Mind Mapping a Brick Wall Problem

I've often written about my 2x great grandmother Catherine Ryan Gilbride. Though I've discovered much about her short life, I still don't know her parents' identities or where she was born. I've searched the 1870 census for her without luck. I've investigated a connection between several DNA clusters with Ryan and O'Malley surnames which I cannot account for in my other family lines. Still, no luck. 

As a female who lived a short life, Catherine created very few records, and I've obtained all I can find. Her parents were not named in any of them. And there is another pesky problem. The 1880 U.S. census states she was born in Pennsylvania, but her death record and Danville Asylum patient record state that she was born in Ireland.¹ This is a conflict that I chose to ignore in the past, preferring the notion that she was born in Ireland. I know better now: I need to address that conflict and resolve it. One short-term goal added to my list.

Last year, as I pondered this genealogical problem, I did a "brain dump" to record every random thought and theory I ever had about it. Last month I created a mind map to visualize these thoughts. Mind mapping can help you see a problem in a different way. The mind map I created for the question "Who was Catherine Ryan's Father?" is below. I chose to focus on her father, as it is more likely that he will have created more records than her mother. (Click on the image to zoom in/out.)

You'll see I'm asking such questions as Did he emigrate? Was he born in the United States? What was his marital status? These questions help me look at the problem from different angles in the hope that some new research avenue will occur to me.

Last week, I attended my first-ever Ohio Genealogical Society Conference.  I attended the workshop "Nuts and Bolts, Bells and Whistles: Pennsylvania Genealogy Bootcamp." Before the workshop, we were invited to throw our toughest Pennsylvania research problems at the workshop panel to see if they had any insights.

Katy Bodenhorm Barnes, executive director of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania was my group leader, and she immediately seized upon Catherine's birthplace discrepancy. She added that based on Catherine's supposed birth year of 1855, perhaps she was not a Famine immigrant herself, but that perhaps her parents were the Famine immigrants and she really was born in Pennsylvania. This theory makes her emigration story parallel to that of the Gilbride family, where the nuclear family members were all born in Ireland and the next generation was born in the United States.

She also suggested that I do a Ryan surname study of the area, researching all the Ryans where Catherine lived to see if I can tease her out of the shadows. The geographic area would include Luzerne/Lackawanna County as well as Wayne County where the Gilbrides settled. It could be that Catherine's Ryan family were neighbors or associates of the Gilbrides and that is how she and husband Michael Gilbride met.

Her last suggestion was to follow up on those DNA matches with the Ryan/O'Malley surname discovered in a previous research by further building out each cluster's family tree to look for connections to Catherine's family.

I've added these ideas and refined some notes on my original mind map, which now look like this:

 

It was really helpful to have someone new take a look at my research on Catherine to identify overlooked avenues—and frankly, to call out my confirmation bias on wanting Catherine to be born in Ireland. Adding these thoughts to my mind map gives me some visual cues to continue my work on this tough case. 

Until next time...

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This post was chosen as a Friday Family History Find by blogger Linda Stufflebean. Thank you, Linda!

 

NOTES

All websites accessed 2 May 2023.

¹ 1880 United States Federal Census, Montour County, Pennsylvania, population schedule, supervisor district 5, enumeration district (ED) 193, page 30 (penned), Inhabitants of Danville Insane Asylum entry for Catherine Gilbride; digital image, FamilySearch (https://tinyurl.com/y5zubx8p); citing NARA microfilm publication T9, Roll 1160, image 15. Also: Catharine Gilbride patient record, 1887-1881, Record Group 23, Records of the Department of Public Welfare, Danville State Hospital, Female Case Books, Book A, pages 81, noting "native of Ireland"; photocopies supplied by Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg, PA to Nancy Gilbride Casey, Tioga, Texas. Also: Pennsylvania. Lackawanna County, City of Scranton, Department of Public Health, death certificate for "Catharine Gilbride," 27 Jan 1881; "Record of deaths, 1878-1905, in the city of Scranton, Pennsylvania," digital image, FamilySearch, (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3Q9M-C9YG-R95K-X?); FHL film 007700813, image 1411.