Sunday, February 16, 2014

Tracking the Family of Catherine Murphy to Ireland




I'm traveling for work and have a day off in a town I'm really not interested in exploring so what better to do than to dig into whatever genealogy I can work on from my laptop. I went back to an email I received from a distant cousin regarding my great-great-grandmother, Catherine Murphy and what appeared to be the baptismal record for her child, one I already know about named Michael Dee Kelly. These are Irish records that can be found at http://churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/churchrecords/. I've known about the page for a little while but I didn't realize that they actually have some of the church records available on the web site. Had I realized this, I would have been digging into this information a long time ago.

Here is the evidence and where it led:

Friday, February 7, 2014

The Doran Property - Using Property Records

I got a question from a Miller cousin who asked about Patrick Anthony Miller, the brother of my father who died when he was about two years old. There is some confusion regarding how he died. The Bixenman Family History book notes that he drowned in a pond on the family property. My mother and at least one of my cousins thought that he died of an illness. I decided to see what I could find out about his death.

First, here is his headstone in the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Fort Madison, Lee County, Iowa. He is buried close to his parents and grandparents. 
T. Patrick Headstone in Sacred Heart Cemetery, Fort Madison, Lee County, Iowa