Tierney, John Herbert grave marker, White Chapel Memorial Gardens, Duluth, Gwinnett, Georgia, USA; photograph by Pamela West, 25 Jun 2009. Digital copy privately held by Jean Marie Diaz, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], Linden, California. 2009.

Tierney, Pauline Marie grave marker, White Chapel Memorial Gardens, Duluth, Gwinnett, Georgia, USA; photograph by Pamela West, 25 Jun 2009. Digital copy privately held by Jean Marie Diaz, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], Linden, California. 2009.

If you’ve wondered why I haven’t been blogging or updating my genealogy database, it’s because my laptop was stolen (argh!) from my office (double argh!). While, yes, my data is all backed up, we’re waiting for the insurance before we go acquire a replacement. I’m using the one-before laptop (the one that amazingly survived a coffee spill) but it’s a Powerbook G4 and cannot run Parallels, and therefore cannot run TMG. Its disk is also too small to restore everything that was on the lost machine, so I have to pick and choose.

Frustrating, to be sure, because I have received a veritable mass of material from the wonderful Janice Cantrell, archivist of the Archdiocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend (Indiana), covering the careers of Rev. (Robert) Emmett KELLY (and giving his death date!) and his nephews, Rev. Thomas Emmett DILLON and Rev. John Edward DILLON. Even better (and more unexpected, to say the least) she has given me a pointer to the possible whereabouts of Rev. Michael TIERNEY (Lott TIERNEY’s brother) in Iowa. Next stop: writing the archivist of the Diocese of Sioux City.

I didn’t think to restore my electronic copy of Evidence Explained last night, which was silly, since I much prefer to include correct citations with my photographs. Nonetheless, I’m doing the genealogy happy dance now, and will do it again when I can share this all with you!

The Tuolumne County Genealogical Society is hosting their annual Spring Genealogy Workshop this year on Saturday, 28 March, 9a-3p, at the Main Library on Greenley Rd in Sonora.

I attended last year and was pleasantly surprised by both the level of attendance and the juiciness of the presentations. I spent quite a while with a kind volunteer from the local Family History Center trying to find Lott Tierney in the 1880 census, and got a library card that allows me to use Heritage Quest at home. I drove an hour over the hills and it was well worth it. It was very useful for the beginner I was, and even the experienced will be able to find something they haven’t thought of before.

Tierney, John J. grave marker, Holy Sepulchre Cemetery, North Andover, Essex, Massachusetts, USA; photograph by D. J. Goldman, 23 Apr 2008. Digital copy privately held by Jean Marie Diaz, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], Linden, California. 2009.

Kelly, Edward grave marker, St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Union City, Randolph, Indiana, USA; photograph by Suzanne Stamper-Youmans, 23 Apr 2008. Digital copy privately held by Jean Marie Diaz, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], Linden, California. 2009.

Little Edward Kelly is buried here with his aunts, uncles, and grandparents, but his family moved to Dayton within a few years after his death, and his parents are buried there in Calvary Cemetery.

Per Miriam’s splendid suggestion, I’m going to attempt a writeup of one of my current challenges in family history. (I’m not overly fond of the phrase “brick wall”.) As a novice genealogist, however, I am modifying Miriam’s instructions, in that I am perfectly glad to be told “you should check database thus-and-so.” I don’t expect anyone to do my work for me.

What I Want to Know:

John KELLY’s parents, and the date and location of his marriage to Johannah LEAHEY.

Known Timeline:

• 1860 U.S. Census, Miami County, Ohio, population schedule, Brown Twp., p. 41 (handwritten), dwelling 307, family 301, Samuel Sayers household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 22 Feb 2009); citing National Archives microfilm publication M653, roll 1010.

  John Kelly is listed as a 22yo farm laborer from Ireland with no personal property of value (unlike the other two farm laborers listed with the family).

• 1870 U.S. Census, Miami County, Ohio, population schedule, Brown Twp., p. 265 (stamped), p. 35 (handwritten), dwelling 296, family 294, John Kelly household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 3 May 2008); citing National Archives microfilm publication M593, roll 1244.

  John Kelly is listed as a 31yo white male farmer, Irish born, with both parents of foreign birth. He is also listed as a citizen. He is shown with his presumed wife Johannah, age 20, born Ireland, and presumed children Catherine (3, born Canada), Ella (2, born Ohio) and John (3/12, born Ohio).

• 1880 U.S. Census, Miami County, Ohio, population schedule, Brown Twp., enumeration district (ED) 131, p. 14B, dwelling 131, family 131, John Kelley household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 3 May 2008); citing National Archives microfilm publication T9, roll 1049.

  John KELLEY, age 40, farmer, is listed with wife Johanna (age 30) and children Catherine (14, born Canada), Ella (12, born Ohio, as are her younger sibs), Johnny (10), Margaret (8), Thomas (6), Mary (4), Edward (3), and farm laborer John PIERCE (50, born in Ireland).

• Jan 28 1881, John KELLEY bought a 160 acre farm in Jackson Twp, Darke County. Citation is to the (Darke County) Deed Book 145, p. 502-503.
• 1888 plat book for Darke County shows the John KELLEY farm.
• 9 Aug 1894, Mrs. Johannah KELLY dies of heart trouble. Schirack and Schirack Jr., Notes from Union City Times, Death notice of Mrs. Johanna Kelly. Cites 17 Aug 1894 Friday Union City Times. While I’m not detailing the sources here (unless asked — this is becoming quite a pile of words as it is), Johannah has brothers and sisters living in the area, and there are several pointers to Tipperary origins for these LEAHEYs.
• 1900 U.S. Census, Darke County, Ohio, population schedule, Jackson Twp., enumeration district (ED) 59, sh. 11B (handwritten), dwelling 241, family 242, John Kelly household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 3 May 2008); citing National Archives microfilm publication T623, roll 1262.

  John Kelly, born Nov 1839, age 60, widowed, born in Ireland of Irish parents. Arrived 1859, in the country for 40 years, naturalized. Occupation farmer; he can read, write, and speak English.

• 14 Feb 1905, John KELLEY writes his will, signing it with a mark.
• 16 Feb 1905, John KELLY dies. The Union City Times says “DIED John Kelly, Thursday Feb 16 1905 at residence North Union St, aged 64 years 2 months 23 days; Interment Catholic cemetery.”
• 25 Feb 1905, the will is probated. Citation is to Record of Wills, Darke County Probate Court, volume not noted, p 392-395. Also have copies of applications for letters testamentary and letters of administration, the latter signed by all the heirs (his children).
• 1920 U.S. Census, Randolph County, Indiana, population schedule, White River Twp., enumeration district (ED) 168, p. 5A, dwelling 127, family 127, Thomas Dillon household; digital image, Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 30 Apr 2008); citing National Archives microfilm publication T625, roll 464.

  John’s oldest daughter Catherine KELLY DILLON is visited by a census taker who helpfully writes “Tipperary” above the “Ireland” listed for the place of birth of both her parents.

• Robert E Kelly, passport #304144 issued 7 Jun 1923. Purpose was “pleasure”, intended date of travel was early July on the SS Canopic. “U.S. Passport Applications, 1795-1925″. Database and images. Ancestry.com. http://www.ancestry.com : 2007.

  John’s youngest son Robert Emmett applies for a passport, stating of his father:

  … my father John Kelly was born in Ireland and is now deceased; that he emigrated to the United States from the port of Liverpool England on or about 1849; that he resided 57 years, uninterruptedly, in the United States from 1849 to 1906 at Darke County Ohio; that he was naturalized as a citizen of the United States before the Darke County, Ohio ["court" is on the form here, but is lined through] [...]

Searches Done:

Phyllis Crick of the Garst Museum in Greenville, OH kindly sent me their surname files on KELLY. She found an 1865 naturalization for a John KELLY, but in Darke County. A check of KELLY naturalizations in Miami County in this time period only turned up a Samuel KELLY. She also sent me the will and letters testamentary for John KELLY, the purchase and sale records for his farm in Darke County, and copies from extraction books of the Union City newspapers.

Ancestry.com search (exact) for KELLY/KELLEY in Brown, Miami, OH in the 1800s in census and voting records shows three groups of KELLYs: a John born in Ireland which I believe is my subject, a group born in Delaware (includes a John and a Samuel), and a group born in New Jersey.

A Footnote.com search for John KELLY between 1845-1880 in Ohio turns up four Civil War pension file index cards. I dismiss two because they are for widows (we know my John outlived his wife). The other two are for invalid pensions. It seems like an unlikely lead (see my Theories, below), but if someone tells me I should check it out, you should also tell me how.

Searched http://dcoweb.org and http://randolph.dcoweb.org for KELLY and KELLEY. Found an obit for Thomas Francis KELLY, John’s son. Found a 1902 directory for Union City, IN which lists on Rural Route 5 “Kelley John — Thos, Ed, Maggie, Mary, Robt., Jose, Celia”.

Unchecked Possible Resources:

• Request Indiana death certificate (in process).
• Query St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Union City, IN for records.
• Research extant Catholic churches in Brown Twp, Miami OH during the period he was there, and query them for KELLY records.

Suspicions and Theories:

I have two theories for why his eldest daughter was born in Canada, when all her younger siblings were born in Ohio or Indiana. First: he was ducking the Civil War by skipping north over the border. Second, that he went back to Ireland to marry his wife (I don’t know where the marriage was, or when, except that Johannah first appears as his wife in the 1870 census, and their oldest child was born in 1865) and returned with her through Canada, taking enough time at it that Catherine was born north of the border. Speculation on these lines very much welcome!

My mother (b. 1946) reports being taken, a couple times, to reunions for ARMSTRONG-KELLY-CULLEN-LEAHEY. Of note is that she remembers the older attendees lamenting that the younger generation didn’t have much interest in the reunions, as they didn’t know their cousins. This made me very excited when I determined that Johannah LEAHEY KELLY’s mother was Catherine ARMSTRONG. It also makes me think of chain migration. I have ample evidence that these LEAHEYs originated in Tipperary, which makes me trust the information from Catherine KELLY DILLON’s 1920 census the more.

Nicholas John KOHL and Bertha WEYRICH KOHL with their grandson, P H Tierney, July 1945.

Kohl, Nicholas and Bertha, with P H Tierney, Tipp City, Miami County, Ohio, USA; photographer unknown, Jul 1945. Photograph privately held by Jean Marie Diaz, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], Linden, California. 2009.

Kelly, Thomas grave marker, St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Union City, Randolph, Indiana, USA; photograph by Suzanne Stamper-Youmans, 23 Apr 2008. Digital copy privately held by Jean Marie Diaz, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], Linden, California. 2009.

Thomas Francis KELLY, brother to my great-grandmother, apparently never married. At various times he is listed as a farm laborer or as a worker at Union City Body (I believe those were automobile bodies being manufactured). He and his brother Edward are standing together in this shot, but I don’t know who is who. (Robert Emmett, the youngest brother, is on the left.)

Note this shot gives a shining example of why one should not always trust the dates engraved on tombstones. His birthdate is given as 1874 on the stone, but both his obituary in the local paper, and (more significantly, I think) the WW1 draft card he filled out in his own hand, give his birthdate as 21 Dec 1873. (Reminds me of my mother, remarking on a family obituary which gave Bertha’s name as “Beth”: “It’s a real shame to lose your name.”)

As a computer system administrator for decades, the necessity of backups is drilled into my hindbrain. I will never forget my first day at a groundbreaking startup, when I asked one of the founders what the backup policy was. “The policy is that anyone who cares about backups knows where the tape drive is,” he replied. Well, that’s a splendid example of laisseze-faire policy, but a lousy backup plan. I promptly wrote a script to fix it.

Then there was another ground-breaking project, a few years later, where we were building a search engine index (no, not Google, but its immediate predecessor). The sheer amount and speed of data being handled made tape backups impractical. The disks were configured so that the data was duplicated at every possible stage, and we thought that was safe enough. Well, it was, until an electrician with a remarkably wide tool belt came into that machine room to do some other work, and inadvertently banged off the power to that precious system. The index in progress was damaged, and we lost a month’s work (under deadline, naturally) once we scraped together what we could. As a result, the process was redesigned to be easier to back up.

You know the moral of the story, right? If you can’t face the job of recreating it, back it up. Your life will be simpler, your hair shinier, your sleep more refreshing. Really.

My personal backups are enormously simplified by running Mac OS X. I really have lost count of the times I have done a complete brain transplant from backups (last time, just over a year ago, because I baptized the then-laptop in 16oz of black coffee. Coffee may make your brain run faster, but I assure you it has exactly the opposite effect on your favorite computer.) I have an external drive at home (500MB, though you can now buy something 4 times the size for less than what I paid. It’s a Western Digital My Book, and it’s been well-behaved for me) which plugs into the laptop. (The link is to a 2TB version.)

Apple’s Time Machine software (comes standard in current OS X) does an incremental backup every hour, and manages the results so that I have a backup every day for the previous month, and then weekly from then on, until the disk fills up (which it also manages neatly).

Note that this is not an archival format. It does let me get last week’s or month’s version of a particular file if I want it, but it does eventually throw away the oldest backups. This is not a problem for me, but the point is that this is excellent for working files, but not for archiving, eg, copies of scanned photos that you don’t keep on your system, but want backed up for the long haul. That’s a different problem. I’m a system administrator, not an archivist.

That covers the files on my laptop. How do I back up my blog? Well, I chose to use the Wordpress platform, so I use a plugin called BackUpWordPress. It’s configured to do a full backup weekly and mail it to one of my Gmail accounts. A filter on that account tucks it away where I won’t even notice it — until I need it. That way, I’m not counting on my server host (which is, uh, me) for access to their system backups.

Written for Data Backup Day, 1 March 2009.