How To Break Down a Brick Wall

 I am participating in 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks, a writing challenge encouraging genealogy researchers to write about their ancestors. The challenge is hosted by genealogist, blogger and podcaster Amy Johnson Crow.

Here's my post for Amy's Week Fourteen prompt: Brick Wall

By Nancy Gilbride Casey

Every genealogist hits a brick wall – that dreaded time when you cannot trace an ancestor or family line any further backwards in time. The records become scarce or ancestors are not where you think they should be. You just hit the proverbial wall.

My biggest brick wall is my great, great grandmother Catherine Ryan, a frequent topic of my blog posts. Although I have made tremendous progress in researching her in the past two years, by finding out she was in an asylum and discovering that she had a second stillborn child, I have not been able to find anything on her life prior to her marriage in 1875. Where was she born? Who were her parents? When did she immigrate? Where did she live between 1855-1875?

Records which pertain to her life are limited to just a few documents created within the six-year span of 1875-1881:

• Marriage record from Holy Rosary Church
• Baptismal record for her only child, my great grandfather, from Holy Rosary Church
• 1880 United States Federal Census special population schedule
• Her patient record from Danville Asylum
• Her civil death record from the city of Scranton
• The cemetery record of the plot purchase made by my 2x great grandfather in Scranton’s Cathedral Cemetery after her death.

One way I plan to approach this brick wall is to look at Catherine's "FAN" club, or those friends, associates and neighbors who took part in Catherine and her husband Michael Gilbride's life events. For Catherine, there are just a handful of these so far:

• Catherine’s marriage to Michael was witnessed by a Catherine Cavanaugh and a Michael Maren. Since Michael’s aunt Rose Gilbride married a Cavanaugh and had a daughter named Catherine, I believe the witness was Michael’s cousin. I have yet to discover Michael Maren's relationship to the couple.

This 1989 transcription of Michael and Catherine's Holy Rosary marriage record was taken from the church's marriage register, from records originally written in difficult-to-read Latin script. I believe the male witness' surname is actually Maren.

• The sponsors to her son John Joseph’s baptism were Robert and Margaret Kilgallon. This couple’s surname does ring a bell, in that John’s younger half-sister Loretta Gilbride eventually married into a Gilgallon family. So, perhaps Robert and Margaret were friends of the Gilbride or Ryan family and the surname was spelled differently on the record, as often happens.
• Catherine was committed to Danville by the authority of the Directors of the Poor of Providence, a charitable entity responsible for indigent citizens of Providence, where the family lived. (Providence, along with Hyde Park and the then-smaller Scranton, were merged together to form the Borough of Scranton in 1866.) So far, I have not been able to find any extant records of the Directors' activities or meetings which might help me flesh out the circumstances of Catherine’s committal. 
• Although their identity is currently unknown, someone paid the annual fee to keep up Catherine's grave site, from 1945-1957, as noted on the cemetery record. This is an intriguing clue, as by that time both her husband Michael and her son John had already died, in 1908 and 1937, respectively. So, who was this mystery benefactor - could they be the missing piece of my puzzle?

  

  This cemetery plot record from Cathedral Cemetery, though copied from an original ledger, notes amounts for the annual upkeep for Catherine's grave site from 1945-1957, bottom right quarter of card. Who was the mysterious benefactor?

Another approach break the brick wall is to do a DNA study. How can this be done when we don't have Catherine's DNA? If a DNA match can be made between me/my family who have DNA tested and another living descendant of one of Catherine's family line - perhaps descendants of her siblings or cousins - then it may be possible to trace backward to her parents or grandparents through traditional "on-paper" genealogy research. It's a long shot, but it's possible.

Looking at the records in new ways, discovering new connections in Catherine's FAN club, and identifying possible living descendants of Catherine's family members, are approaches that I hope will help me finally break down this most solid of brick walls.


Subscribe to "Leaves on the Tree," to see updates to this and other family history stories, right in your email box. Click the green Subscribe link above.

Until next time...