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!
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