mary left Rose with JJ, but he wasn’t able to care for her, so he approached the Glanford Brigg Board of Guardians to have Rose boarded out at his expense.

But on 6 August 1896, JJ — all of 27 years of age — died from nephritis uremia in an infirmary in nearby Hull (presumably where Hull came into the picture). When that happened, the woman who had been caring for Rose gave her to the Glanford Brigg workhouse because she was no longer being paid. Against the odds, a woman who belonged to the Board of Guardians was so taken with Rose that she adopted her.

Meanwhile, JJ’s wife, Mary, professing that their marriage was invalid, wed her childhood sweetheart in July. Since she had taken on another surname about a month before JJ died, those who knew that Rose’s mother was alive couldn’t find her, so the adoption went ahead.

There are many elements of this story that are peculiar, but one that stands out is that Mary, living about 20 miles away, didn’t know about her daughter’s adoption, but somehow Rose’s grandmother in Syria got wind of it and showed up in England to claim her in October. Unfortunately, the board’s minutes and relevant inmate registers and boarding out records have gaps around the time this was happening, so what is known is derived from newspaper accounts.

Custody dispute over Rose (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 30 October 1896, BritishNewspaperArchive)

According to several articles, the woman who had adopted Rose didn’t want to give her up, but the board initially decided in the grandmother’s favor. Efforts to have Rose’s mother, Mary, weigh in were fruitless since they hadn’t found her, so the turmoil continued for two months with attorneys for both sides joining the fray.

In mid-November, the board concluded they had lost authority the moment the child was adopted, leaving the other involved parties to sort it out. This is when the mother materialized saying she had only learned what was happening upon reading about it in the local paper. Mary strongly preferred the board member because she didn’t want her daughter taken to Syria (“they would barter it away to the Turks for £200”), and signed paperwork authorizing the adoption, so the grandmother left England without Rose. At this juncture, the media invited Rose’s mother to share her experience and shifted from dismissing her to celebrating her.

Mary offered a dramatic narrative in which she had been tricked into marriage by a bigamist, a reality she learned about by intercepting a letter written to him.² He had not only a wife, but also a son who was living with his grandparents in Syria. In arguments that ensued, he struck her in the chest, causing cancer that forced her to have surgery to remove her left breast. When she recovered, she took her daughter to England, but “being passionately fond of the child,” he pursued them on the same ship, though they didn’t travel together.

Even after they arrived in England, he continued to follow her until one day he pointed a loaded revolver at her and said that he would kill all three of them unless she let him keep their daughter. With only ten minutes to make her choice, she reluctantly left without Rose in order to save all three of their lives. She and her new husband subsequently tried to find her daughter, but to no avail.³

The challenge with interpreting this from the distance of 125 years is that in spite of the compassion one might feel for Mary, she was a classic unreliable narrator, blending hyper-specific and accurate details with other, more questionable ones. The name and address she gave for the woman who had sent the letter, for instance, were valid. Moreover, the letter-writer was a wealthy socialite who would soon be embroiled in a public scandal for attempting to elope with the “wrong kind” of man (her melodrama merits its own article, but I’ll resist temptation to stay on track here), enhancing the plausibility of Mary’s allegation.

On the other hand, you can’t get cancer from being struck (and even if you could, the odds of a freshly arrived immigrant living in rural New York being able to get this surgery, still in its early days, so swiftly are doubtful), and the paper trail shows that she journeyed back to England in a second class cabin (there were only seven in this class total, including their daughter) with the man she said she was running from. Elements mentioned in other coverage, such as the fact that Mary’s own mother supported the Syrian grandmother, injected further confusion.

Some of what she said was definitely true, but flourishes seem to have been added, perhaps to garner sympathy or explain why she was late becoming involved in her daughter’s predicament. And JJ, her quasi-husband, was no longer alive to present his side.

All of this wouldn’t matter much if it weren’t for Mary’s assertion that JJ had been married before and had a son who was living with his parents in Syria. That claim brings us back to the mystery grandson his mother later brought to America — the one who eventually went by John J. Neumeyer and was said to have been born on 21 December 1895 in Hull, England. And this is where we encounter a battle of unreliable narrators because Sultana and JJ’s mother — also named Mary — had a habit of changing her story over time, so much so that her grandson wound up befuddled about his own origins.

Whose child was John J. Neumeyer, born 1895? (Ancestry)

John lived with her until she died when he was 24, but even three years before then, he expressed his confusion when applying for citizenship, saying, “I was informed I was born in England — I do not know of what parents. I remained in England until I was 11 months old when I was taken to Syria where I remained until I was six years old. I have lived in the United States ever since.”

He also noted that, “I am informed by Mrs. Mary Neumeyer who for some time claimed to be my grandmother,” revealing that he was no longer convinced that she was.

Declaration of Intention for John Neumeyer (Monmouth County Archives, NJ)

I don’t think it’s any accident that when she died in 1920, he made plans the next month for a trip to England. His passport application and the local newspaper said it was to study for the ministry, but he only stayed for three months. I suspect that among his grandmother’s papers, he had found traces of Rose, and believing her to be his closest living relative, went to try to meet her. Or conceivably, the two of them had managed to connect the dots several years earlier when Rose had begun using “Numeyer” as a middle name. In any case, his inheritance from his grandmother (and yes, it appears that she really was his grandmother) allowed him to make the trip.

I’d like to think John and Rose met, but the question in my mind is whether they were siblings or cousins.

John’s grandmother had said that he was her son’s son. And John’s very existence would seem to lend credence to the tale about JJ already having a first wife and child when he married Mary E. Wood, but other “facts” of the two Marys clash.

If the alleged son’s date of birth is correct and he was born in England, how could that timing have worked? He would have been born after Rose, not before, so he couldn’t have already been taken to Syria. The younger Mary would almost had to have been his mother, meaning that she would have been very pregnant when crossing the Atlantic and given birth to three children in two years — two with her disavowed-husband and one with her new one — with barely time to breathe in between. And even if that happened, why is there no birth record in England for such a child, and why is there no mention of him in all the news coverage about Rose’s adoption? Wouldn’t her having a local, infant brother have at least been mentioned in passing?

Two other possibilities come to mind. It could be that the story about JJ having a son from a previous marriage was true, but it was earlier and not in England, so the child was a bit older — say, born in 1893 or 1894. Or maybe — just maybe — John was really Sultana’s son.

It’s hard to avoid noticing that he was born the same month that she died. True, he was born on the 21st and she died on the 5th (and yes, I tried to verify, but failed to obtain relevant Lebanese records), but with all the other truth-stretching floating about in this family, what’s a gentle tweaking of dates?

I think it’s plausible that Sultana died in childbirth, and that her husband either chose to or was persuaded to leave his child with his in-laws and return to America. It was 1896 and he was a widowed, 22-year-old student with a half-Syrian child. He came from a family that was ambivalent about his marriage and he was dealing with a strong-willed mother-in-law who had the home court advantage since this would have taken place in Syria.

Whether John was JJ’s child or Sultana’s, using the Neumeyer surname and borrowing aspects of Rose’s life would have made things easier for his grandmother as she returned to the United States to begin a fresh chapter with a little boy by her side. And if John was JJ’s son from a previous marriage, she would have needed to nudge the date of his birth by a year or two so that it could have happened during the brief period JJ had lived in England.

Barring unanticipated revelations (such as Lebanon providing the requested records or the unearthing of the missing Board of Guardians records in England), the only way to solve this riddle would be through DNA testing. But this situation is complicated and there are four clusters of potential participants to consider — those descended from 1) John, 2) Rose, 3) Mary E. Wood’s second marriage, and 4) Sultana’s husband’s second marriage.

I have researched descendants in each branch, and all indications are that none of them is aware of this story or their connection to it. Normally, I contact relatives before publishing, but this family history is so complex that for the first time ever, I decided to write first and reach out to family members with a link so they can absorb it (or not) at their own pace.

I hope that they will be pleased to learn more about their heritage and see a couple of out-of-the-blue family photos from 1890. If any should choose to allow me to share their reaction, I will post updates here, but I am not going to try to persuade anyone to take a DNA test. My goal was simply to try to find out what had become of the young woman in the photo, so everything else is up to them.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes it takes considerably more than a thousand words to explain one. I hope you’ll agree that this one deserved 3,400.

¹ All quotes in this paragraph are from “A Harvard Romance,” Worcester Daily Spy, 10 February 1895 (Newspapers).

² Efforts were made to uncover any prior marriages JJ might have had to determine whether he was a bigamist, but marriage records of that era were hyper-local and nothing has been found in likely locations to date.

³ Details of Rose’s mother’s account are from “A Scunthorpe and Lincoln Romance,” The Lincolnshire Chronicle, 27 November 1895 (BritishNewspaperArchive).

The post Captured in Time: Syrian Immigrant Sultana Numeir upon Arrival in America in 1890 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Percy Hemingway, age 8

Percy Hemingway was a little boy with a big tag and minimal luggage when he made the journey from England to America by himself at the advanced age of eight. Fellow passengers on the S.S.Teutonic said he showed no fear and required little assistance.

Ellis Island was under construction, so when he arrived in New York on November 6, 1890, he was processed at the Barge Office. The tag attached to his coat explained that he was to be forwarded to his father in Philadelphia, so that may be how he came to meet E.W. Austin, the money changer whose station was near the booth for railroad tickets.

Percy’s departure and arrival (Ancestry)

Austin was intrigued by this pint-sized, solo voyager and asked to take his photo. Luckily for Percy’s future descendants, he agreed. When he did, he became part of Austin’s collection of immigrant photos taken between 1890 and 1892, predating by a generous margin the better known photographs of Augustus Sherman (roughly 1904 to 1924) and Lewis Hine (1905–1909 and 1926).

It’s also thanks to his photo that I was able to identify E.W. Austin as the man behind the camera. Since the picture was included in an album owned by John B. Weber, the Commissioner of Immigration who oversaw the opening of Ellis Island, I had long thought that Weber was the likely photographer. But an 1891 Harper’s Weekly article included a sketch that I instantly recognized as Percy, as well as other drawings from the collection (now housed at the NPS library at Ellis Island), and the helpful explanation that these illustrations by Thure de Thulstrup were based on photos taken by E.W. Austin.

“from England without escort” (Harper’s Weekly, 24 October 1891)

Percy, whose full name was Harold Percy Hemingway, was born on July 6, 1882 in Horbury, England to Levi and Ann (Shaw) Hemingway. He was the middle of three brothers, sandwiched between Wilfred and Herbert, but Herbert died in 1886 and was soon followed by the boys’ mother in 1887. It wasn’t long before Levi, a tailor by profession, decided to take his chances in America with his remaining two sons.

What’s puzzling, though, is how they made the trip. Many families traveled one or two at a time so the first to arrive could earn enough to money to pay for the rest to follow, but in this instance, there were only three in the whole family and two of them were children. Even so, they didn’t journey together because Levi made the curious decision to take his 11-year-old son with him and leave his 8-year-old behind to cross the Atlantic on his own almost two months later. But Levi clearly knew his cool-headed younger son who made his way to Philadelphia with no issues.

Departure of Levi and Wilfred Hemingway (Ancestry)

After a brief stay in Philadelphia, the trio moved about 85 miles northwest to Pottsville, Pennsylvania, where among other things, they were known for their singing talents. It was here that Percy would embark upon his communications career, learning telegraph skills that would land him a job back in Philadelphia and then another in New York.

He worked in the brokerage industry, and as it happens, so did my grandmother before she married. Thanks to her, I know that telegraph operators were highly valued because the best ones could shave critical seconds off trades, giving their companies a competitive edge.

Percy, it seems, worked well under pressure, which makes it somewhat surprising that he dillydallied about getting naturalized, not bothering to start the process until around the time of WWI. But even after all that time, he remembered the ship he came on and his date of arrival, so his paper trail removed any doubt that this was the correct fellow. Several candidates of his name were floating about at the time, so it was helpful to have this confirmation.

Percy’s declaration of intent to become an American citizen (FamilySearch)

His American-born wife — a fellow Pottsviller (Pottsvillian?) — probably wished he had gotten naturalized earlier as she lost her citizenship by marrying him due to U.S. immigration laws at the time. She consequently had to go through the same procedure despite having been born in Pennsylvania, and given that she waited about a decade after her husband, it’s possible she didn’t realize for some time that she had lost her citizenship.

Though Percy lived in Brooklyn for more than half a century, he returned to Pottsville often to visit his family, as well as his wife’s, and he sang in churches — sometimes solo and sometimes as part of a choir — in both locations. It says something of his interests that his obituary summarized him as a “broker and singer.”

The World Telegram and Sun, 16 October 1962 (FultonHistory)

The little boy with a big tag seems to have carried his easy-going attitude throughout a life well lived, so I was excited to reach out to his great-grandchild 131 years after his photo was taken, but was met with silence. As someone who cold calls strangers on almost a daily basis (tracing families who have relatives still missing in action from WWI, WWII, and the Korean War), this is familiar territory for me. Some don’t answer phone calls at all, some screen, some never listen to messages, some assume it’s a scam, and some are skeptical for other reasons.

Photo of Percy colorized and enhanced through a combination of MyHeritage and PhotoShop

It’s all understandable, and given that I only have a virtual item this time — not a physical photograph — I was reluctant to push too hard in my outreach, but the virtual world also provides a safety net by allowing me to share this online. So I’m writing this article in the hope that the Internet will carry this image to his family just as the S.S. Teutonic carried Percy across the ocean all those years ago.

The post Captured in Time: 8-Year-Old Percy Hemingway upon Arrival in America in 1890 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

Mrs. Lillicrap and her nine children

Bessie Lillicrap must have been exhausted when she arrived in New York with her children. The family had left Liverpool on October 7, 1890 and finally disembarked on the 18th. That’s a long time to be at sea with nine children, the oldest of whom was only 12.

U.K. departure passenger entries for Bessie Lillicrap and her nine children (UK National Archives via Ancestry)

So she may have been less than enthusiastic when a man named E.W. Austin approached her about photographing them. Still, it wasn’t an every day opportunity for a poor family like hers, so she agreed. She, Bessie, Susie, Annie, Mary, Dick, Sam, Alice, Emily and baby Thomas were captured for posterity on that day just over 130 years ago.

Mrs. Lillicrap and nine children (colorized and enhanced on MyHeritage)

E.W. Austin had been fortunate enough to gain the money exchange concession to service immigrants arriving in New York in 1890, and while Ellis Island was under construction, he worked at the Barge Office which served as the interim immigrant processing center. As described in a previous article, he took this opportunity to take photos of immigrants from a variety of countries, and the result is the earliest known collection of this type.

While he scribbled notes about his subjects, they were usually restricted to nationality and maybe another random detail, but in this instance, he had written, “Mrs Lilycroft age 35 & 9 children Oct 18 to 25 1890.” With all this information, it didn’t take long to find them in passenger arrival records in spite of the misspelling of the Lillicrap name.

Passenger manifest entries for Lillicrap family members (National Archives and Records Administration via FamilySearch)

But what had become of them? It was handy to have such a large family to research as I was able to trace them to Adams County, Mississippi — although it might be more accurate to say that I located the survivors with their father, Richard, in the 1900 census.

Lillicrap family in the 1900 Federal census, Adams County, Mississippi (National Archives and Records Administration via Ancestry)

Four of those in the photograph had died during the intervening decade, and the specifics I would learn would make this harsh reality even more distressing. I discovered that 11-year-old Mary had succumbed to “tonsillitis and croup” in 1892, and Annie to phthisis (pulmonary tuberculosis) the following year. Life was clearly a struggle for the Lillicraps because I turned up another daughter in a nearby orphanage in 1900, but that still left the mother and Thomas unaccounted for.

At this point, my sleuthing went into overdrive because I had to know, but nothing I tried answered my question — until I found a single newspaper article that sadly solved the mystery. The mother, Bessie (Edworthy) Lillicrap, hadn’t lasted a year in America. Nor had Thomas. Both died from malaria in August of 1891 in a small community called Church Hill, Mississippi.

Desperate, Richard had piled his remaining children on a train and headed about 20 miles away to Natchez to seek help. All were ill and the family was described as, “entirely destitute of means, and with scarcely clothing enough to hide the nakedness of the little ones.” The town took pity on them with both the hospital and Baptist Church pitching in, and as seen by the 1900 census, most of the Lillicraps had rebounded.

The Weekly Democrat (Natchez, Mississippi), 26 August 1891 (Newspapers)

Now that I knew what had happened to the family, I turned my attention to finding their descendants. Did they, I wondered, know of this photo that included even baby Thomas during his brief life? I followed the lines of each of the surviving children, identifying living grandchildren and great-grandchildren, but once I figured out that one of the sons had married late, I saw a chance to reach out to someone whose father, aunts and uncles, and grandmother were in the photo. She was my first call.

“I can’t believe this,” Mary declared as I rattled off a few family names to quickly reassure her that I wasn’t looking for anything from her, but hoped instead to share something with her. She confirmed details, and then mentioned that her father had a brother and four sisters. I explained that there had been three other siblings who died young.

We chatted a while, and I offered to snail mail a copy of the photo since she didn’t have a computer or cell phone. To say she was delighted would be an understatement. I would have given anything to be there when she opened her mail, but got the next best thing when she called back, carefully identifying herself as “Mary Louise Lillicrap Milligan” and telling me about her upcoming plans. It seems the photo has lit a spark. She’ll be heading to the local library shortly and has already arranged a jaunt with a friend to Church Hill to see if they can find where her grandmother is buried. “I’m 83,” she exclaimed, “and just now learning about my family!”

The Lillicrap family uprooted themselves and crossed the Atlantic for new lives 131 years ago, and remarkably, their moment of arrival was captured. And now after a very different kind of journey tucked away in a photo album belonging to a stranger, it’s finally gone home.

The post Captured in Time: The Immigrant Lillicrap Family upon Arrival in America in 1890 appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

WW2 lovers were separated after a blind date cut short, so she drew a map of where to find her – I love seeing grandkids appreciate how remarkable their grandparents were. #genealogy

Top photo: Megan’s Mom, Seton Shields, in her office.

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Two women have sent each other the same weathered birthday card for 81 years – So these friends have been sending each other the same silly birthday card for 81 years!

AR-2 Forms and the Flexoline Index – In case anyone’s curious, I’m still able to get WWII-era alien registrations from NARA!

Photo by Suraj Tomer on Unsplash

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Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

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How a Solitary Tombstone in Wisconsin Solved the Mystery of His Irish Origins

Tomhaggard Village

As a professional genealogist of half-Irish heritage, I’ve long embraced the opportunity to underscore the ties between Ireland and the United States, and one of the most obvious ways to do this is to trace the roots of high profile Americans to their place of origin in Ireland. This is trickier than it sounds since “crossing the pond” to Ireland can be challenging, especially when ancestors arrived Famine era or earlier. But I can be stubborn, so over the years have ferreted out Moneygall for then-first-time candidate Barack Obama, Ballina and Carlingford for then-Vice President Joe Biden, Rathangan for Bruce Springsteen, Limerick for Barry Manilow, Eyrecourt for Katy Perry, and so forth.

So it’s no surprise that I would do this again for Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz. In this instance, I identified the Catholic parish of Kilmore in County Wexford, but came up short on naming the specific townland. No worries. Whenever I’ve done this in the past, genealogists in Ireland have piggybacked off my research to learn more about the individual’s past, so I figured it was just a matter of time.

The flurry of media coverage that said this was already happening only reinforced my expectation, but five weeks have gone by with no further word, so I decided to jump back in. This time around, I managed to zero in on a village called Tomhaggard, and I’m going to spend the balance of this article explaining how.

I’ll warn you now that this will probably provide more detail than many would be interested in, so if that’s you, feel free to stop reading here since you already have your answer. But if you’re a fellow geek or perhaps a skeptic, get comfortable as I park you on my shoulder to follow the process.

Surround and Conquer

Whenever you’re stuck genealogically, it’s always a good idea to find others associated with the people you’re researching, as it’s possible that they left the paper trail you wish your direct targets had. I casually refer to this as “surround and conquer,” although “cluster research” and FAN club (FAN = Friends, Associates, and Neighbors) are more popular terms.

In my earlier research, I had focused on immigrant James Sullivan and his parents, Daniel and Ellen (Doyle) Sullivan. All of them came to America in the latter half of the 1850s. James was one of five children born to the Sullivans, so I opted to start by seeking out the godparents of these children. Godparents are often relatives and a good first guess is siblings of the parents of the child being christened.

I could have gone about this several ways, but was fortunate to be able to take a shortcut thanks to a woman named Rachel Darlington who established and maintains a website called “Kilmore Genealogy.” The Internet used to host countless location-specific sites like this, but they’re becoming increasingly rare. Still, it’s always worth a look, and I’m so glad I did because Rachel has single-handedly transcribed civil, parish, and other records for the vicinity of Kilmore. Better yet, she did so more comprehensively than other resources as she troubled to include the names of wedding witnesses and baptism sponsors. This allowed me to search a single page, rather than perform a series of individual searches elsewhere.

I swiftly developed a list of godparents, and it jumped out that there were no Sullivans, but four Doyles – Judy, John, Catherine, and Denis. A look into other godparents hinted that they might have married into the Doyle family. This told me that James and Ellen Sullivan lived where her family – the Doyles – had come from, not his. There was a smattering of entries for Sullivans, but they were sparse on the ground – especially for such a common name – so I suspect that James was an incomer, at least from another pocket of Wexford.

Pushing Back

I also noticed from Rachel’s site that there were some earlier transcriptions of marriages and baptisms from 1798 to 1812. This was lucky since Catholic parish records are patchy and even more so this early, and I wondered whether I might be able to get back another generation. I knew from my previous research that Ellen (Doyle) Sullivan had supposedly been born in 1813 (according to her obituary), but the collection of documents I had for her suggested a range of 1810 to 1813.

With this in mind, I took a dive to see whether this batch that ended in 1812 might just include her and found an entry that looked promising. If this was her, then her parents were William Doyle and Catharine Moran. My next step was to search FindMyPast for any other children this couple might have had, and there they were – Judy, John, and Catherine – almost a perfect match for the names of those who would become godparents to Ellen’s children in later years. As to Denis, his birth was included and his parents were also a Doyle and Moran couple, so he was likely a first cousin. Yes, this was Ellen’s family.

17 February 1810 Marriage of William Doyle and Catharine Moran (Catholic Parish Registers at the National Library of Ireland)

Map Time

This is when I caught a break. The records I had searched over a month ago had no place names, but the priest who logged these earlier family events had kindly included the townland of the participants. I sought out each of the four baptisms as well as the marriage of the parents and pieced together the geography. The parents were living in Crossscales (yes, a triple ‘s’) when they married in 1810, had moved to Pludboher by the time of the birth of their first child, and then shifted once more to Grayrobin for the births of their next three children.

In an attempt to make sense of this, I turned to an incredibly helpful website by renowned Irish genealogist, John Grenham. One of the reasons determining an exact location in Ireland can be confusing is due to the variety of land divisions, and just for fun, they frequently share names and overlap, but have different boundaries.

I knew from my previous sleuthing that Tim Walz’s family was from the Catholic parish of Kilmore within the diocese of Ferns, but now in my effort to single out the correct townland, I had turned up three. John’s site offers the perfect tool for this kind of situation – one which overlays the maps of Catholic and civil (that is, government) parishes.

If you’re able, I’m going to request that you go to his Kilmore parish map and zoom into the bottom where you see Kilmore. Once you’re there, move the slider to the left to see the Catholic parish of Kilmore. If you look directly east from the lower “Kilmore” label, you’ll trip across Pludboher, and just above are Grayrobin and Crossscales. Now I had confirmation that this trio of townlands is indeed located within the Catholic parish of Kilmore.

But what about the civil parish? Shift that same slider to the right and you’ll get the view below. This grouping of townlands is associated with the village of Tomhaggard.

Wexford Catholic and Civil parishes overlaid (Irish Ancestors by John Grenham with maps created using © Mapbox and © OpenStreetMap)

Context Matters

At this point, I took a bit of a detour to poke around a tremendous Irish resource, The Dúchas Project, also known as the National Folklore Collection UCD Digitization Project. One of my favorite aspects of this is The Schools’ Collection which former school teacher, Tim Walz, would probably appreciate.

Back in the 1930s, students were instructed to write essays about the places where they lived. To do so, many spoke with elders in their communities and recorded stories and traditions that had been passed down, song and poem lyrics, and historical and geographical details. I’ve found it a useful way to get a feel for a place in Ireland that’s new to me.

Much to my delight, it holds a collection of essays for a school in Tomhaggard, and as I read through them (prepare to be dazzled by the exquisite penmanship if you explore), I began to understand both how intermingled and modest in scale they were. Eamonn Carty of Crossscales (then spelled by some as Crossgales), for example, wrote of the 25 people from seven families who lived there. The Doyle name popped up from time to time, as did multiple mentions of Father Mayler, a priest who was murdered there in 1653 (Cromwellian time frame), and “mass paths” which according to student Phyllis Codd were initially “used by our ancestors to bring corpses to the graveyards” before evolving into current day short cuts.

Essay by Phyllis Codd, “The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0621, Page 413” by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection, UCD is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Someone had even sketched out a map which includes the location of the priest’s martyrdom, a spot where a contemporary blog informed me, mass still takes place early on Christmas morning.

Tomhaggard map by James Ryan, “The Schools’ Collection, Volume 0621, Page 413” by Dúchas © National Folklore Collection, UCD is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.

Final Lap

Between the maps and the students’ essays, I realized that Tomhaggard was the family’s place of origin, but there was still one catch. I had proof that they had been there up through 1820 when that cluster of Doyle children had been born, but the more recent records didn’t have any place names. Had they stayed there until emigrating in the 1850s?

Obituary of Ellen (Doyle) Sullivan, Cedar County News, 28 December 1899 (Newspapers)

This is when I decided to revisit the Stateside research I had done before, starting with Ellen’s obituary. When I reread it, I remembered that I hadn’t followed up on the son named John. He hadn’t shown up in baptism records, so I didn’t know much about him. John Sullivan is a common name, but this at least told me that he had died in Wisconsin sometime before 1899.

Other records for the family that made fleeting reference to Wisconsin mentioned Madison in Dane County, so that’s where I looked, and that’s when I found a tombstone. The name, location, and timing all fit, and while it takes a little squinting, you can just make out that the text at the bottom says he was a native of “Thomhaggard.” I now had the substantiation I needed from both sides of the Atlantic, and yes, the family had remained there until the time of departure.

Tombstone of John Sullivan (FindaGrave, memorial by Angela Owens Jando and photo by Jade)

Flashback

At this moment, I experienced déjà vu, mentally flying back to early 2007 when I had traced Barack Obama’s roots to Moneygall. Just as with Tim Walz’s Irish immigrant ancestors, multiple generations of the family had come to the United States and settled in one place, only to move on to another. Both families had lost one or two relatives in their first American home with the result being that their tombstones were effectively stranded since they were in places that drifted out of descendants’ memory. And both of these isolated tombstones held the critical clue of the place of origin in Ireland. With Barack Obama, the missing puzzle piece resided in southeastern Ohio, and with Tim Walz in Wisconsin. From this genealogist’s perspective, it feels like lightning striking twice.

So it’s Tomhaggard, a historic village about 2.5 miles as the crow flies from Kilmore (though further by road), that was home to Tim Walz’s Doyle family. As it happens, before he was selected by Kamala Harris as her running mate, he was scheduled to lead a Minnesota trade mission to Ireland in November. A few things have changed since then, but let’s hope he has the chance to walk in his ancestors’ footsteps – perhaps along an old mass path – before long.

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AI-generated image of the “shiny object ancestor” experience

When I recently delved into Taylor Swift’s roots, I made mention of a phenomenon I refer to as “shiny object ancestor.” And while it was just a passing remark, it resonated with a number of fellow genealogists who reached out to say that they knew exactly what I meant.

Whenever you research any family tree — your own or a complete stranger’s — there’s inevitably an ancestor (though it can also be a pair) who calls more loudly than the others. Anyone who’s experienced this will tell you that it’s almost as if they’re insisting on your attention.

This has happened to me countless times over my decades as a genealogist, so I decided to see if I could explain what it is that makes certain progenitors so irresistible. After a little mulling, I came up with a handful of factors that seem to be at play, and I’m curious whether others will agree.

Accidental discovery

Learning something that makes you do a double take, as often as not, results from tripping across a random tidbit in a newspaper, and this is the equivalent of an engraved invitation to dig deeper. In the case of Katy Perry, for instance, I spotted an article about a gold heist in 1859 San Francisco that featured members of her family. That caused me to follow the trail of her Irish immigrant great-great-grandmother, Anna “Hannah” Maria Mulhare, and reach the conclusion that she’s probably the one who wound up with the haul.

AI-generated version of Katy Perry’s great-great-grandmother, Hannah Mulhare

Similarly, with Barry Manilow, I stumbled across a piece about one of his grandfathers, Harry Pincus, that revealed he was a strongman swimmer — that is, he did stunts where he swam long distances (usually a mile or two) and used a rope in his teeth to pull up to five rowboats with men in them. Sometimes he even did this with his arms tied behind his back. This alone would have been sufficient to lure me, but then I found a prison record for him and had to know more.

Pocket of history I want to know more about

If you’re like me, there are slices of history you have a passing knowledge of — maybe you studied them briefly in high school — but you never truly wrapped your head around them. Every once in a while, I’m fortunate enough to be able to address one of these gaps thanks to a beckoning ancestor.

Ambrose Hawkins, a 3rd great-grandfather of Pharrell Williams, is one such person. I was aware of the American Colonization Society and its efforts in the first half of the nineteenth century to send free people of color to Africa (which they referred to as “repatriation” in spite of the fact that most descended from families that had been in America for generations), but Pharrell’s antecedent left an intriguing paper trail and it wasn’t until I investigated his involvement that I gained a better understanding.

AI imagining of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 5th great-grandparents, David and Sophie Towns

David and Sophie Towns, a pair of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 5th great-grandparents, were kind enough to take me on an extended ride to learn not only what it was like to be an interracial couple in the early 1800s, but also about the chaotic early days of Texas and the role that slavery played in the revolution that gained its independence from Mexico.

Challenge

Stubbornness in genealogists can be a useful trait because we often encounter obstacles. We tend to refer to them as “brick walls,” and I’ve never met one I didn’t want to kick down or climb over. It’s a bit twisted perhaps, but I like it when the ancestors make me work for it.

I dealt this when unearthing the roots of both Barack and Michelle Obama. In the case of then-candidate Obama, I ventured back in time to see how far you had to go to find immigrants (aside from his father who returned to Kenya). This is how I made my acquaintance with his 3rd great-grandfather, Fulmoth Kearney, from Ireland.

Ireland loves to claim its own, so once word got out that Barack Obama had Irish forebears, I was contacted by members of the Irish media wanting to know exactly where his family was from. One of the most common stumbling blocks in Irish genealogy is identifying the place of origin, particularly if the immigrants left fairly early, and Fulmoth’s departure was Famine era. In other words, figuring out which town or village got credit was not going to be easy. Ultimately, it was a pair of tombstones in Ohio that pointed me to Moneygall in County Offaly. If they hadn’t existed, it might have taken me several years instead of a couple of months to ascertain his ancestral home. To this day, the resulting Barack Obama Plaza, a highway service station in Moneygall, gets rediscovered and goes gently viral once or twice every year.

In the case of Michelle Obama, it was a mother-son pair who grabbed my attention, Melvina and Dolphus Shields. I first observed them together in the 1870 census, living next door to a white Shields family, and also noted that though they were living in Georgia, Melvina had been born in South Carolina. The obvious questions arose, and having done a lot of African American genealogy, I was well aware there would be no simple answers. It took me several months, but I was eventually able to ferret out the answers I sought.

Unexpected locations, heritage, and/or connections

I love those moments when you’re poking around a family tree and come across a surprising location. This occurred not long ago with Taylor Swift when I noticed that one of her great-grandfathers had been born at sea. As I continued to burrow, South Africa and Malta came into the picture — not what I had anticipated when I began.

This reminded me of my probe into Jon Stewart’s ancestry that turned up a document stating that one of his grandfathers, Nathan Laskin, had been born in Manzhouli, now part of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of China. I hadn’t seen that coming.

I was also caught off-guard when I realized that one of Bruno Mars’s grandmothers was Jewish, the daughter of parents from Ukraine and Hungary. Like so many, I was aware of his Puerto Rican and Filipino heritage, but not this aspect.

And then there are the unexpected connections between famous people, but not necessarily that they’re cousins. Perhaps I’m more dismissive than I should be, but when you see such tales in the media, the celebrities cited are typically very distant — 10th or even 20th — cousins — and once you get back that far, we all have millions of cousins, so it rarely impresses me. I prefer stealth links of a different sort.

For instance, when I was asked to look into the family history of civil rights activist and one-time presidential candidate, Al Sharpton, I became fascinated with one of his great-grandfathers, Coleman Sharpton. Imagine my queasiness when I uncovered the fact that Coleman had once been enslaved by relatives of Strom Thurmond, who had run for President with the aim of preserving racial segregation.

Fortunately, most such hidden associations are more pleasant in nature, such as ancestresses of Michelle Obama and Meghan Markle living near each other in Jonesboro, Georgia, and relatives of President Joe Biden and Taylor Swift living in the same pocket of Portsea, England.

Roots claiming them

Finally, I enjoy getting pulled into cases where it seems that a high profile individual was almost destined to become known for a specific reason because, well, their ancestors steered them in that direction. Hannah Waddingham is a classic case. As I pushed my way back on her mother’s side of the family, I waded through four generations of singers and musicians, so it’s no wonder that she’s such a gifted singer and performer. It’s in her blood.

The same is also true of Anthony Bourdain. Yes, he was a vagabond, and once you know that his grandfather, Pierre M. Bourdain, stowed away on a ship to America at the age of 13, and that his ancestors meandered around France, Brazil, Ukraine, Spain, Austria, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Gibraltar, it seems almost inevitable that he would also be a wanderer.

And then, of course, there are the physical resemblances. Please enjoy this sampling.

Top: Bruno Mars next to one of his grandfathers (credit for photo on right: PR Photos); Middle: Jon Stewart and his great-uncle; Bottom: Barack Obama next to his 3rd great-grandfather, Fulmoth Kearney (credit for photo on left: Merlyn White).

So these are the elements that can turn a casual exploration of anyone’s roots into an obsession with one or two of his or her predecessors — at least for me. But what about you? What turns “just another” ancestor into a “shiny object” one for you?

Note regarding AI: While I make liberal use of AI to generate images to accompany my articles (and always identify them as such), it has not been used in any way to write this article — no brainstorming, drafting, editing, or any other aspect.

The post Shiny Object Ancestors: The Ones We Can’t Resist appeared first on Megan Smolenyak.

1. Surnames adorning the branches of his family tree include Binford, Brooks, Carter, Cephas, Cooke, Fears, Foster, Gomes, Graca, Gross, Hobson, Jeffries, Pereira, Pina, Smith, and Taylor, so if you have any in common, you could be related.

2. You might think the odds of a connection are slim, but Congressman Jeffries has a multitude of cousins. One of his great-great-grandmothers made it to the century mark and her obituary noted that she left 77 great-grandchildren and 31 great-great-grandchildren. This was half a century ago, so the number of descendants from this ancestor alone would be in the hundreds by now. And in case you’re wondering, Hakeem Jeffries’ life overlapped hers, so he was one of those 31 great-greats.

3. While he was born in Brooklyn, his roots are planted elsewhere. Using the generation of his great-grandparents as a reference point, Virginia claims 3/8ths of his heritage, Georgia 1/4, Cape Verde 1/4 (more on this later), and Maryland 1/8. A combination of the Great Migration and immigration added California, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio into the mix.

4. A sad affair that emerges with distressing frequency in his family is parents dying young, particularly mothers. For instance, his mother’s mother, Nellie, died when she was only 23 years old and her daughter all of two. For Nellie’s husband, this would have been history repeating itself in the worst possible way, as his own mother had died at 23 when he was only two.

On his father’s side of the family, his grandfather — the youngest of 13 — was orphaned at 10. Due to these tragic losses, older sisters and aunts have played an outsized role in the family, stepping in to raise the children who have lost parents. When Jeffries’ parents married, for example, it was his mother’s aunt who announced their engagement.

5. A more welcome pattern that surfaces when researching Rep. Jeffries’ family tree is one of service to others — a blend of community, military, and union-related. His paternal grandmother was recognized by Essex County, New Jersey for her volunteer efforts helping elderly people who lived alone, while one of his maternal great-grandfathers helped the Mine, Mill & Smelter union he belonged to (which presumably assisted him when he later broke his leg at work).

His maternal grandfather was career military, enlisting in the Army during WWII in 1942 and serving until 1963, and his service may well be what inspired his daughter — Jeffries’ mother — to become chairman of the Junior Girls of both local and state American Legion Auxiliary posts. A newspaper article notes that she was the “first Negro girl ever” to serve in this capacity, a phrase that simultaneously makes one wince and appreciate that even to volunteer, she had to break new ground while still a teenager. Around the same time, she was also an officer with her school’s Future Teachers of America and Choir organizations, the latter especially fitting since she’s a gifted vocalist.

6. The Jeffries branch of the family hails from Jasper County, Georgia, and the earliest ancestor I’ve been able to find there so far is a 3rd great-grandfather named William Fears who was enslaved for the first forty or so years of his life. For this reason, July 6, 1867 would have been a special day for him. This was the date he registered to vote.

(both found on Ancestry)

A census record reveals that he had been born to a local woman and a father from Africa, so it must have seemed improbable to him that this moment would ever come.

Even so, Jasper County would not have been a haven for Fears and his family as a gently disguised form of slavery persisted there well into the 20th century. A Kirkus Review of Gregory A. Freeman’s eye-opening book, Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves, summarizes this peonage system as follows: “A young black man would find himself arrested for some minor offense and issued a fine that he would be unable to pay; a local farmer would pay his fine and put him to work under slavery-like conditions, ostensibly to pay off this unasked-for loan.”

Lynchings and other forms of violence were also a constant threat. Jeffries’ ancestors — William Fears’ descendants — would finally leave in the early 1920s. In the half-decade leading up to their departure, at least 15 Black people had been lynched or otherwise murdered in the county.

Jasper County history excerpt

None of this is included in this Jasper County history I came across in the course of my research — not surprising since it was written in 1969 and reflects perspectives and attitudes shared by many at the time. But it’s disconcerting that this is the history presented on the county’s official website today.

7. Finally, though most of Congressman Jeffries’ family tree meanders back for generations in the U.S., one portion came here just slightly over a century ago when a pair of his great-grandparents immigrated from Cape Verde (then a Portuguese colony), off the coast of West Africa.

His great-grandfather, Manuel Gomes, arrived in 1915 following the 4,000 mile path between Fogo and New Bedford, Massachusetts crossed by countless others since New England whalers had forged the connection back in the late 18th century. He married, had a son, applied for citizenship, and lost his wife — all by 1923.

Still, he carried on, working in brass mills and for a railroad, raising his son, securing his American citizenship, remarrying, and having more children. At some point, he returned home for good and died in São Filipe in 1974, where his grave can be seen today.

(FindaGrave, photo by Alan and Linda Martineau)

In his waning days, I can’t help but wonder if Manuel could have possibly imagined that Cape Verde would gain its independence just seven months later, much less that his then-four-year-old great-grandson, Hakeem Jeffries, would rise to where he is in the U.S. Congress today.

Top Photo: Hakeem Jeffries (official portrait, 2022)

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