Genealogy Tips and Quips Read online

  Genealogy Tips & Quips

  In 2007, a twelve-day trip to Ireland—my ancestors’ homeland—turned out to be the most significant turning point in my life. I never dreamed when I embarked on my adventure it would lead to me becoming a genealogist, meeting dozens of Irish rellies, writing two fiction book series set in Ireland, and buying a renovated 1887 schoolhouse in my Coffey ancestors’ townland.

  Since that trip, I’ve researched more than twenty-five of my maternal and paternal Irish lines as well as several Scottish ones. I’ve also assisted friends and family members with ancestry research in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Hungary, and the US. Besides conducting online research, I have visited numerous historical archives, traipsed through hundreds of cemeteries (many now situated in sheep-filled fields), and located several family homesteads.

  In 2018, I began writing a genealogy column for my monthly author newsletter about my personal research experiences. Because I was writing articles faster than I was publishing newsletters, I decided to compile them into a book. Genealogy Tips and Quips includes:

  twenty-five newsletter articles

  twenty-five brand-new articles

  a case study about how a paternal DNA test revealed my family’s royal lineage and my quest to uncover our family secrets

  an extensive case study on tracing my most difficult family line

  Be prepared for a lot of unexpected twists and turns as I share my mistakes, lessons learned, and tips for getting to the roots of your family tree!

  Genealogy Tips & Quips

  Eliza Watson

  Copyright

  GENEALOGY TIPS & QUIPS

  Copyright © 2020 by Elizabeth Watson

  All rights reserved by author.

  Interior formatting by Joan Frantschuk at Woven Red Author Services, www.WovenRed.ca

  All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Elizabeth Watson.

  ISBN ebook: 978-1-950786-02-2

  ISBN print book: 978-1-950786-03-9

  Books by Eliza Watson

  NONFICTION

  Genealogy Tips & Quips

  FICTION

  A Mags and Biddy Genealogy Mystery Series

  How to Fake an Irish Wake (Book 1)

  The Travel Mishaps of Caity Shaw Series

  Flying by the Seat of My Knickers (Book 1)

  Up the Seine Without a Paddle (Book 2)

  My Christmas Goose Is Almost Cooked (Book 3)

  My Wanderlust Bites the Dust (Book 4)

  Live to Fly Another Day (Book 5)

  When in Doubt Don’t Chicken Out (Book 6)

  Other Women’s Fiction Books

  Kissing My Old Life Au Revoir

  Writing Romance as Eliza Watson

  Identity Crisis

  Under Her Spell

  ’Til Death Do Us Part

  Writing Young Adult as Beth Watson

  Getting a Life, Even If You’re Dead

  Dedication

  To Jane Daly—a brilliant genealogist and mentor

  Without your assistance, I’d still be wandering through Ireland’s cemeteries searching for ancestry clues.

  Thanks a mil!

  Acknowledgments

  Genealogy Tips & Quips would never have been written if it weren’t for my courageous Irish and Scottish ancestors, who immigrated to America and Canada. My longing to discover their untold stories became a major turning point in my life, leading me to their homeland and down an unexpected path. I’m grateful to my parents, Doug and Judy Watson (née Flannery), for sharing my interest in our family heritage. I will forever cherish the memories of our journeys to Ireland and Scotland. Thank you to my living Irish rellies and friends for making all my visits so memorable: Charlotte, Peter, Alexander, and Ivan Molloy; Bernard and Nuala Bolger; Patrick, Geraldine, and Alison Flannery; Joyce, William, and Patricia Fullerton; and Des, Mags, and Darragh Carter.

  Thanks to my husband, Mark, and all my friends and family for believing in this project. And also for understanding my obsession, er, passion for genealogy. Nikki Ford and Judy Watson for your in-depth feedback. To beta readers Lori Lynch, Aileen O’Connell, Kyleigh Twaroski, Sandra Watson, and Penny Wolberg. To Chrissy Wolfe for editing and proofreading the book. And to Joan Frantschuk at Woven Red Author Services for your guidance with my first nonfiction endeavor and for a flawless interior format. Thanks to you ladies, I was able to publish this book with confidence.

  And to the many ancestors I have yet to find. Don’t worry, one day I will choose the correct path that leads to you. When I do, you will never be forgotten.

  Table of Contents

  List of Figures

  Genealogy Tips & Quips

  Copyright

  Books by Eliza Watson

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  How It All Began . . . Becoming a Genealogist

  Tip 1: Just Because It’s Set in Stone Doesn’t Make It True

  Tip 2: Helpful Online Resources

  Tip 3: The Importance of Being Earnest What’s in a Name?

  Tip 4: Psst. Did You Hear About . . . A Newspaper’s Gossip Column Might Have Some Juicy Family Details

  Tip 5: A Bit of Neighborly Advice Get to Know Your Ancestors’ Neighbors

  Tip 6: City Directories Pointing You in the Right Direction

  Tip 7: United States Naturalization Records

  Tip 8: The Creative Things I’ve Done to Research My Ancestors

  Tip 9: Can’t Find Your Ancestors? Get Off-Line!

  Tip 10: Yea or Nay for AncestryDNA?

  Tip 11: Playing a Genealogist Sleuth Inspector Clouseau or Sherlock Holmes?

  Tip 12: Middle Name Syndrome Don’t Ignore These Important Names

  Tip 13: Become a Cemetery Whisperer

  Tip 14: How to Make a Brick Wall Come Tumbling Down

  Tip 15: You Have a DNA Match . . . Now What?

  Tip 16: Your Ancestors Were Divorced? Lucky You!

  Tip 17: Ship Passenger Lists Helping You Embark on Genealogical Research

  Tip 18: Mapping Out Your Ancestors

  Tip 19: How One Clue Helped Me Solve a Ten-Year Family Mystery

  Tip 20: How a Tea Towel Can Help Determine Your Ancestors’ Origins

  Tip 21: Give It the Old College Try How a School Yearbook Helped Me Solve a Thirty-Year Family Mystery

  Tip 22: County Directories Finding Rural Ancestors

  Tip 23: Connecting the Family Dots How Linking Clues Can Lead to Answers

  Tip 24: He’s No Joe Blow The Importance of Sponsors and Witnesses

  Tip 25: Wills & Probate Insight into Families, Finances, and Feuds

  Tip 26: The Social Security Death Index Tells About a Person’s Life

  Tip 27: Ten Ways to Determine Death Dates

  Tip 28: Was She Mary, Molly, or Polly? Identifying Unusual Nicknames

  Tip 29: Tracing Your Ancestors Backward, Forward, and Sideways via Their Occupations

  Tip 30: Don’t Forget About the Little Guys Utilizing Local Libraries and Genealogical Societies for Ancestry Research

  Tip 31: Walking Among the Dead What a Cemetery Can Tell You About Your Ancestors’ Lives

  Tip 32: Go Straight to the Source Questions to Ask Your Relatives

  Tip 33: Once Upon a Time . . . Writing a Captivating Family Biography

  Tip 34: Photos Help You Picture Your Family’s History

  Tip 35: GEDmatch.com Connecting with Serious DNA
Researchers

  Tip 36: Military Records Insight into Your Ancestor’s Life and Role in Historical Events

  Tip 37: Inquiring Minds Want to Know . . . Author Q & A

  Tip 38: Eliza Watson or MacWattie? Tracing Ancestors with Surname Variations, Changes, and Aliases

  Tip 39: Family Reunions More than Potluck and Playing Cards

  Tip 40: Truth or Dare Are You Prepared for Your DNA Results?

  Tip 41: How to Make the Most of an Ancestry.com Account

  Tip 42: Hello, Is Anyone Out There? How to Receive More Responses from DNA or Family Tree Matches

  Tip 43: If Only I Had . . . Ten Things I Wished I’d Have Done Differently

  Tip 44: Ten Assumptions that Can Lead to Creating Your Own Brick Walls

  Tip 45: A Genealogy Support Network Just What the Doctor Ordered

  Tip 46: A Game of True or False Genealogy Fact or Myth?

  Tip 47: Researching Your Irish Ancestors

  Tip 48: Tracing Your Family Backward and Then Forward to Find Living Relatives

  Tip 49: Walking in Your Ancestors’ Footsteps Finding Their Family Homesteads

  Tip 50: I’ve Done Everything Possible But Still Can’t Trace My Family Line . . . Have You Climbed Mount Everest?

  Case Study: Tracing My Coffey Ancestry My Journey from Southwest Wisconsin, USA to County Westmeath, Ireland

  Case Study in Progress: From Type B Blood to Blue Blood, How a Paternal DNA Test Changed My Lineage

  My Ancestors’ Cameo Appearances in My Fiction Novels

  Glossary

  Websites

  Family Trees

  Author’s Note

  About Eliza Watson

  List of Figures

  Figure 1: Michael Daly’s grave in Kilbeggan, County Westmeath, Ireland

  Figure 2: Cemetery in Avoca Valley, County Wicklow, Ireland

  Figure 3: My ancestors sailed to America from Cobh, County Cork, Ireland

  Figure 4: How Many Ancestors Do You Have?

  Figure 5: Exploring a sheep-filled cemetery, County Westmeath, Ireland

  Figure 6: Dennis and Erma Flannery’s honeymoon photo in Chicago, Illinois, 1916

  Figure 7: The fashionable Grandma Zelda Watson, circa 1927

  Figure 8: Patrick Daly (1858–1935) from Kilbeggan, County Westmeath, Ireland

  Figure 9: Mary Coffey (1830–1895), Patrick’s sister, from County Westmeath, Ireland

  Figure 10: Top Ten Census Problems

  Figure 11: Bernard’s grandma Catherine Coffey’s family in Ireland, circa 1900

  Figure 12: Patrick Coffey’s childhood home in County Westmeath, Ireland

  Figure 13: Patrick Daly’s childhood home in Kilbeggan, County Westmeath, Ireland

  Figure 14: Touring Flannery land with Patrick Flannery in County Mayo, Ireland

  Figure 15: Discovering our Coffey graves thanks to Matthew Coffey

  Figure 16: Our Coffey family’s grave plot in County Westmeath, Ireland

  Figure 17: Patrick and Margaret Coffey’s five sons in Wisconsin, circa 1900

  Figure 18: James Watson and Clara Burkart’s wedding photo, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1910

  Figure 19: The Travel Mishaps of Caity Shaw

  Figure 20: A Mags and Biddy Genealogy Mystery

  Figure 21: Watson Family Tree

  Figure 22: Coffey & Daly Family Tree

  Figure 23: Flannery Family Tree

  Introduction

  I have fond childhood memories of spending Christmastime with relatives in my parents’ hometown in southwestern Wisconsin. A houseful of my mom’s relations would gather at my grandma Flannery’s or my aunt Susie’s. The men would catch up over a beer and a game of Euchre while the women enjoyed coffee and desserts. Everyone was too busy to notice us kids sneaking sodas and homemade holiday treats. On a sugar high, my cousins and I would run around playing until we were forced to snuggle into our sleeping bags on the living room floor and rest up for the next day’s activities. I was always sad to leave, knowing we wouldn’t make the three-hour journey back to Grandma’s until summer, when we often attended large family reunions. The perfect opportunity to sit and chat with my elderly relatives—born in the late 1800s—about our family history and folklore. Oh, how I wish I had. If only I could go back in time . . .

  My mom comes from a large, close-knit Irish family, yet little family history was passed down. Thankfully, a few embellished stories about our emigrant ancestors have held on through the generations, which I’ll share later. My dad, an only child, had numerous relatives on his mother’s Norwegian side, but the only Watson he’d known was his father. My grandpa Watson had no family history knowledge, having been estranged from his father at a young age. When I began researching the Watsons, all I knew was my great-grandpa James Watson had supposedly been a steamfitter in Chicago. Our surname sounded English, like the famous Sherlock Holmes and Watson, so I’d assumed my research would lead to England. In 2007, on my first trip to Ireland with my parents, we’d had no idea my dad had Irish ancestry, as well as Scottish, but very little English.

  Since that trip, I’ve researched more than twenty-five of my maternal and paternal Irish lines along with several Scottish ones. I’ve also assisted dozens of friends and family members with ancestry research in Austria, Canada, England, Germany, Hungary, and the US. Besides conducting online research, I have visited numerous historical archives, traipsed through hundreds of cemeteries (many now situated in sheep-filled fields), and located several family homesteads.

  I’m not a professional genealogist. I merely play one via the fictional characters in my books. I’m fortunate to be able to combine my two greatest passions, writing and genealogy. In 2016, I began writing a women’s fiction series, The Travel Mishaps of Caity Shaw, inspired by my travels as an event planner. A genealogy mystery threaded through the series grew stronger with each book. I enjoyed the genealogy aspect so much that in 2018 I began sharing my research experiences in my author newsletter. Readers often reached out to thank me for the tips and to share their own family research adventures. This bolstered my enthusiasm, and before long, I was writing tips faster than I was publishing newsletters. I decided to compile the tips into this book with the hope of helping others with their ancestry research.

  I’ve included twenty-five tips from my newsletters and twenty-five new tips. The tips are presented in the order they were written to demonstrate the evolution of my research over the two-year period. Additionally, I’ve written a Watson case study about a recent paternal DNA test revealing my family’s royal lineage and my quest to uncover family secrets. I also compiled a study on tracing my most difficult family line, the Coffeys, over a four-year period. At the back, my family trees provide an at-a-glance view of those ancestors discussed throughout the book, and there is a glossary with genealogical terms. In addition to tips, you’ll find a few quips. Besides perseverance, a sense of humor is a necessary trait for a successful genealogist.

  So, whether you’ve just begun dabbling in your family history or you have been beating your head against a brick wall for years, I hope you’ll find this book insightful, inspirational, and enjoyable. That a tip will give you a new look at an old document and lead you down a path to your ancestor waiting at the end to celebrate the journey with you.

  “Some family trees have beautiful leaves, and some have just a bunch of nuts. Remember, it is the nuts that make the tree worth shaking.” ~ Unknown

  Eliza

  How It All Began . . .

  Becoming a Genealogist

  While growing up, I celebrated my Irish heritage on St. Patrick’s Day by wearing green along with a pin that read, “The Luck of the Irish.” Yet the only family history we knew was that my mother’s Flannerys had emigrated from Castlebar, County Mayo, and her Dalys from Kilbeggan, County Westmeath. In 2007, having always wanted to visit Ireland, my parents and I took our first trip to the Emerald Isle. Little did I realize that we weren’t merely embarking on a journey to our ancestors’ homel
and but on a journey that would change my life forever.

  After landing at Shannon Airport in western Ireland, we drove up to Castlebar to visit our Flannerys’ hometown. We spent hours traipsing through the cemetery transcribing Flannery graves, unsure if they were related. While walking through Castlebar in my ancestors’ footsteps, I knew straight off the trip was going to be an emotional experience.

  Over the next few days, we drove down to southwestern Ireland and hit all the main tourist attractions before making our way up to Kilbeggan, which is located in the Midlands. Our ancestor Patrick Daly’s 1935 obituary confirmed that his brother Michael had been living in Kilbeggan at the time of Patrick’s death. So our first stop was at the cemetery to search for Michael’s grave. I can recall that breathtaking moment standing in front of an Irish relative’s grave for the first time. The same reaction most tourists have while standing on the Cliffs of Moher staring out at the Atlantic. Not only did Michael Daly’s tombstone memorialize him and his wife but also his two daughters. (I’d later learn these daughters were buried with their parents because one had been single and the other abandoned by her husband.) At that moment I said, “Wouldn’t it be great to return to Ireland and visit living relatives?” And so the genealogical research began.

  The Westmeath Genealogy Centre in nearby Moate located baptismal records for Patrick and Michael Daly, their parents’ marriage record, and baptismal records for their mother’s brothers. Another awe-inspiring moment, obtaining the first of thousands of historical documents for ancestors. Yet the most helpful clues we came away with that trip were the names of Michael Daly’s daughters from the tombstone.

  In 2007, online records and genealogy how-to books were scarce. So, I hired a genealogist in Ireland. (You can find a professional genealogist at Accredited Genealogists Ireland, www.accreditedgenealogists.ie. For other locations see Association of Professional Genealogists, www.apgen.org/cpages/home.) I selected genealogist Jane Daly, hoping that our shared family surname was a positive sign and that she was possibly related. I’d had no clue that Daly was one of the top twenty most popular Irish surnames. We ended up not being related, but she assisted me with researching numerous family lines, and we became great friends. She located a 1960 newspaper article about Michael Daly’s daughter Emily having been struck and killed by a truck. The article noted Emily had three sisters. Even though the two married sisters were identified by their husbands’ names—that is, Mrs. D. Swan—a quote given by D. Swan included his first name and where he lived. Bingo. I was off to County Carlow to conduct further research, on my computer anyway.