Hey Pilgrim!

First of all, Happy Birthday John and Chris!  I had to steal this great picture of Chris and Lori that appeared on Facebook this week

Wow! For a minute, I had to double check who was the guy with all the grey hair but you're both looking really good here.  I'm so glad your friend shared! And John gets to have a birthday with his new sister.  Pretty sweet place we're at right now. 

With Thanksgiving approaching, I thought this would be a good time to introduce the Pilgrims in our line.  I knew it was possible/likely that we had Mayflower connections, but my recent trip to the New England Historic Genealogical Society in Boston confirmed it to the extent that I think I can share the details with you.  And you have to pay attention because it's almost Thanksgiving and it would be nearly un-American not to pay attention to Pilgrim stories at this time of year.

First of all, part of my hesitation in sharing this with you was kind of stuck in my lack of confirming documentation that we actually descend from Mayflower passengers.  Part of what I learned in Boston was that there's a certain point in family history research at which you can accept what you are given since it's been very well documented by others with much more knowledge, experience and history than you. I don't need to find Richard Warren's birth certificate--that fact is already well researched and accepted knowledge.  The very fact of its presence at this library proves its worthiness.  I don't need to re-prove what's already well proven.  I guess I hadn't really come to that realization yet, though I've had this Mayflower information for nearly 20 years now.

It appears we have (at least) three Mayflower passengers through whom we can claim this honor: Richard Warren, Stephen Hopkins and William Brewster.  This is 14 generations ago.

These are documents Ann Gleason possessed and shared with me.  She was working with a couple of other researchers who (I now see) did their work very well.  The outlines above were done by one of them. At number/generation 12 we would have Catherine Pierce (Nanny Ryan) and Paul Ryan Sr.  Generation 13 would be Paul Ryan Jr and Anne Flynn.  Pretty cool, right?  I already had things pretty well sketched out back to generation 8 or so and my time in Boston opened the gates from generation 7 back to the passengers themselves.

There are many many stories about these passengers, their first brutal winter at Plymouth and the first Thanksgiving celebration and it's pretty awesome to think we carry those stories in our very genes.  If you are curious, a really neat Mayflower site is Caleb Johnson's site www.mayflowerhistory.com . 

There you will find brief biographies of these people and one of the most intriguing is Stephen Hopkins, who apparently had previously traveled to this new land and spent time in Jamestown VA before coming to Plymouth.  He was quite the rogue it seems, so that fits in pretty nicely with the rest of our story. We actually have 2 connections through him. 

Another nice summary can be found at the New England Historic Genealogical website: http://www.americanancestors.org/who-came-on-the-mayflower-pt2/ . I strongly encourage you to check these out.

It's the Pierce family that is our "Yankee" connection.  Who knew? It's interesting to note that our beginnings in Plymouth MA wind their way back through our own ancestry from Gloucester  to Nova Scotia (Nickersons) to Cape Cod and finally back to Plymouth. 

I hope you keep these Pilgrims in mind as you feast this year.  Special Thanksgiving wishes to you all.

The Ryan boys

As you have heard, I made it my mission to "find" Aunt Bud, which I was able to accomplish on our recent trip to Gloucester.  Although there is still some mystery as to exactly where she rests, I feel settled that I have closed a chapter for her by adding a death date in our family tree.  There remained another unfinished story in Uncle Jack.  It was my secondary mission in Gloucester and I found him as well.  It's an interesting story.

Grampie Ryan was one of 9 children.  One baby girl died at birth so Aunt Bud was the only girl among seven boys.  John "Jack" Ryan was the youngest and was the victim of an accidental shooting in November 1939.  I think I've shared that story before.  Tim told me he thought that Jack had died as a result of his wounds, but I didn't find an obituary in the days immediately following the accident.  So I felt I needed to "find" him as well so that I could close his story also. 

I had discovered he died sometime in 1939 so it was a tad easier to go day by day through the newspapers from the November shooting date to the end of the year to find his death.

More than 7 weeks elapsed between the accident and his death, and Tim was absolutely correct that his uncle had died as a result of the shooting.  I noted that Jack had a wife and two children but haven't located them. Yet.

Since I was on a hot streak, I decided to pick up the thread left behind by this gravestone:

John J. Bentley is Captain Bentley who was lost at sea, Mary Costello Bentley was his wife.  Catherine Bentley was their daughter, our ancestor who married this William H. Ryan.  They are buried in separate cemeteries.  Everett Sr. is one of Grampie's brothers and Everett Jr. obviously his son.  As tempted as I was to locate Everett Jr. who apparently died as a teenager, I began looking for Everett Sr. in 1934. 

I did find a funeral notice for Everett Sr. in August of that year but couldn't find the traditional death notice so I looked in the main portion of the paper and stopped cold when I found this very sad story:

This left me feeling very melancholy at how sad and lonely it must have been for Everett and his family and I couldn't go any further that day.  I was able to close the door on 3 of the siblings and have 2 remaining (Chester and Arthur).  There was a great deal of tragedy in that Ryan household which provides insight for Grampie and for Dad.

Halloween Tale to Tell

Happy Halloween!  As you know, we have recently returned from a two week trip to Gloucester.  It was a great trip filled with children, whales, research and birthday fun.  The typical "Gloucester Report" will follow in another post.  We did have kind of an interesting experience that seems just right for a Halloween post.

My primary research goal on this trip was to "find" Aunt Bud.  Aunt Bud was Viola Elizabeth Ryan, a sister to Grampie and a favorite aunt of Dad's.  Perhaps you remember the story Peter told us about Aunt Bud giving Dad a ring to give to Mom?

In this picture you see Nanny Ryan, Dad, Aunt Bud and Uncle Peter.  I believe this was taken at his college graduation 1955.  So I knew she was alive at least til the spring of 1955.  For a long time, I've been trying to track down some more details about Aunt Bud's life especially when she died and where she was buried.  Peter told us once that he remembered that she was living on Haskell Street with Nanny and Grampie because she was ill.  He came home from school one day and found her dead.  No one could really remember when that was but I figured 1955-1958 as a range because Peter would probably have graduated by about 1958 when he was 18.  That narrowed it down but that's still a pretty big range to search.  Tim and Peter thought it might be 1956 or 1957 so I started to search day by day through the Gloucester newspapers for an obituary.  This was on a previous visit.

Just before we left for this recent trip, I prepped myself to research Aunt Bud and Uncle Jack, who supposedly had died of an accidental gunshoot wound.  Lo and behold some new digital references had become available so I learned that Aunt Bud died in 1957 and Uncle Jack in 1939 (the year of the accident). So I began searching day by day through "only" 1957 without much luck the first time.  But the second time, I tried the roll of microfilm that held copies of the paper from Oct-Dec 1957 figuring that range might be a good bet because school is in session most of that time since Peter remembered he had some home from school to find her.  (Nancy Drew has nothing on my detecting skills!). And, voila, this is what I found from early December:

Peter was right again!  He's got great information.  I was quite pleased to find her.  You'll notice it says she was buried in the family plot at Calvary.  The only family plot I was aware of at Calvary is this one where Nanny, Grampie and Grampie's mother are buried:

We noticed her arrangements were made by the Greely Funeral Home and I remember Mom saying this is the place always used by the Ryans.  Jim suggested we go there and ask.  I was a little reluctant, but off we went and BOY was it worth the attempt!! A very nice lady was wonderful enough to go up into the attic to locate their books from 1957 and show us the page in their records for Aunt Bud's services:

Perhaps you'll notice that the drawing of the plot seems to indicate the burial of mother Katherine Bentley Ryan AND Arthur 1955 from Florida!  Arthur is another "lost" Ryan so this was huge.  I was tickled to think I'd found Aunt Bud and her brother Arthur so we went back to Calvary to see if we could find Sect 15 Range 15 Lot 13.  No luck. I called the Archdiocese of Boston and they said she was in Sect 17 Range 1 Lot 13.  Back to the cemetery.  Still no luck.  Apparently there is some confusion with Calvary cemetery records prior to 1960.  The Archdiocese "cannot confirm or deny" that Aunt Bud is buried there so we cannot have her name added to the stone--which was my intention at first. 

We feel Aunt Bud and Arthur are buried in this plot.  We don't know why their names do not appear but I can speculate that it was just too expensive.  The monument people told us it would be $410 plus a $20 fee to the Archdiocese to add Aunt Bud to the stone.  That was more than I was expecting so I suppose in 1955 or 1957 if you pro-rate that amount, it would still be kind of expensive for Nanny and Grampie to add those names, even if the other siblings helped out.  And perhaps it should just stay that way. We don't even know who owns the plot so it could be quite a process to get the proper permissions.   I'm not sure.  I'm going to wait til I find Arthur to decide how to proceed. 

But that's our cemetery mystery for Halloween 2013.  I found Aunt Bud and probably Arthur.  The Uncle Jack story and the story of another brother, Everett to follow.  Also very interesting stuff!

There are stranger things in cemeteries than this:) 

Gloucester--Here we come (again)!

We'll be leaving for Gloucester this weekend for a two week stay.  We have been looking forward to the day that we could go and not have to hurry back so we are very excited about this trip.  As you know, we've been visiting Gloucester for a long time now.  Jim and I went there for our honeymoon and, lucky for me, Jim loved it too.  The nature of our trips has changed over the years but it's always based in family. 

I thought you might like to see a little bit of our perspective of Gloucester over the years (well, at least since 1985!):

 Cousin Cathy -- how cute is she?

At the Haskell Street house 1985

The following year we returned to celebrate our anniversary and made that a tradition until children and summer activities kind of interfered a bit.

 This street fair was in progress August 1987.  I think I'm going to take the pictures I have of Gloucester streets in 1987 with me on this trip and try to find the same spots again for comparison.  Stay tuned.

We went back to Rocky Shores Inn and this was the view.  You can see why we liked it there but they did not allow children in the Inn so we haven't been back in a while.  Now they are under new ownership and we have found places much closer to the water we like to listen to while we sleep.

1997 in Tim's front yard

Sometimes others would come along for the ride.  This is 2003.

2010 with Ryan off to school and Amy in Erie.  Just the two of us again. We've been discovering new places and hugging babies on recent visits.

I plan to spend lots of time researching family history on this trip--in fact, I've signed up for a genealogy workshop in Boston while we are there.  It will be so nice not to rush back though we've never been gone for this long, though the Ireland trip kind of warmed us up to being away from the house for a while.  I hope to bring back some cool stuff to share with you all, which is what this has always been about! 

Slainte!

A whole month since the last post.  Holy Cow!  Thanks for hanging in there with me.  I feel as though I've just gotten our return from Ireland complete and now I can turn my attention to our upcoming time in Gloucester!  The weather has been so magnificent that it's hard to concentrate on other things like blogging and sorting Ireland pictures!!  Many of you have seen several of them already but here are some you may not have seen.  They tell the story a little differently :) 




As you know, we stayed one night in Gloucester on both ends of this trip, which worked out really well for us.  We got to spend some time with Uncle Tim and it felt a little bit like we were making up for not having him on the trip with us.  In his defense, we were only on the ground in Ireland for a few hours before it was very clear to me what Tim's hesitations were about coming along.  For one thing, we kept up a pretty good clip the entire time and he felt he would drag us down.  I don't believe that to be true, but the pace was pretty consuming and I can see where that might be hard for him.  We did miss him while we were there but it felt great to have some one-on-one time with him at both ends.

Frankly I was dreading the whole airport, security and flight experience but, surprisingly, it was actually very smooth and not nearly as difficult as I had anticipated.  We departed around 9 PM and I did not find it difficult to sleep most of the flight time.  Aer Lingus was great though and opened my eyes to the fact that air travel does NOT have to be unpleasant.  We got a quick introduction to the culture of Ireland while we were waiting in the Dublin airport for our bus and there was a group of 4-5 guys drinking beer out the bottle at the check in area!  The ride to Galway was about 2 hours perhaps and I was still kind of sleepy though it was 8 AM there.  My body was still on EST (about 4 AM).  I did take note that the scenery along the way looked nothing like I had pictured ---in fact, it looked a whole lot like home!  I was feeling disappointed but that did not last long once we got to Galway. 

As you may have seen in the pictures, we were greeted to Galway with a rainbow.  That felt like a very appropriate welcome on Mom's birthday!  We stayed in Salthill, an area of Galway city, which very much reminded me of Gloucester.  Water views, huge rocks everywhere, a boulevard for walking along the water's edge--one thing missing was the distinct seaside smell I associate with such towns.  We were in a bed and breakfast--a very common sight there and across Ireland.  It was very comfortable there, made more so by the HUGE breakfast each morning. 

We found a pub to our liking:  O'Connor's.  It was within easy walking distance and we went there each night we were in Galway.  They burned peat in the fireplace, had a older man entertaining on the piano and had some locals at the bar.  Kevin won himself a miniature shillelagh for participating in the trivia contest.

From Galway we traveled by bus to Cork which was very similar in many ways.  Our B & B there was next door to University College Cork so we found ourselves walking back and forth to town with the college students.  Oddly enough, we found a pub there also to our liking!  Reedy's--Emmy had visited there on a previous trip and she did not steer us wrong to go there to relax on the way back for the night.  While in Cork, we went to a show held in an old (OLD--built on that site by the Vikings) church.  Here's one of the numbers:

We are really glad we went to this show!

From Cork we went to Dublin by train for 2 nights.  Dublin was definitely very different from the other places we visited.  Our hotel was smack in the center of the bar scene downtown and you felt all that city energy.  We got a great deal of history explained to us here as we visited Jamesons, Guinness, the old jail, Trinity College for the Book of Kells, and Christchurch (one of the filming locations for "The Tudors").  We jammed a great deal into those couple of days.

The weather was good: "for Ireland" as we were told again and again.  It was mild but we didn't see much sun.  There was some drizzle and only one day did we get wet while out and about.  The food was also great--much better than we'd expected.  When you think if Irish food, it's not at the top of the list of "mmm-mmm-good" reactions.  But we had no trouble finding good food to eat.

I found myself taking that "long view" that I mentioned earlier.  I was looking over the landscape and thinking of our fishermen and our farmer ancestors.  The land is a treat for the eyes.  The grass is truly a different shade of green from what we are used to.  But our ancestors did not have easy lives and I respect them even more now than before.  Our heritage has served us all well over the years and I expect that to continue into the future. 


We found ourselves making plans for a return trip --when I intend to do some serious family research.   It was great to spend time with Emmy and Kevin sharing this adventure.  But I did realize that my body needs liquids other than caffeine and alcohol!  It was well worth it.  Anyone want to join us when we return?

Here's a bit of what the average landscape looked like.  Taken from our bus ride through The Ring of Kerry (the most beautiful scenery ever--made me cry!)

I love listening to the driver's voice.  We miss hearing the brogue.  I even watched "Historic Pubs of Dublin" on Netflix so I could hear it again!  Til next time:  Slainte!

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

Today we took a trip to Sapsucker Woods in Ithaca, a place I've wanted to take Jim for a long time now.  Their hiking trails are associated with the Cornell Ornithology Lab and I thought Jim would enjoy looking for the birds.  For myself, I've been working on getting back some of the "photography mojo" I seem to have misplaced recently and this seemed a good opportunity to practice.

As you probably know, I took a couple of photography courses recently.  I believe these are how my photo-mojo seemed to go missing.  I understand that learning new techniques for anything will naturally result in a learning curve, so I wasn't too surprised that I didn't feel like these courses helped my photography very much.  I understand my camera a little better and I appreciated the overview of the technical aspects like ISO, aperture and f stops.  But my pictures suffered!

One of the courses was called "Landscape Photography" and I was so stupid as to believe this referred to taking pictures of nature and the like.  I like taking pictures of flowers and animals so "landscape" seemed close enough.  The very first thing I learned in this course is that landscape photographers take pictures of ...(wait for it)....landscapes.  Huh. 

This got me thinking about "my" photography.  How would I describe what I like to do with my camera?  Here are some pictures from this week as I've been working on regaining a personal comfort level with my pictures and camera:

These are from Sapsucker Woods today:

 (You'll notice there are no birds here)

And my personal favorite from this week from the weeds in my front yard:

It occurs to me that I like to take pictures of the smaller pieces of the big puzzle to bring some attention to the beauty of the parts of the whole. 

You know that phrase "He can't see the forest for the trees"?  I think it's the opposite of that.  I like the trees in the forest and sometimes ignore the bigger picture (haha) while I focus on the details.  Like my personality, but that's for another blog post on another day.

I badly want my photo-mojo back before we go to Ireland.  I do not expect to experience the details of our family history while there especially since I have no idea where any living relatives might even be.  But I am hoping to get an idea of the big picture about our Irish heritage:  the lay of the land, the culture, the history.  I will carry with me the list of our Irish ancestors and their Irish roots.  On the Ryan side:  Timothy (maybe from Tipperary); Capt. John Bentley and his father in law Martin Costello (Galway); Conlons (Sligo); James Handran (Kilkenny).  On the Flynn side:  Ellen Breen Flynn (Clare) and Julia Fisher Nevins (Meath).

See you on the other side.  Of the Atlantic Ocean!

We'll Be Back

Our recent trip to Ellicottville prompted me to take another look at our connections there.  This is where our Nevins family in America took root.  I can say this with fair confidence now that I have some new information about John Nevins, Mom's great grandfather.  I don't think it's a small coincidence in the cosmic genealogy world that Dad took a job in Ellicottville and lived there himself for a while but that's already been covered!

When I undertook a review of the Nevins/Ellicottville research, I found a document that shed new light and re-invigorated by research efforts. 

This is a copy of a page from the Cattaragus County/Ellicottville Draft Registration for the US Civil War as of July 1 1863.  You will see a John Nevins listed at the very top of the page as a 30 year old single farmer born in Canada.  This may seem like a small piece of information, but for my research, it broke through a bit of a brick wall that I'd been banging my head against for several years.  I feel quite certain this is "our" John and it places him in Ellicottville in 1863.  I knew he married Julia Fisher in 1866 somewhere in New York, and now I feel quite certain they married in Cattaraugus County.  Placing a person in a location within a time period is a very critical piece of genealogical information.  I am quite thrilled.  You may stop yawning now.

I do not believe John actually enlisted.  There were a number of draft registrations for Union soldiers--1863 was the first.  John appears to be a Class 1 which makes it seem as though he could have enlisted and served.  Each county had a quota of men to provide for service but it appears he was not called to enlist nor did he choose to enlist.  I may yet find that he did indeed serve but perhaps from another location.  We saw this with Grampie Brown (he enlisted from Wisconsin when his home was in Buffalo NY) and presume it is related to the enlistment bounties paid.  Counties or regions tried to "up the ante" with their required numbers by offering a bounty for enlistment and it was not uncommon for potential soldiers to shop around their services to obtain the better bounty money.  Substitutes could also be "bought" for a drafted solider so this is another possibility for John though I believe it unlikely that a farmer would be able to pay for a substitute.  OK, done with the history lesson for this post.

On to the Fishers.  My attention to Ellicottville Nevins must also include the Fishers.  Julia Fisher Nevins had a brother Christopher who also lived in the Ellicottville area.  I was reviewing holes in my research and noticed that his family needed some attention from me.  Christopher had 6 children and I decided to concentrate on the males since it's a little easier to track them down.  This decision led me to a very odd, sad story that I thought you'd like to hear.

Christopher's oldest son Mathew married Catherine Simons and had a child Eveline May born April 22 1896 in Ellicottville according to church records.  This family lived in Ohio in the 1900 census and I was unable to find them after that which was weird because of the young child and their fairly easy names.  I couldn't let that go and kept looking finally finding the following:

Evelyn Mae Fisher, 7 years old, died of cold and exposure on a street corner in Spokane Washington in 1904.  Her last residence was listed as Elk British Columbia.  This haunts me.  How did this happen?  I've gotten no further in this story line but it feels a little bit liking I'm taking a commercial break on the Who Do You Think You Are? show.  We'll be back after the following messages from our sponsors.