But wait, there's more!

 Digging for newspaper accounts on James Lawrence Grace allowed me to actually find the little ads that Margaret had put in newspapers, searching for him. She did put ads in papers in Ireland and the US, and I spotted ones in an Oklahoma City newspaper (where their brother Thomas was living), as well as Pittsburgh. It seemed like Margaret really didn't know where James was. It does make me wonder if his other siblings knew where he was and Margaret wasn't kept in the loop, so to speak. After awhile, I really got the impression that after Richard Grace's death, his children went their separate ways and likely didn't really keep in touch with each other. I would have thought that if James was really in danger or something had happened, that his surviving older brothers (Thomas or John William) could have gone after him, though maybe not. Maybe they didn't care? That's one of the mysteries I can't solve, and that will always haunt me, because there's literally no way to find out.

 It's also interesting to point out that even though Margaret came to Glasgow searching for James, and got a lead on him, she wasn't ultimately successful, in that she went home empty-handed, with no James. In fact, it wasn't until 1925 that he returned with her. And for the most part, that ended their stories. There were a few city directory entries showing them living together, then nothing, until I located their death certificates. Both died in hospitals, and neither body was claimed, but instead the bodies were disposed of through donation. A bit odd it seemed, but then again, that's how medical schools get their cadavers.

But thanks again to a lot of online resources from the Pennsylvania State Archives, I was able to actually find a digitized register of deceased individuals whose bodies were donated to medical schools ... and I was able to track down what happened exactly to the bodies of Margaret and James Grace. Both went to medical schools in the Philadelphia area, and both bodies were dissected over the span of two years, and then the remains were buried in a Philadelphia cemetery who had a specific area just for the remains of medical research subjects. Kind of creepy, but then again, dissecting cadavers gives medical students important lessons that help them become good surgeons and doctors. And finding the information allowed me to close the book, so to speak, on the two Grace siblings.

But it turns out that I wasn't yet done with James. I was researching the other Grace family in their town in Pennsylvania, trying to establish a definite family connection between them and my Grace ancestors. When I saw in Margaret Grace's hospital record that it mentioned that "her brother, Thomas Grace" had been an inmate at the hospital, I was a bit perplexed, because Thomas had a fairly defined trail out of Pennsylvania, and I could account for him up until the 1930s, so it seemed unlikely that he'd ever returned there. So I ordered the file, and it turned out to be the "other" Thomas Grace, from the other Grace family. His file was interesting, and it gave me hints that possibly the two families were related, but it also mentioned that other family members had been inmates there at the hospital, so I reached out to the archivist, and asked if there were any other files for a person named "Grace." She got back to me, and mentioned that there was a file for someone named "James Lawrence Grace."

Um, that was unexpected.  So I immediately ordered the file, and waited for it to be scanned and emailed to me. And yes, it was great-great-Uncle James. It actually was two files, because he had been in the hospital for several weeks in the early 1930s, and then for a longer stint in the 1950s. And it was interesting, because in a way it was two different guys, because the younger one apparently had been avoiding alcohol for a period of time, and may have been in the hospital because it was thought he was dealing with a brain tumor, and he was blaming the possibility on a venereal disease he contracted in 1917 ... likely in France while serving with the British Army, which was my guess. He also had the effects of Malaria, which probably came from his service in Burma. The doctors there ultimately concluded he was likely suffering from anemia. The patient interview was interesting. He remembered his mother's name, and indicated she died 11 days after his birth, which doesn't quite match up with her death register, but then again, it's not like he was going to remember that. He knew the deaths of his siblings, though couldn't quite remember their ages of death correctly; he thought Michael was 60 when he died (my research suggests he was 41), Patrick, who was 35 (he was likely 30, though that's a guess on my part), Richard  Jr. dying at age 15 (fairly close, it was 21 according to the dates on his birth and death registries), which James blamed on meningitis caused by a knitting needle being shoved up his nose! And he has John dying at 46, which was spot on, as I suspect they were the closest of the siblings. He did mention Thomas alive at 62, which was also close, as he was still alive and 60 at the time. No mention of Bridget, or even of Margaret, which is interesting, as he was likely living with her at the time. I wonder if they just didn't get along.

It does mention that he started working in the oil industry at 16, first by cutting wood to be used in the steam boilers on drilling rigs, and then operating a hydraulic jack to remove pipes on abandoned wells, and then by age 20 becoming a tool dresser, and working in oil fields up to the time he was in the hospital. He did say that he went to India (technically yes, since Burma was part of India at that time) at age 24 and worked for an oil company and apparently also a gold prospecting company! He then indicated he joined the British Amy in 1914, and then was discharged in 1919, serving in the Royal Engineers and remaining in England from 1919 to 1925, coming back to Pennsylvania.  

So my research was right!  Hot damn! He didn't mention getting sick and getting evacuated back to England, or working in England from 1915 until drafted in 1916, but everything else matched up. He says he had malaria in 1912 and was ill for several months, and then was sick in 1915 from something called "tropical sprue," and that may have been what sidelined him early in the war. He also admitted to getting VD in 1917, and being treated for it in England in 1920. He also claimed to have abstained from alcohol since 1920, which for a Grace male would be a pretty incredible feat (my family doesn't have a good history with booze). 

He was kept for observation for a couple of weeks, and released. So that first file really supported the research, and as a complete bonus, it had a PHOTO of him from 1933!  As far as I know, NO ONE else in the family had a photo of James. So that was a startling surprise. He did resemble my great-grandfather John, though in 1933, James was leaner and clearly older than the only portrait I have of John, and he also clearly had a lot of miles on his face. But he looked like a Grace. And now added to the passport photo of Margaret, I had three pictures from the Grace family, which was more than I think anyone knew existed.

The next file was from 1950, when James was 71. This time he was admitted because of "Psychosis due to Alcohol," and ordered by the court to be there for 90 days. There was no abstaining anymore, he was a SERIOUS drinker by this time. And his mind wasn't quite as sharp. He still remembered he was born in Ireland, and he remembered his father's name, but Ellen Dreelan from the 1933 report was now "Kitty Dreeland." The 1950 report did point out that Margaret was a patient there and had been there for 3 years. So it's interesting that her file doesn't ever mention that James visited her during her stay ... but yet he was actually in the hospital at the same time?  It was a huge complex from old photos that I've seen, so perhaps neither knew the other was in the hospital ... or cared.

His memory appears to be somewhat sharp, somewhat vague. He again reported that his mother died two weeks after he was born, and also mentions his father remarrying, and the family immigrating and going straight to Pennslyvania. He also mentions going to India and drilling oil wells in "Upper Burma," starting in 1906. He then mentions he couldn't get out of India due to the war, and so he worked for the British until 1916 when he was sent to France to join the British artillery, though he then said when he was with the British, he was made a captain (in 1933 he said "Private") and put in charge of water well drilling to supply water to the troops. So at least that part of the story appears to check out (well drilling, not being a captain). He claimed he came back to Pennsylvania in 1919. He also claimed he worked at the hospital in the late 1930s, though the interviewer noted that hospital records show he did work at the hospital briefly in 1943, and was discharged from being drunk on the job! The file also recounts some of the evidence of his prodigious drinking, with drunken sprees lasting from a week to six months in length, and his later escapades, where he'd buy 2 to 3 gallons of wine and drink it until it was gone, and once that was gone, drinking anything that had alcohol, whether it be bay rum, hair tonic, or "canned heat," whatever that is! But apparently he was a relatively pleasant drunk, and caused no problems, and was even very courteous even when highly intoxicated.

The interesting part is when James recounts his family background, because it's difficult to determine what could be factual, and what is utter fantasy, though some things are really clearly wrong. He claims his grandparents were named Thomas and Ellen Grace. Not sure where that came from, as it appears from the research that Richard's father was named Michael. He does remember Richard's name, and said he died at 56, which was actually fairly likely, as Richard's birth date is a bit questionable, either 1840 or 1846 ... so he was either 57 or 63 when he died. James actually listed what he said were some of Richard's siblings ... Julia and James. Maybe? If I could actually find more information on Richard, I could try to confirm that, but it's nearly impossible to do so at this point.  In this part of the file, he does remember that his mother's name was Ellen Dreelan ... BUT he indicates that she died in her 70s, "near Detroit in 1928 or '29." Umm, no. Definitely not. But that does make me wonder if perhaps he means Bridget?  Though he does mention her later when he's asked about his siblings; he mentions Margaret (and has her age right), he mentions John dying at 46 of a heart attack, again interesting that he knows that one well. He mentions that Thomas was dead at age 70, though in this 1950 interview Thomas was still alive, and would be for another 3 years, when he did die at age 80. This time he says Patrick died at 55, Michael died at 74, and Richard Jr. died at 32, though he reports again the knitting needle up the nose ... so maybe that actually was true?!? He also mentioned Bridget died at 65, which could be true, I could never find her after the early 1900s because her name was so common.

He does then detail his various whereabouts in the 1920s and beyond, apparently moving around a bit doing some oil field work, doing some woodcutting, taking care of cattle on a farm. He told of being a tool dresser in the West Virginia oil fields for six years, and then in Burma for 9 years as a driller. He went on further to say that after the war broke out the British engaged him to help work on fortifications on an island off Bombay, which is actually plausible ... as there are multiple islands off Bombay, and many of them held fortifications. He also said he was sent to the Persian Gulf to help put oil wells in order that the "Germans and Arabs had destroyed," which again is actually plausible, because the British did send a force from India into the Persian Gulf and landed to take over Ottoman Empire holdings, including oil fields. He then said he was sent in 1916 to France where he joined the artillery, but they found out he was a driller, so they had him drill water wells, and he did it until the end of the war.

He did say he was a captain in the British Army, which is so NOT plausible. He also claimed that when he was on leave in Paris, he met an American general and talked to him, and the General said he should join the American forces, but that he was too valuable to the British, who refused to let him go. That actually could be a bit believable. Though he then goes on to report that he returned to Pennsylvania in 1919, and detailed some places he lived and worked in the early 1920s ... but of course, there's a paper trail to show that he was still in England and didn't come back until 1925. But there is the possibility that these could have been places he lived after he came back to Pennsylvania, because the details he offered were quite detailed. 

He also admitted to never having married, and claimed that he was busy in India during his marrying years ... but then also admitting that in Burma he had a native mistress, an Indian girl who was the daughter of his cook, and that it was a common custom for the American men to have a native girl share their bed. He also claimed that he got VD in India, but that a local doctor cured him. But I think his interview from the 1930s was more accurate there, and he likely got it in France. He did remember coming to the hospital, possibly because of his VD, but he thought it was the late 1920s ... instead of the early 1930s.

It does sound like his hospital stay was beneficial, as he was attending AA meetings at the hospital and doing chores around the place. Interestingly, after he was discharged, the hospital followed him after he had been admitted to another hospital several times over the next few years, including when he essentially became a resident at the other hospital in 1954. 

 The file also noted that in case of his death, to notify several of the other Grace family members there in town ... so there was a relationship with them. Though when he died in 1959, it's unknown if they were contacted, but either way it doesn't matter, because his body wasn't claimed, as I noted earlier.

I'm amazed at how much I've been able to find out about this man. It's also ironic that I know so little about my own great-grandfather, but yet his brother I know more than anyone else among the siblings. Enough details of his life match up so that I can reconstruct his life pretty well, and there's so many colorful stories. He was always the most mysterious family member, because everyone had heard of him, but knew so few of the details ... but now I had them all. The mystery of James Lawrence Grace had been solved, and I was the one who did it.

But one thought does continue to nag at me ... the one person who would have REALLY enjoyed learning all of this was Mom. And she wasn't around for me to share it with.  I did share it with some of her cousins, and that helped, but it's still not quite the same. 

But I'm not going to stop. I'm going to keep on digging into the Grace family background, but also in all the other families. 

James Grace in 1933

 

Go East, Young Man

Before I get into the mysteries of James, the youngest Grace son, first we have to talk about oil. Because when it comes to the Grace family, oil is absolutely crucial to their story and their lives. Because by the time they came to the US, Pennsylvania was deep in the grips of petroleum fever. The "oil business" is usually traced back to 1859 and Edwin Drake's oil well in Titusville, PA. It was a sensation to be sure, and was followed in short order by people drilling for oil all over Western Pennsylvania. Interestingly enough, this was LONG before the advent of the automobile, which today is the one of biggest users of petroleum. No, back then petroleum was viewed as useful for illumination and lubrication, and the biggest product (after some refining) was kerosene.

 It's hard to imagine today the absolute mania for oil back in Pennsylvania, especially after the Civil War, though once oil was found elsewhere in the area, especially West Virginia and then Ohio, and further west from there, it caused endless get-rich-quick dreams. And one of the areas where oil was struck was near Clarendon, PA.

And Clarendon was where the Graces went after coming over from Ireland. Initially in my research, I wasn't sure why. And no one in the family ever seemed to know why the family came to Clarendon. The only big industry in the town seemed to be tanneries, because the town was in the middle of the Allegheny National Forest area (even though the park hadn't been set up when the Graces moved there), and was surrounded by hemlocks, the perfect tree bark needed for the tanning process. And the only surviving census showing the Graces in Clarendon (1900, since the 1890 Census was lost to a fire), shows Richard Grace as a laborer in a tannery). 

But as I was able to uncover more about the boys, I found out that all of them got involved in the oil industry. The first hint I got was when Ellen died; her obituary mentioned that while James and Margaret were still living at home in Clarendon, "Mike, John and Thomas" were living in Sistersville, West Virginia and Bridget was married and living in Ohio. I was actually able to find after that a marriage registry for Bridget; in 1896 she married an older man named John MacDonald, an oil driller from Fostoria, OH. At the time they were in western Ohio, it was undergoing a major oil boom. But when I looked at Sistersville, it was going an immense oil boom in the late 1890s (some sources say it was the center of the American oil industry briefly in the mid 1890s, with a population that went from 600 to 7000 or more in short order). And as I looked deeper, the few sources I found told me that all three of the Grace boys there were oil men. I don't think at that point any of them were leasing land and putting in their own wells. No, they were labor. Tool dressers, riggers, and drillers, likely.  Mike was the first to marry, but also was an odd one, because it appeared he may have also been going by Bertram at times, or Bertram Michael Grace, though he was still referred to as Mike in the family. I'm not sure where Bertram came from, though it may have been a middle name, because once in America, many of the Graces suddenly sprouted and used middle names. John was John William Grace, or "J.W. Grace" in newspaper accounts, while Mike was "B.M. Grace in newspaper mentions or property deeds, and James was James Lawrence Grace, or "J.L. Grace" later in newspaper mentions. And in Ohio, Bridget went by Elizabeth, which might have been her middle name. Margaret and Thomas were the only ones who didn't appear to use middle names much. From what I understand through research, middle names were not usually on any official documents, like birth or baptism records in Ireland, but quickly became used to separate all the family members with the same names, thanks to the naming convention! So while a family may have had several generations named "John Grace," it was easy to separate them by referring to them with their middle name, like "John William" in polite conversation.

 Further locating of the sons was helped out inadvertently by Richard Grace dying in 1903 of influenza, because I actually managed to find his will on FamilySearch through a catalog search. And his will listed each of his children, and where they were at that time, so I was able to really locate them. Mike was in Woodsfield, OH, where I could find his marriage information and his children's information eventually; Bridget and her husband were in Cygnet, OH, which was ground zero for a huge oil boom in western Ohio, and I was able to find them there in a Census document and later some legal documents; Thomas and James were in Jacksonville, WV, which was another huge oil boom area known as the Stringtown Field, and John was in Japan (more about that later!).

But James disappears after that. And he was already part of a mystery, because everyone in the family among my mom and her cousins had heard of him, but they all had different stories, some of which I already disproved. A few heard he never immigrated with the family ... wrong, that was Richard Jr., and he was already deceased back in Ireland. My finding their passenger list, Ellen's obituary, and now Richard's will all disproved that. But the prevailing story was that he was in India ... he was in the British Army in India ... no, he was in the Royal Navy ... no, he was in the British Army, and he had been wounded, and his sister took care of him and nursed him back to health. Which sister? Well, his sister (some of the cousins didn't know there were two daughters, they thought there was just one). No, he was in Burma. And that's where it was left. No one really knew about James (some didn't even know his name, he was just the brother who was in the army in India), though everyone had heard of him, likely through their fathers, who were all the sons of John William Grace.

 

So I set out to work. I had subscribed to FindMyPast, the British genealogical site, to track my English ancestors, but I also used it to find anything on the Irish ones as well, and didn't have much luck. I used it to see if there were any military records for James, though unfortunately I soon learned that a great many WWI military records were destroyed when the building they were in got bombed during the Blitz in World War Two. Either way, I didn't find anything on James in the military records. But for the hell of it, while trying to dig things up on the English ancestors in the newspaper search on FMP, I tried searching on James, just using "James Grace" as a search term.

 

And I found something intriguing; a story in the Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette (England) from December 10, 1915 describes a meeting of the Crediton Board of Guardians, a group of trustees overseeing Crediton’s workhouse for the poor, and describes how a candidate for a position as porter had to withdraw, because a close relative had been killed, and didn’t want to take the post as it was too far from his home. The article noted that the clerk of the board “had received an application from Sapper James Grace, of the Bombay Volunteer Artillery, who stated that during the last eight years he had been in the oil fields of Burma, serving in the capacity of engineer. On the outbreak of the war, he had joined the British cause, but was shortly afterwards taken ill, subsequently being invalided to Exeter, where, after being restored to health, he was discharged. He had for some little time been employed in the Devon Voluntary Aid office, where he received information of the vacant situation, for which he was now applying.” At first blush, it could have been a completely different James Grace, but the fact that he was working in the oil fields of Burma does sound like the family story, since I knew he was an oil driller … so he could have worked for the “Burmah Oil Company,” (as it was spelled at the time) or he could have followed in his brother John William Grace’s steps, and headed to the Far East to drill for oil an exotic land (note that Great Britain ruled Burma at the time, and it was considered a province of India, so technically he was in India as much as he was in Burma).

 

 Nothing else came up, so I expanded further into "James Lawrence Grace," and suddenly MORE popped up. An article from The Western Times in November 4, 1916, nearly a year later, another newspaper in Exeter mentions a “James Lawrence Grace,” who was ordered to appear at the local barracks and be conscripted into the military as part of the Military Service Act of 1916, which made all men 18-41 eligible to be drafted. Apparently he showed up, collected a day’s pay, and then went AWOL. He was arrested, and claimed he was an American citizen, and had been living in the United States since childhood … which was true for our family’s James Lawrence Grace. The article gave his address as Sun Street in Exeter, and said that he had claimed that he became a citizen at age 21, but did not receive any papers at the time but had “been in communication with the United States;” so the local authorities had him escorted to an American Consul.

 

 A slightly different story, one with better details, appeared in the November 4, 1916 Devon and Exeter Gazette: the article focused on the case at Exeter Police Court and the issue with James Lawrence Grace, “described as a boring engineer” (English term for oil well driller, not an engineer who was dull) of Sun Street, and the charges of being absent without leave since October 28. Grace was asked what he would plead to the charges, and he replied that he really didn’t know whether he was “guilty or not under the circumstances,” claiming he was registered in England as an alien from a neutral country, “being an American citizen” (the US was not involved in the war at this time). When the clerk asked if he was willing to serve, Grace replied that he did not tell the officers in the recruiting barracks in Exeter that he was willing to serve. A clerk at the barracks indicated that Grace received a notice on October 12 directing him to report on October 28; Grace did personally go to the barracks on that date, documents were drawn up, and apparently, he signed a document about a separation allowance. The clerk said that he was considered a reservist under the Military Service Act, he received his 2 shillings, 7 cents pay, and signed for it, and then disappeared. 

 

 Grace said he went to the barracks to be examined by the doctors, claiming he “did not do this with a view to joining the Army there and then, but wished to undergo such examination in order to know the state of his health, which at the present time was not good.” He then claimed that he and another man were giving a pass by a soldier at the barracks, allowed to leave, but told to return the following Monday. He then claimed that he had been made an American citizen at age 21 (which would have been in 1899-1900, as he was 37 in 1916) in Pennsylvania, but when questioned further, said he didn’t have a certain paper, which the court clerk told him was necessary to “legally establish the manner,” at which point Grace said investigations were being made about his American citizenship and asked for the case to be held over for a few days, at which point that a recruiting representative said he would be given every opportunity for this, though he would have to stay at the barracks.

 

 So this helps to confirm that this was really our James Lawrence Grace, and also confirms the original story from earlier in 1916 in Devon. The story continued in 1917, with a follow-up in The Western Times on February 19, 1917. The small story indicated that Private J. L. Grace was charged a few days previously with being absent without leave since earlier in the month, and that Grace admitted it. He had been handed over to the military, but he stated that he went to the American Consul in Plymouth to get a passport, using a pass from the Exeter barracks on medical grounds, but did not come back on the date stipulated. The article mentioned again that he came to Exeter from “just before the war” from Bombay, where he had been in the Volunteers. The story ended with Grace being handed over to the military again. And then his trail goes cold; we don’t know if he did try to seek an American consul, or just tried to avoid the military whatever way he could, but he got caught up in the military draft, whether he wanted to serve or not, and lost his three-month effort to avoid rejoining the military, and was presumably shipped out to the Western Front. As for naturalization, he doesn’t appear in available Warren County, PA naturalization files; only Richard appears to be the only family member naturalized, but James could have filed papers elsewhere, though he may also have generally just claimed to have been born in the United States, like his older brothers did. And technically, he may have actually been naturalized because he was still a minor when Richard filed his papers, but there wasn’t any papers for James to prove it in England.

 

 But while his story appeared to end in 1917, continued research resulted in a discovery that that really broke open the story in a huge way. A front-page article found in the Glasgow Sunday Times on December 16, 1923 was about a woman from Warren, Pennsylvania named Margaret Grace who came to Glasgow looking for her brother James L. Grace. Jackpot! The story read:

 

A remarkable story was told me to-day by an American lady, who has just arrived in Glasgow from Warren, Pennsylvania, in the hope of tracing her long-lost brother.

 

She has come to Glasgow – a journey of 3500 miles – to find James L. Grace, said to have been a patient in a city hospital.

 

Grace, it is stated, joined the Royal Engineers on coming to Britain from India, where he had been engaged in the oil trade.

 

The missing soldier served with distinction in the British Army for four years, and is understood to have lived for several months in the South of England {note: Exeter is in the south of England}. He was discharged on the 21^st March, 1919, and having failed to learn of his whereabouts from the Department of State in America, Miss Margaret Grace communicated with Mr. Lloyd George, who was then Premier. She received a reply to the effect that James L. Grace had served with the Royal Engineers, and resided in lodgings for a period at 17 Sun Street, Exeter.

 

After being demobilized he is stated to have met several friends from America then in England, and at a later date to have been employed as an engineer at an oil works in the Midlands.

 

Advertisements soliciting information about the ex-soldier appeared in several newspapers, and in reply to one of these Miss Grace received a letter from her brother, who was then a patient in a Glasgow hospital, explaining that he had lost the power of one of his arms, and owing to this infirmity had been rendered unfit for work.

 

The ex-soldier made a fervent appeal for money, in response to which his sister wired a hundred dollars and later a draft for a considerable sum of money.

 

The communication, Miss Grace believes, was written by her brother, but a part of the money was returned to her, and despite the most exhaustive inquiries since, she had been unable to obtain any further information concerning him.

 

His sister now believes he may be resident either in England or Ireland, and hopes that any of the hospital medical superintendents or patients who have met the man will communicate with her at the General Post Office, Glasgow.

 

There is the possibility that Miss Grace has been duped by someone posing as her brother, but the lady does not hold that view.

 

 A follow up story appeared in the Glasgow Sunday Times a week later, on December 23, 1923: 

     American Lady’s Search of Scotland For Soldier Brother Who Went Missing

 

Owing to the extensive publicity afforded by “The Sunday Post” in the search for James L. Grace, the missing ex-soldier, whose sister has come from America and is searching Scotland for information, two important letters have been received.

 

One of the letters is from a man in Kelvindale Street, Glasgow, who states that James L. Grace served with him in France in No. 3 Water Boring Section of the Royal Engineers, being demobilized at La Flague immediately after the Armistice.

 

Another hospital is from a nurse in Dysart Union Hospital, Thornton, Fife, in which is enclosed a snapshot phot of a man answering the description of the missing soldier.

 

The photograph was taken while he was a patient in Horton War Hospital, Epsom, Surrey, but the name is given as J. W. Grace.

 

There doesn’t appear to be any further follow-up articles, but the Glasgow articles do confirm the earlier articles from the Exeter newspaper, that the James Grace in those articles was my wayward great-great-uncle, James Grace. So the story that he had been in India or Burma with the oil trade was true, and he did join the British Army there, and was ultimately sent to England, possibly to recover after an illness, and appears to have been discharged after his illness. Then he was out of the military, and somehow ended up in Exeter/Devon, working various jobs for several years, and then was drafted in 1916 when he would have been eligible under the draft act enacted then, though he tried to get out of it by claiming he was American into 1917. No naturalization documents have not been found for him, nor any passport application, though those were not in common use before World War One, and if the British knew he was born in Ireland, to them he essentially WAS a British subject still, especially as he couldn’t come up with the necessary paperwork to prove otherwise.

 

I had solved the mystery of James Lawrence Grace!  How cool was this?  The lack of surviving British military records from World War One made it hard to confirm the water boring engineer story. I did email the Royal Engineers Museum in England, and the curator there admitted they had no personnel records, but they also said that if the military had found out he was a boring engineer, they would have put him to work in that particular job, which was crucially needed on the Western Front, as supplies of water were difficult to secure during the war. She also directed me to the unit's war diary, and while it doesn't mention individual soldiers (other than a couple of officers), at least I know what they did and where they did it, as it's quite detailed about the wells they dug and how much time it took them.  

And while I've not found any newspaper articles about him serving as an oil driller in Burma, I did find a LOT of articles in American newspapers about other young men going to Burma to drill. It was surprisingly more common than I had ever thought, and from their articles, I had a very good idea on the things he experienced over there.

 

Nor have I been able to find any additional information about what he did in England after the war ended, but at least I have what the government reported to Margaret, which was printed in the newspaper, and that seems fairly plausible.  

But while I essentially solved the mystery, it turns out that there was even more information I was able to locate!

 

 

Solving mysteries

 The Grace family appears to have immigrated over to the US in May 1881, arriving on the SS Greece, which departed from London. So the family traveled from New Ross to London first, before crossing the Atlantic to Castle Garden in New York.

 There is a passenger list which includes the Graces, which I have to admit was a thrilling thing to find. The whole family is listed (though Ellen's first name is smudged out a bit and illegible). Richard (written as Rich Grace, age 42, and with laborer listed as his occupation); his wife, age 35 (while Ellen Dreelan was close to Richard's age, Ellen Murphy Leahy was younger than he was), and the children. "Michl" was 18 and also listed as a laborer; "Brid" was 14 and listed as a spinster (which seems odd at that young age). Some people seeing Bridget's abbreviated name misinterpreted it as "Bird," and have that as her nickname in their trees. Not sure how they see that, because it clearly looked like "Brid" to me, and the names are clearly abbreviated. Plus, I've never seen her referred to as "Bird" anywhere else. Following her was "Pat," age 12, also listed as a laborer; "Margt," age 10, and listed as "child," followed by Thomas, age 7, John, age 4, and James, age 2, all listed as "child."

 For awhile, I wasn't sure where they could have gone next, though I know they ended up in Clarendon, PA. Eventually I found that they went straight there upon landing in the US. There was another Grace family in Clarendon that I firmly believe were cousins. The patriarch was a man named Thomas Grace, and I briefly considered that he could be an older brother to Richard, but the age difference was decades, and it seemed likelier that he was an uncle rather than a brother. But they lived on the same street at times, and Richard bought property from their daughter, Bridget Grace Malone. 

I did also find a death notice for Ellen in 1899 of "grippe," (essentially the flu), and even an obituary in the newspaper. The wonderful thing about her obit (only to a family historian is an obituary "wonderful") is that not only does it list every child, but also WHERE they were at the time, which opened up a lot of information for me in my continued search.  It also left a big mystery as yet unsolved, because it listed every child ... except Patrick. Where was he? At the moment, still missing. I really think he passed away, but I can't find any information to support that, but it may be mostly because there's not a lot of sources available with death information from the 1880s into the 1890s in Warren County. Later in the 1890s, yes, that's how I found Ellen's death notice in a source only on FamilySearch, and unindexed. 

So I'm still in search of Patrick, but of course he has an incredibly common name, so it's not going to be easy. And while Ellen's death essentially closed the door on her story, it was kicked back open again more than a year later.

I was exploring around on the Pennsylvania State Archives website, seeing what sources they had, when I found that they had some records from state hospitals, including the Warren State Hospital. That triggered something in my head, as I remembered that Margaret Grace had died in the 1950s in the Warren State Hospital, which was essentially a mental hospital. I sent an inquiry ... and yes, they had a record on her. So I ordered it, and after a time, it was emailed to me. And it was wondrous. It was a medical file, but there were also interviews with her, and even family information. For someone who the family knew very little about, I was about to find out more about her than anyone else alive knew.

The key thing was that she completely reinforced my finding that Ellen Dreelan died, and Richard Grace remarried, because she admitted that in an interview. But then it got sad, because it turned out that Ellen Murphy Leahy was very cruel to her. She was never allowed to play with other children, and had to spend all her time cleaning the house. She was suffering from senility and paranoia when she was in the hospital, but her interviews and history gleaned from people in Warren who knew her indicated she had been that way for a long time. She was also very superstitious, and believed she could talk to those who were dead, which of course would trigger people in the US to think she was crazy, but later research indicated was a surprisingly common belief in Ireland, where a lot of people believed in spirits, fairies, and thought they could communicate with the dead. It was interesting that among the interviewees about her was an acquaintance who thought she didn't have any mental issues, but was just eccentric.

One thing I found interesting was that when interviewed, Margaret could remember when Ellen died, and had the exact date right (she also had Richard's death date right). But oddly enough, she couldn't remember Ellen's name. According to the interviewer, she said her mother's name was Deland Richards. So why could she remember the exact date, but not her name? Granted, Margaret was still young, only 8 years old at the time. She also remembered her siblings, but not entirely accurately. She couldn't remember her only sister Bridget, but instead remembered her husband's name and claimed he was a sibling. She noted that Richard Jr. was dead (he didn't come over with the family for some unknown reason, and I found a death registry listing for him a few years after the family left). She didn't list any of her other siblings as dead, though by that time, only she, James and Thomas were left. But clearly Margaret hadn't been in touch with any of them, so she may not have known. 

The file was actually very sad, because she clearly had mental issues and was in decline, and she did get worse over the years she lived in the hospital and died there. And as no one claimed her body (James was still alive, but I don't even know if he knew she was dead, or cared, and I have no idea if the cousins in town knew or cared, either), it was donated to a medical school for dissection. A short time after that, I found a directory of bodies from state hospitals that had been donated, and I found where her body went in Philadelphia, and that it had been used in medical education for two years, after which point the remains were buried in an unmarked grave in a Philadelphia cemetery that had a section for medical cadavers. 

Sort of a sad ending, but that's family history research ... sometimes you find good things, sometimes you find sad things. I even found a photo of her online, from her passport application in 1921. As far as I know, it's the only photo of her that anyone has.

Of course, why she had a passport was another mystery that my research solved, because it was entirely the story of her wayward brother, James.

Detective work

 I was actually using quite a few sources in my Irish digging. Yes, Ancestry and FamilySearch, and also Findmypast, the British genealogy product (which I'm not terribly impressed with; access to great sources, yes, but also crappy interface and search capabilities, especially the newspaper searches), but also several Irish products. Irishgenealogy.ie is run by the Irish government (the folks in the southern part of the island, rather than Northern Ireland), and isn't bad, as it did have some baptism information on some of the Grace family, and rootsireland.ie, a paid site that had quite a good bit of information.

 Not the holy grail, though. No birth certificate for Richard, no marriage certificate for Ellen Dreelan and Richard, either. There were some baptism records for a couple of Ellen Dreelans, but I have no way of knowing if any of them are for her ... my great-great-grandmother.

But as I was looking through the record of pretty much every Grace in Wexford in the era that I knew that my family lived there, I came across an odd record; a death record for a woman named Ellen Grace, who lived in Ballyanne, and passed away there. The last few births in the Grace family had been in Ballyanne (a little hamlet outside of New Ross), so I know my family lived there. Could this Ellen Grace be my great-grandmother? It seemed possible. 

For one, the death occurred right after the birth of the last child, James Grace. He was born in May 1, 1879. She died May 11, 1879 Another factor was that present at the birth was the name of a woman named Catherine Hayes, who was probably a friend or a midwife (or possibly both). Present at the death of Ellen Grace? Catherine Hayes. Ellen was listed as 40 years old, a "Labourers Wife" and her cause of death was "weakness from childbirth 2 days no medical attendant." 

Though looking at the entire page of deaths registered, everyone listed on that page also had "no medical attendant" listed with their cause of death.  

Ellen's death wasn't even registered for several weeks after her death (though some of the people on that register didn't ahve their deaths registered until a month or more AFTER their deaths! On one hand, I don't want to know how she died in detail, but on the other hand, I do sort of want to do know. Was she just weak after giving birth to 8 kids over 15 years? Was she weak and malnourished before she even gave birth? There's so many things that could have gone wrong, especially with no doctors nearby (and likely the family didn't have much ability to even pay a doctor, if one were available). Did Richard and the children have to watch her slowly decline and die over the few days she lived after James' birth?

I had no doubt at the time that this was Ellen Dreelan Grace. Later research proved me completely right. 

Then of course, there's the mixed feelings ... a feeling of satisfaction in that I uncovered something that no one else uncovered, judging from other online trees, including ones from cousins, and thinking that my detective skills were pretty darn good. But then ... sadness. I had never met Ellen, I had no knowledge of her until I started researching, but as a parent, I could really feel the sadness of her passing. Here was this young woman, only 40 years old, according to her death registry (and since I can't find her birth certificate, that's pretty likely), and the mother of 8 children. And then ... gone. at the time of her death, her oldest child, Michael, was 14 years old. Her youngest, just days old. My great-grandfather was 2 years old. Did he even have memories of his mother? And poor Richard, then having to deal with her death and also having to raise the children and still working, that must have been a struggle, though hopefully the oldest children helped out. 

But then I made another discovery. In the midst of seeing what else I could find on the family, I stumbled across a civil marriage record for a Richard Grace, a labourer from Ballyanne and also a widower. The marriage date was September 1880, so a bit more than a year after Ellen Dreelan Grace, which meets the traditional 12-month period to mourn in Ireland. So I was pretty sure this was my Richard. But what was interesting were two things; one, his new wife was a widow named Ellen Leahy (nee Murphy), a widow whose husband had drowned. 

A-ha! That meant that the information I had (and other relatives in their trees had) that Richard and Ellen Grace came over to America with their children was actually correct ... there WAS an Ellen Grace who came over. It just wasn't Ellen Dreelan Grace! It was Ellen Murphy Grace!  I don't think anyone else in the family knew this (and when I showed my findings to a few cousins interested in the family history, they were shocked because they never knew this). The other interesting thing about the marriage record was that it also listed Richard's father ... Michael Grace. This was also a big unknown, and as no one could find a birth or baptism record for Richard, many other people had found various people named "Richard Grace"and assumed he was the one. More than a few people online had his father listed as John Grace and his mother as Mary Malone (though I looked into this, and it was highly implausible). Based on the evidence I found in the documents, I am sure that this was the right marriage record for my great-great-grandfather, and it also listed the name of my great-great-great grandfather. 

And it also made sense, because Richard's first oldest child and first son was named Michael Grace. And in the Irish naming traditions (which apparently were often followed into the 20th century, though it may have waned by the middle of the century), the first son was named after his father's father. So if Richard's first son was named Michael (which he was), then he was likely named after Richard's father ... which according to Richard's 2nd marriage record, was named Michael. The tradition also indicates that the 2nd son was named after the mother's father. so Richard Jr. wasn't technically Richard Jr. (again, I've not seen anything indicating that is how he was named, I just refer to him that way to keep him separate from his dad), but he was likely named after Ellen's father. Though they didn't quite adhere completely to the tradition, as the third son was name after the father, and in this case, their third son was Patrick ... but then again, they weren't going to name two sons Richard, so that likely makes sense to have him named differently (and Ellen apparently had a sibling or relative named Patrick, though I'm sure Richard did too, because Patrick was such a damned common name back then in Ireland). The fourth son would be named after his father's eldest brother; Ellen and Richard's fourth son was named Thomas. The fifth son was to be named after the mother's eldest brother or father's second oldest brother, so John, my great-grandfather, could have been named after Ellen's oldest brother, or Richard's second oldest brother. Of course, since I can't find any documents about Richard or Ellen's families, who knows if this is true?

A similar pattern existed for daughters, though a number of sources indicate this wasn't always adhered to; the first daughter would be named after the mother's mother; so in my family, the first Grace daughter was named Bridget, so by that pattern, Ellen's mother would be named Bridget. The next daughter would be named after the father's mother, and in the Graces, the only other daughter was Margaret. So perhaps Michael Grace's spouse was named Margaret. I still don't know, but it could be plausible that Richard Grace's parents were Michael and Margaret Grace ... and Ellen's parents could have been Richard and Bridget Dreelan. I actually did find a birth record for an Ellen Dreelan, born in County Carlow to Richard Dreelan and Bridget "Biddy" Kavanagh in December 1846. It could be her, but if I could just find her and Richard's wedding registry (which usually lists the fathers), I'd have more chances of finding out.

But at least now I knew that when the family came over, there was an Ellen with them, only it wasn't the Ellen who gave birth to all the children. But to the youngest children, Ellen Murphy Grace was essentially their mother from that point on, as John may not have had memories of Ellen Dreelan Grace, and James never would.

The Full Irish

I wish I knew why the Irish side of my ancestry obsesses me the most. 

I suppose it's because there's a strong Irish culture and pride in Irish ancestry in the US, more so than the other ancestral lines (though in certain Midwestern cities there certainly is a lot of Polish pride). Sometimes I wonder if it's because there's more mystery in my Irish line than in the others, and also because perhaps I inherited the Irish interest from my mother, who always seemed to be most interested in her Irish background. Apparently my Polish great-grandfather was essentially disowned by his siblings back in Poland for not returning there and sharing the wealth he had made in the United States, so there was little to no contact with them after he died, and though my great-grandmother did stay in touch with her family, and even went to visit them in 1958 (which was actually a fairly dangerous trip, especially as she was smuggling in money, which was frowned upon by the Communist authorities), her family actually pissed off my grandmother, because she had been sending them money for years, and when she died, the only thing we heard back from Poland was not even a message of sympathy or condolence, but just a note asking who would now be sending money. That really set off my grandmother, and she cut off communications. So essentially we turned our back on the Polish family, and maybe that rubbed off on me in my digging. 

 The Slovak side was also sort of a mystery. Though my dad and his cousins knew their grandmother who immigrated from the old country (she and their grandfather came from the same village and came over after marrying there), for some reason there apparently wasn't any real communications back to the old country, and from what I can tell, neither my dad nor my cousins ever really had any interest on where the family came from, other than just knowing the name of the village back in what's now Slovakia (but then was the Austro-Hungarian Empire). There was also the issue of their name undergoing changes once here in the US, and there was no guarantee that I could find the original name, or apparently that anyone cared. But I'd still pursue it nonetheless.

The English side wasn't so much a mystery, though again, there was disinterest over here. Apparently my grandfather, who I knew when I was a kid (he did when I was 10), NEVER spoke about his upbringing in England. Ever. My dad does not remember him ever talking about it. My dad did know his step-grandmother a little (more on her background later), but she died in 1947 when he was six, so his memories aren't very strong. The one person who did talk about England a lot was her biological daughter, my great-aunt Hilda. She was only about 5 when the family came over from England, but she LOVED England, and remained very English to the end of her days. Later in life she would even go back to England and visit relatives. She was the only one who actually met some of the Dawsons back in England, though she mostly visited her mother's family. We did get to meet some relatives; when I was living back in town after graduating from college, one of my cousins on the Dawson side came to the US to spend a semester at an American college, so it was arranged for him to fly in to Cleveland and we met him, and later my brother drove him to his college. Nice chap, though it did take a little while to establish the relationship because none of us knew how many siblings my dad's grandfather had in England, so figuring how exactly how he was related took a little bit, though to be honest, I don't think he knew how many siblings his great-grandmother had, other than the brother who moved to Cleveland all those years ago. So there wasn't a huge family interest in finding out the English story, other than my dad's curiousity, which he pursued on his own, only to run into the brickwall of there being a LOT of Dawsons back in the old hometown of Bolton, and it was difficult to figure out which ones were "our" Dawsons!

 But the Irish had a mystique about them that appealed to me. I initially suffered from the naivete that it would be easy to find them, because after all, the sources should all be in English, right? Well, for the most part yes (other than church records in Latin), but it wasn't until I started digging that I learned the story about how so many Irish records were destroyed in the Irish Civil War in ta bombing and fire at the Public Records Office in Dublin in 1922. Church records were not destroyed, but they were also a bit sketchy at times. I've found church records that have been microfilmed and digitized, but accessing them is a bit tough, because the microfilms were made years ago, and the quality varies greatly, and even worse, than handwriting ranges from startingly clear to utterly incomprehensible. Let's not even get to the horror story about old Irish census records, which were destroyed after each census once the British authorities mined them for the statistics they needed.  Damn Brits. Oh wait, I'm British ... 

So once I started, I found this was going to be a challenge ... and then once I began digging in earnest, I found out that things were going to be even harder, because the Grace family name was VERY common in Kilkenny, and even across the river in Wexford. So I found A LOT of Graces, which raised the question of which ones were the ones I wanted to find? What started out as an optimistically easy exploration turned into a slow meandering through deep fog. 

But in some cases, I found information fairly easily. I knew my great-grandfather's birthdate, and I was able to find his birth baptism record (and actually a civil record) from his birth in 1877. So from that I found that he was born in New Ross (my mom hadn't been sure, and for awhile thought he was from County Cork, but only found out much later from a cousin interested in family history that they were actually from Wexford), and those documents gave me his father's name, Richard Grace. I also had some of his sibling's names, because his widow, Ida Belle Grace, had been driven to chemotherapy sessions many times by my grandmother, and the two of them talked, and my grandmother got the name of a number (not all) of her father-in-law's siblings. And with those names and Richard Grace's name, I found all of their birth/baptism records, and I also found their mother's name. Ellen Dreelan. 

But that led to another set of mysteries, because I started finding that Ellen Dreelan's name was spelled every which way. In some cases, this was due to transcription errors, though once I could start finding the information in the original sources, even I was having a hard time figuring out the handwriting. But Ellen's last name was spelled slightly differently in almost every birth record for her children I found, and also in later documents. Even her own children had a hard time remembering her name, so there's multiple versions on documents they filled out or were filled out later, like death certificates. So I found Ellen's last name as Dreelan, Dreelen, Dreelin, Dreeling, Dreeland, Drellen, Drillan, Drieland, Dreclan, Dillon, or even Duellen! Further research showed that a lot of those were unlikely, as there weren't any others with those last names ... but Dreelan, Dreeling, Drealan, and Dreelin were all plausible. And with her, I couldn't dig any farther back in her past, because I couldn't ever find a marriage record for her and Richard Grace, which would have listed their parents. That's still the holy grail for me. I keep searching and trying every database I can lay my hands on, but I've not had any luck. I think at some point, I'm just going to have to suck it up, and actually hire a genealogist over in Ireland to dig for me and hopefully find it ... though that's daunting because they are NOT cheap.

So at the time, and I guess still, things are at a sort of dead end with them, because I can't go much further back than Richard and Ellen, though I have a lot of hints, just nothing concrete to really help me really be certain who their parents were. I'm not even sure who their siblings were, though I have some suspicions.

But all I do know is that they had eight children together; Michael (b.1863), Richard Jr. (1865), Bridget (1867), Patrick (1869), Margaret (1871), Thomas (1873), John (my great-grandfather, 1877) and James (1879). I'm not sure what accounted for the four-year layoff between Thomas and John, when they were clockwork with a two-year gap between children. I surmised there might have been a child who was born and died young, but I haven't found a birth record, though there could have been a stillbirth. Or maybe the family was just too poor to have any other children? Really there could have been any number of reasons, and I'm likely to never find out, though I may keep looking.

But I was already up on various cousins who had delved into the family history previously, as no one had Richard Jr. (I added the Jr. bit, because his birth record didn't have that on it) at all. Which was odd, I thought at first.

But I discovered a few more things that no one else in the family knew as I kept digging!

John William Grace, ca. 1900s

 It was time to build my tree. I had raw materials, and I started the most basic way. I added me as the home person, then my parents. Then my grandparents, because those were the family lines I was going to pursue. Four main families; Grace, Rosiek, Dawson, and Gorchik. These were the lines that resulted in me. Four interesting lines in terms of ethnic background ... Irish, Polish, English, and Slovak. 

I figured the Irish and English lines would be the easiest to trace back ... after all, the sources will be in English, right? Easy-peasy. I figured I wouldn't be able to do much with the Polish and Slovak lines except go back as far as the ancestors who emigrated to the US ... which were my great-grandparents. So those were going to be essentially short branches of the tree, though I would be able to populate it with my family members on those branches, so they would be thick branches. 

So I quickly populated my Ancestry tree (backing it up on Family Tree Maker frequently), and once I got the basic people in, I started confirming what I knew with the primary source documents on Ancestry, making sure to also download those that were really interesting and important to my computer (and cloud backup) so I could keep those regardless of what I did in the future with my Ancestry tree (I knew at some point I would be canceling my subscription, so I wanted to make sure I kept everything). I was also careful with the hints, because again, I wanted accuracy. I wanted to make sure that everyone I added to the tree was as best as I could tell, really a relative who belonged on the tree. Though I soon learned that as much as I wanted complete accuracy, I was going to run up against case after case where things weren't going to be black and white, but rather 50 shades of gray. Because there were just too many common names in my family history, and often multiple people with those names, and it was going to be a judgement call to say that one was related and the other one was not. I don't know why, but this bothered me more than it should. I mean, I'm (or used to be) a professional historian. No matter how good you are about names, dates, and places as a historian, you soon realize that the interpretation of what went on on those dates, in those places, and with those names was often very subjective, and it wasn't always rock solid truth. And so it would be with family history. It wasn't going to be easy to find, and it wasn't always going to be easy to prove, and I had to live with that. After all, who was going to challenge me that so-and-so might not be our great-great-great-great-great grandfather? Or that a distant cousin was married to someone? 

The only real challenge to accuracy was my own. So I would just make extra-sure with everything I was adding.

And this even meant looking at the information I already had with an eye for skepticism. Because I quickly found out that my mom's family history indicated that her great-grandfather was a man named Cornelius Grace, and it was thought he may have been a ship's captain. And I found out after a little digging that there was NO such person as Cornelius Grace. Where she got this information, I don't know, and obviously can't ask. But I found that one of her cousins had a family tree online, and that tree also indicated that Cornelius Grace was her great-grandfather. But just a small bit of digging led me to find that the real great-grandfather was a man named Richard Grace, not Cornelius. But at least, according to one of his children's birth certificates, he had been a boatman in New Ross, Ireland. So not exactly a ship captain, but he had been on the water. Though he only had that occupation for several of his children's births. Later, he was listed as "labourer." But that was the first big breakthrough, finding out my great-great-grandfather's name, and then not only my great-grandfather's info, but all his siblings, including one that no one else in the family had listed in their trees. And in finding them, I also found where they were from, New Ross in Wexford, though the oldest children were born in Kilkenny. So I wasn't sure where the family was ACTUALLY from, but I knew at least that my great-grandfather was born in New Ross, Wexford.

For some reason, the Irish side of the tree, the Graces, fascinated me the most. I'm not sure why, but there was just something mysterious about them, and I think it was because oddly enough, my mom and her cousins knew the least about them, because what was known was that their grandfather, John William Grace, the man born in New Ross, had died young working as an oil driller. My mom had even gotten a copy of his picture from one of her cousins, so growing up, I saw this old black-and-white photo of a handsome-looking guy in a starched collar, who sort of looked like my grandfather, as well as a portrait of a beautiful black-haired young woman who was my great-grandmother, Ida Belle Grace. Now I wanted to know more about them.

Ida Belle Grace, ca. 1905

It seemed from my notes that my grandfather and his siblings didn't all know their father too well, as a number of them were quite young when he was alive, and apparently he hadn't been around the house very much, as he was always off searching for oil. The family joke went that every time he came back to the family home in West Virginia, he'd get their mother pregnant again. So in a way, it wasn't surprising that none of them really knew who their grandparents were, and didn't even really know their names.There was also a family mystery that intrigued me, that apparently John William Grace had a brother who didn't immigrate with them, and was in the British Army in India, and got sick and one of their sisters went to India to care for him. The details were always sketchy, but it was a really interesting story. I wondered if it was true, and if I could find out about it. 

Filling the other parts of the tree with the other family lines was fairly easy, because I was only going back as far as my great-grandparents, as they were the ones who came over from Europe, and I essentially figured I wasn't going to find anything farther back in Europe (and frankly, even if there were things about the family further back, was I going to be able to figure it out from foreign-language sources?). And at least one of those great-grandparents, my great-grandmother Rosiek, I actually had known when I was a child, as she was around until I was 7. Apparently my great-grandmother Ida Belle Grace was also around when I was very young, but I have zero memory of her, but she died when I was 5. My great-grandmother Rosiek I remember very well because she spoke broken english with a heavy Polish accent, and was an absolutely fabulous cook. I still remember the blintzes she would make us, and also that she never used a recipe, she had everything in her head. My grandmother, her daughter, also had all sorts of info about her, and I had grown up hearing all sorts of stories about their upbringing, so filling in the basic facts was pretty easy on all of the other lines.

But then it came time to do a deeper dive, starting with the Graces.

 

 

 

 

 So I needed to figure out how to pursue my research. I did do a little researching on family history researching, and a lot of writers were clear that you had to be organized. I'm sort of organized, in a chaotic unorganized kind of way. Damn ADHD.  My habit when I was in academic history and churning out 50-page term papers (most if not all of which got A's, thank you very much) was to start writing what I knew, and then the writing helped me identify holes that needed filling, and then I'd go research primary and secondary sources to fill those holes, and keep writing. I figured I could do that with genealogy, but also use the actual creation of a family tree as a way to organize, as just adding names would give me points that I needed to research, such as major life event dates, etc. 

So I got myself a subscription to Ancestry.com, getting the level that had world access, since all of my ancestors came from Europe, and I'd want to be able to access international records. I also wanted access to newspapers.com. But I also supplemented it with genealogybank.com, another newspaper source. I used their modern product, NewsBank and liked it, so I decided to get their historical newspaper product. I also got a subscription to FindMyPast, which is a genealogical program for Great Britain. Since one of my ancestor families was from England, and several others were from Ireland, I figured this would be helpful. I also knew I wanted to have a copy of everything on my computer, so I also got FamilyTree Maker, because I heard that it would sync with Ancestry, and I also knew how to use it from creating my old money Cleveland bluebloods family tree. I also got an account on FamilySearch.

 I then made an inventory of what I had to work with at the start. I had a number of family documents that my maternal grandmother had saved, but it turns out that my dad had things saved as well, such as various birth and death certificates, his own father's naturalization papers, and various things he uncovered from his own foray into family history a few years earlier.  I had a STACK of funeral home cards from quite a few relatives that had passed away and my grandmother and mom saved from their funerals, which was very helpful since they all had birth and death dates. My dad had also done an interview with his father's step-sister from years ago about the family in England and their experience coming to Cleveland, and wrote everything down, so that was very helpful. I had interviewed my maternal grandmother back in the 1990s, and had actually digitized the audio tapes when I worked at the history museum and was experimenting with an audio digitalization workstation we had in the library, and I also found that my mom had written a term paper of her family history in the early 1990s when she was attending night classes to earn a degree that she was required to do for her job (she worked in a school, and they required the staff all have college degrees ... but my mom was a nurse, an RN, and didn't have a college degree, so she went back to school and earned one in the 1990s). It was an urban history class, so I'm not quite sure why she had to do a family history, but it gave me a lot to start with. She had asked my grandmother a loto of questions and had save the letters my grandmother had sent her with all the family history she could remember, including a stack of index cards that had a lot of basic biographical info for family members.

So I had quite a lot to start with and I could build on the work that people had done before I came along, which was helpful. I even found that one of Mom's cousins had built a family tree on Ancestry of the Irish side, which was good as well. And it turned out that although I didn't know her personally, I was still able to email her (first via Ancestry and then later just via our own emails) questions about some of the old family stories. There was also another cousin of Mom's that I did know a little, and he was always happy to answer any question that I had. So while I had heard and remembered many of the family stories, I could reach out to cousins of my mom's generation and pick their minds and memories for more information.

With that raw material, I built my first tree. I had done this before on Family Tree Maker and knew the basics, so it was easy to do, once I figured out how Ancestry worked. I quickly had a good basic tree, and Ancestry made things very easy with nonstop hints, many of which were absolutely spot on. Of course, I soon learned that they also gave plenty of wrong hints, and while it was very easy to just keep clicking on those hints and adding people to the tree or adding documents to the people, it was also very easy to get things WRONG, and then unraveling all those mistakes was difficult. So very quickly I also learned that I needed to analyze every single hint, refer to the original documents, and be very skeptical of everything I saw. I wanted to make my tree as accurate as possible, so I sure as hell didn't want any garbage messing up my tree!

 It does amaze me that there are people out there happily clicking away on the hints in Ancestry, adding wrong information to their trees nonstop. And of course, Ancestry then suggests their trees to me as hints, but I find that those trees are riddled with the errors that I worked really hard to avoid. Thanks, but no thanks, Ancestry. 

The errors thing also kept me from building a tree on FamilySearch. I think it's a good source to research on, but I learned quickly about how anyone can edit the trees on FamilySearch, as I added some ancestors and started building a tree, only to find that others would actually edit out known facts in favor of mistaken identities. I noticed this with a great-great-grandfather who had a common name, and someone had added a father and mother to him who were not his father and mother; I had used a variety of sources to find that the person with my great-great-grandfather's name and was born to that man and woman was actually born in 1869, whereas my great-great-grandfather was born in 1840, and his father had a completely different first name than the guy added to him. I messaged the person who did that, and showed the error and included information that was correct ... and they agreed, so we broke the link.  And then someone else re-added it. Interestingly enough, it was a cousin who re-added it. I've never met her, not her grandfather who was my grandfather's brother. I did message her, but no response. And she still keeps adding. Apparently we're now related to Winston Churchill and the family line goes back earlier than the 1100s, based on the names she keeps adding, all linked to a man and a woman who don't appear to be related to my great-great grandfather in the slightest.

So, I gave up on FamilySearch, except to use their research tools, which I've found to be very good, especially the Catalog Search, which I use to dig through scanned microfilms for things not indexed yet. And I've been able to uncover wonderful things with that ... death certificates, naturalization certificates, property deeds that helped me establish when ancestors were in the United States, and all sorts of sources that have really helped me flesh out those branches of the family tree.

And so my tree started to grow fairly quickly, but I'm obsessed with making sure the data is correct, so I'm really being careful to check and double-check every single source that I add to the tree as a fact, so make sure that it's the right person in the right place, at the right time. And the sucky thing is that I have a LOT of ancestors with really common names, so it's very very tough!

 

 So what did suddenly inspire me into getting into genealogy in a really enthusiastic way (I could say obsessed, but I'm generally a pretty chill person and don't get obsessed by things ... but I am very very enthusiastic about family history)? It wasn't because I'm middle-aged, which is often when people get into family history. No, it was essentially because of a loss.

 My mom died.

 After her passing, it wasn't just her that I missed, but I also had the realization that with her passing, it was also a loss of family lore, of all the great family stories she had heard from her mother and other relatives. My maternal grandmother had been the keeper of the family stories, not just of her family, but also for my maternal grandfather's family. He didn't appear to care very much where he came from, but she knew the stories and kept track of all the relatives. She even told me once that she knew so much about his family because his mother late in life had cancer, and my grandmother had to drive her to chemo every week, and so they'd chat in the car to Pittsburgh and back, so she asked her mother-in-law about her background and her long-passed husband's background (I always remembered that my great-grandmother never referred to her late husband by his first name, but called him "Mr. Grace," in a very formal way). 

And my mom became the next keeper of the stories, and like her mother, my mom also knew all about my dad's background and all about his family. I always wonder if this was unique to our family, or if in other families the women were the keepers of the family stories and the family history?

But that was gone now with Mom's passing. This thought really hit me hard when we were at the house, sorting through things as my Dad prepared to downsize and sell the house (he never had liked it that much anyway, it had been a house that Mom picked out when they first "downsized," moving out of the house I grew up in in favor of a newer, BIGGER house). I was looking at all the old photo albums that my grandmother had, and our other family albums, and decided to take them. My brother, who lived out of town, didn't have much time to stick around and help sort though things, so it fell to my wife and I to help out Dad and decide what to keep and what to sell. Dad only wanted a couple albums with our photos as kids, and an album of his family's photos, and his wedding album. Everything else was either going to get tossed, or I would take them. 

I took them, and though I knew who a lot of the people in the photos were, I realized my daughter did not, and I'm not entirely sure that my brother knew who they were, and certainly his kids wouldn't, either. I had heard a lot of the family stories from Mom and Grandma, but I don't know if my brother had, because after he went off to college, he moved on and away from Cleveland, while I stayed in Cleveland, and had the chances to hear more of the stories.

But I knew then and there, that I had to do something to preserve those stories, as much as preserve those old photos, and make sure that the family members knew of our family history and where we came from. I knew this was going to take work, because I'd have to do a lot of research and try to pull together a lot of loose ends and try to solve a lot of mysteries. And I knew I also knew very little about really doing deep family research, outside of using Census records and old newspapers. But I also knew that I wanted more than just names, dates, and places. I wanted context. It wasn't enough for me to learn the city in England we came from (Bolton), but I wanted to also learn the history of Bolton, and find out what background information I could get on all sorts of aspects of my ancestors' lives. 

And it was also not just important to create a family tree, but to create a family NARRATIVE. I knew I was going to have to write this up as a story, so that I would have a "product" for my daughter to read, as well as something that my brother could read and something he could share with his kids.

So it wasn't a little thing I realized I needed to do. But I knew I had to do it, and that I was one of the only people around who COULD do it. I knew that Mom had a few cousins who had done some digging, and I hoped I could build on what they had already, but I figured that no one was going to do the context research that I was also planning, because I HAD been a historian, and that's the kind of research I had been doing during my professional and academic career. 

So what I needed to learn now was the basics of genealogical research, and learning what sources were out there to go digging into that could help me find the information I needed to construct my family history, and to also see what basic things I had to work with in terms of family papers. As we sorted through Mom's things, we actually found that my grandmother never got rid of anything, so we had a box of family documents that would be extremely helpful to my work.

And so I set to work.

Working my way to a new hobby, eventually.

So I got a job as a historian at a historical museum

 I've got an astounding archival and special collections library right there where I work, I've got the background skills in researching people, so this is when I started digging on my own family tree, right? Well, no. I did do a lot of research on people's family histories, and created family trees, only they weren't for my family. 

No, like other historical societies, our collections and interpretations favored the rich families of the region. We collected their old furniture and decorative arts, their family papers and photographs, and their lives and experiences dictated a lot of our exhibits and interpretation. And visitors often wanted that. They wanted to see rich people stuff, or hear about their lives. There were many of us on the staff who wanted to showcase working-class history and related artifacts and stories, but we also found out that it didn't quite resonate with a lot of visitors. Some were indeed tickled to see things they remembered or experienced in a museum, but a lot of people still wanted to see rich people's pretty things. We knew what side our bread was buttered on, so we made sure to still collect and feature the pretty things. 

I did get to be pretty good with the Census. I had to, because not only was I doing research in it, but I also had to write grants to try to get us money to be able to afford to acquire the forthcoming 1930 US Census ... and that would be a LOT of microfilm, and it wasn't cheap. So I wanted to make sure I was very familiar with the ins and outs of the Census so that when I wrote grants, I knew what I was talking about. I also got familiar with social directories, and investigating people via old newspapers (which of course was easy for old money bluebloods, because they were always in the paper, especially the society pages, a concept that you just don't see anymore in today's newspapers). I had also had an internship in a newspaper archive in my first grad school, so I knew a lot of tips and tricks for dealing with old papers (i.e., women didn't have their own name, except when they were unmarried; once married, they always went by their husband's name as "Mrs. John Smith"). 

The gig with the history museum lasted 8 years, but then a financial setback hit the place, thanks to an economic slowdown, so I and a great many other staff members were invited to leave. I sent out emails to everyone in my contacts, and heard back from a former coworker, who had moved on to another institution, and they let me know that their employer had an opening for a grantwriter. I had been writing a lot of grants to help fund exhibits and archive projects, so I applied, interviewed and got the job ... and it was essentially falling upwards, because taking the new job ended up raising my salary by more than $10k/year. But in the new job, there wasn't much in the way of historical researching, but I was busy with my new role, and I enjoyed what I was doing, as the institution had a really good mission, and I felt good contributing to that mission. 

That lasted a few years until the opportunity arose to jump to a bigger institution, again primarily to write grants. I made the move, which again was good for salary, as I got another large bump, and this was an institution that had another great mission that I was happy to support. And I was a successful grantwriter. I did actually use my research skills, because I would look into various funders and see what they liked to fund, what they didn't like to fund, what they were looking for in terms of projects, etc., to make sure that my grant applications would have a higher chance of success. And actually, I WAS successful. I did write some very good grants that funded some needed projects that had a nice impact. 

Until one day they sat me down and said they needed me to take on a new and different role; they had a small team of staff members who focused on researching the backgrounds of donors and potential donors, to help their fundraisers focus on potential donors who could have the money to support the institution philanthropy. The lead researcher who led the team had left to go work at a local college, and they needed to find someone to replace him, and a couple of the senior staff of the department knew I had a history degree, so in their mind, that meant I could do research on people. So they offered me the job (and another nice raise), so I took it. The researchers I would be leading sat me down and taught me the specific skills to do the kind of research they did. I knew how to research, but this was all about learning the right tools and also look for the right things they wanted to see. 

So I picked up those skills, and very quickly got into the role, and it was very interesting, and I enjoyed it. And not surprisingly, the institution I worked at had long had board members who were members of the old money bluebloods that I was familiar with from the history museum, so was able to revisit that old research, and actually add to it. In fact, there were so many old bluebloods in the institution's board history that I soon needed a way to keep track of all of them, so I ordered up a copy of Family Tree Maker, and proceeded to create a family tree of these old money families. And I quickly learned that they had all intermarried, so that ultimately I ended up with a big tree with several thousand people over a host of families all connected together via marriage (and also a few small trees of some individual families who never married into the big money family). This was a good exercise, because I had never made a family tree before, and I found it was enjoyable filling in the blanks and finding out the key information. I was able to use primarily old newspapers, old social directories (we had a stack of them at my institution), and the research tools that I used in my current job, because these were not people who hid or were under-the-radar; they had money, they were living very public lives, and their lives unfolded in the society pages of the local and (in some cases) national papers. 

After a number of years working at my job, my Dad approached me, as he was retired, and looking for things to keep him busy, and he decided to fool around with genealogy and try to find out more about his family history. He had never really expressed any interest in this before, but I thought it was a great idea. So he subscribed to Ancestry.com, and started digging, ordered a variety of birth certificates, marriage certificates, and death registers of ancestors from the General Records Office (GRO) in England, and I helped to answer some of his questions. He was able to find a few things about his ancestors, particularly his English ancestors, though he also ran into a number of brickwalls because of the key reason that our surname is REALLY common where the family came from in England. In fact, our surname in this particular English city, Bolton, is like Smith would be in an American city. So he came up with a LOT of folks with our surname, but couldn't determine if they were ancestors or not. I did help where I could, but this was really his thing, so I only lurked in the background, offering advice. Eventually the brick walls got too hard to break, so he essentially gave up. 

I was impressed with what he had found, and was pleased with it, but didn't feel obligated to pick up the slack. I wasn't a family historian, I was a formerly professional historian, and I focused on big things (well, big in terms of local history), not doing the tasks of amateur historians. Which yes, is a dumb viewpoint, because frankly, the best and most important history is done by "amateur historians," because professional historians (academics, not public historians) are spending years and years studying more narrow topics that ultimately are not really contributing to a greater narrative of our history, or really inspiring people to learn about the past. No, it's really those public historians who are working in museums and archives, or writing popular history books that are really getting people excited about history. More people are learning by watching a Ken Burns documentary, reading a David McCullough book, reading Bruce Catton books, or going to a Smithsonian history museum than are being influenced by history Ph.D.'s in colleges. 

It's a harsh statement, but I've been on both sides of that world, and I've seen how folks in academe have really denigrated popular works, and focused on things so narrow that only a few people out there might be interested in learning about it. And I found that I prefer popular history. I've enjoyed pursuing my interests in history which have meandered all over the spectrum of time. No longer focusing on the industrial and labor history I focused on in grad school, I instead moved on to learning about the Civil War ... and then the Byzantine Empire ... and then Rome ... and then English history ... and then coal mining history (thanks to my internship) ... and then cultural history ... and then art history ... it was lovely, I could go anywhere, and didn't have to worry about my professors or the history department coming down on me for not pursuing my narrow interests. 

My interests were broad ... but they weren't yet focused on my own history. I'm really not sure why. It was always there, always around me. I enjoyed looking at old family photos that my maternal grandmother had, and hearing the old family stories from her and my mom. I liked learning about my relatives and ancestors, but never thought to actually turn my skills and background into pursuing all that. 

But then something happened that changed my mind.