Small Town in a Big City

It's been really difficult to find any records of my mother's family dating back before she was born, especially on her mother's (Mom Mom Mom's) side. Do you have any idea how many Mary O'Briens there were in Philly in 1900? On top of that, i wasn't sure of her parents' names. Last night i finally had a breakthrough: i remembered the names of a few of my grandmother's siblings. It's amazing how your memory kicks into gear as soon as you make that first connection! I started out by remembering that i had an Uncle Jim whom i thought was her brother, then i remembered Aunt Jule, next came the name of an uncle by marriage that i'd always heard spoken of as being a royal jerk.

I finally found a 1900 census record with the right kids' names and with both parents born in Ireland (as I knew they were). This was surprisingly tricky. It turns out that there were two O'Brien families on the same page of the census, both sets of parents were born in Ireland, and both mothers were named Mary. Not only that, but there was a daughter named Mary in the other family (although the census taker inexplicably labelled both Mary and Margaret from the other O'Brien family as sons). So to return to my earlier comment: there were an awful lot of Mary O'Briens around in 1900! The first Mary was too young to be my grandmother and the names of the other kids in the family didn't sound familiar, so i looked down the page to the second set of O'Briens. When i saw that the father's (my great-grandfather's) name was Cornelius, it rang a bell. Oddly enough, my grandmother's name wasn't listed, but since all the other names were the names of her siblings, i'm assuming that it is the correct family. It's possible that, for whatever reason, she was not living at home at the time the census was taken. I've run across this in the records for my father's family, where at one point two of his brothers were living with their aunts rather than their parents. At any rate, I started out looking for one Mary O'Brien (my grandmother) and found three others, even though she herself seems to have been hiding from the census taker. This has been a real challenge, but i've finally broken through to one more generation in the family tree.

Now here's the really cool part. Since i've always been a map-geek, when i find old census records for people in the family, one of the first things i do is see if their address is legible, then look it up on Google maps.  I already had the 1900 census record for my mom's father's family (the candy-making Millers from whom i inherited my sweet-tooth). So i plotted the two addresses and discovered that my mother's parents grew up about a block away from each other in Fishtown. I'd always known that my dad's side of the family lived in or near Fishtown, but i was really surprised to discover that my mother's family did too! I wonder if the families knew each other. They may have gone to the same church, or Grandpop Miller may have gone to school with Aunt Nell (his future sister-in-law), since they were about the same age.

A. 210 E. Allen St. - Miller
B. 914 Beach St. - O'Brien

Even though their houses gave way to urban renewal long, long ago, it's so exciting to know that this is where they lived, these were the streets they walked. And, in a strange coincidence, i lived just a few blocks from there ninety years later. It's an odd feeling to know that i walked the same streets as my great grandparents and probably passed where their homes had stood a hundred times.

C. My little house on Crease St. (1990)

Oh, and since i mentioned that my father's family lived in that area too, here's where his grandparents lived.

     A. 933 N. Mascher St. - Lyons (1900);  B. 210 E. Allen St. - Miller (1900);  C. 914 Beach St. - O'Brien (1900);  D. my house (1990)                                      

In 1900, Philadelphia was the third largest city in the United States. But to our family it was practically a village. I've now found the homes where three of my four grandparents' families were living at the turn of the last century...and they were all within walking distance of each other.

We Can't All Be Descended from Napoleon or Pocahontas

I've always wanted to fill in some of the details of my admittedly sketchy knowledge of my ancestors. The facts were few and often contradictory. Among the smattering of things that my sister Peg and I knew for certain was that our mother's paternal grandfather came from Alsace-Lorraine and her paternal grandmother was from Hamburg and spoke high German. Our mother would tell us this in such reverential tones that, even though we had no idea what was so high about high German, we knew this was, for her, a source of great pride. We even used this as a way to explain how different our mother was from her shall-we-say "earthier" sister Eleanor. Aunt Eleanor was loud and likely to chop up the furniture for firewood or refinish all the floors in the house without asking for--or even wanting--anyone's help. Our mother was soft-spoken and partial to wearing white gloves. She was more refined, we surmised, because she had spent much of her childhood with her Hochdeutsch-speaking German grandmother. Now, thanks to a few old census records, I've learned that my revered high German great-grandmother was named Annie and was apparently the daughter of Irish immigrants. Go figure!

About my father's family, I knew even less. He always told us he was Irish, but when mom would get mad at him, she'd occasionally refer to him as a "damn limey." Again, go figure! Of one thing I am fairly certain: when my father would tell me that we were descended from Sir Richard O'Lyons of the Third Royal Fusiliers, he was bestowing a bit of the blarney. I use the term "blarney" in the belief that, despite my mother's epithet, he was in fact a son of the Emerald Isle (the census records seem to support this). Are we descended from Sir Richard? Who knows. I rather hope not if he's the Sir Richard Lyons (an Englishman whose name lacked the O') that I stumbled across in my research, the one who was "killed in a riot--possibly for selling bad meat to the troops" back in 1383. 

As you might imagine, it was with some trepidation that, after this initial foray into genealogical research, I decided to see what more I could find out about my roots. Who knows what other parts of our cherished family history would turn out to be more accurately described as family mythology. So far it's been pretty frustrating: there's not an uncommon surname in the batch, and the given names of four generations seem to be limited to Johns, Marys, Catherines, Patricks and Bridgets. These were, mind you, people who had enormous numbers of children, but apparently they subscribed to the George Foreman school of child-naming. Nevertheless, I intend to forge onward and use this blog to occasionally post updates on what I find. I can't guarantee what form this will take, though given my own inclinations and familial tendencies, I expect that it will veer more towards storytelling than the recitation of hard data. I will try not to lie or turn any Germans Irish or vice versa. But I won't promise not to add some imagination to the mix in an effort to give life to what little I find about these people whose lives perhaps went largely unnoticed by the movers and shakers of history, but with whose lives my own is so thoroughly entwined.