We’ve inherited a lot of family treasures since we became known as the group preserving the publishing our family history, but only one is on our desk at all times: A very old, unattractive portrait of Samuel FB Morse. The first great historian in our family was Myra (Tradewell) Morse (1870-1962), and she and her cousins spend decades building out a family tree we still use as a base today. She established our family line to her GGF Charles Edwards (1768-1811), who served as a soldier in the Revolutionary War so she could establish her Daughters of the American Revolution membership in 1904. She also established a link for her husband Elmer A Morse (1870-1945) (link) to his 2xGGF Samuel FB Morse, and this little portrait of the inventor of the single-wire telegraph and Morse code was venerated and displayed in the Elmer and Myra’s house proudly.
The only issue was, neither of those facts were true. A Charles Edwards might have been a soldier (still open for debate), but the link to that Charles was specious and called out by the organization in later years. Myra was a State DAR leader and lost her membership in the organization because they had re-evaluated her research and found it lacking what’s required as proof. Her daughter saved the day by identifying a new ancestor with qualifying service, getting her membership under that soldier, then Myra re-applied under the same ancestor and regained her membership. Also, there was no direct relation from Elmer to Samuel FB Morse (they are 4th Cousins, Twice Removed). His 2xGGF was Samuel Morse, but they were born 50 years apart, in different States, never lived in the same State and our Morse died while telegraph Morse was still in his teens.
This is the kind of thing that pollutes the Ancestry.com algorithm and becomes cannon, and we almost plowed through doubt even as we thought we were being skeptical and reserved.
We keep Samuel FB’s portrait on our desk to remind us of how we can manifest results we want by bending facts in ways we aren’t even aware of. Myra did great work, there’s no way she just made this all up on purpose. And we were reminded of that this weekend when we followed that same path despite all of our efforts to avoid this.
It started Friday night, on Instagram, when one of my favorite creators Jen, The Formidable Genealogist (https://www.theformidablegenealogist.com/), posted an announcement that Ireland would drop (what we read as) the fully searchable 1826 Ireland Census at midnight. This was a massive breakthrough for us, and despite cooking dinner (with a glass of wine) we tried the site a few times to see if it dropped early. It did come online Friday night and we did some searching on the couch watching TV that evening.
The reason this was so exciting for us that the oldest Leonard ancestor, Michael (1799-1861), arrived in the US around 1830 with 2 young children and no record of a wife. John (1828-1891) and Ann (1829-1906) always listed their birth location as Tipperary, Ireland but we’ve never been able to establish they actually arrived or how the family looked at the time. Ann’s obituary said her “parents” arrived in the US when she was “just a child”, and settling in Quebec, Canada before moving to Lockport, New York. We know Michael remarried around 1841 in Lockport, and had 4 children with his new wife, and in the 1850 US Census Michael had moved to Wisconsin with John and Ann, his new wife, and the 4 children. The questions are numerous: Did he arrive with his first wife? If so, did she die before having any additional children? Were there additional children that we have no record of that didn’t make the move to Wisconsin? It all makes so little sense that we, along with a great researcher on Ann’s line, have never been able to gleen any fact about this family pre-1841, and we’ve hired professional genealogists in Canada to help attempt to establish Michael’s arrival details (he likely arrived in Quebec, not the US and moved).
With that backdrop, it was exciting to have a census just 2-4 years before Michael’s emigration, and we woke up Saturday morning and immediately searched and we found 162 Michael Leonard’s captured in the census! Narrowing to just Tipperary, and found 7 Michael’s, but only 2 were close enough in age to possibly be ours. The 17 year old was still living with his parents, and his record wasn’t of any value. But another was 32, and it stopped us in our tracks.
He’s obviously 5 years older than our Michael, but given the uncertainties of the time that is not entirely unreasonable. He lived with his father-in-law and his aunt, as well as his wife Mary but it was the children that made us gasp. Michael and Mary had John (age 6), Mary (age 4), and Annie (age 2). These ages don’t match entirely, but they are in the range and reviewing all of the Michael’s within the age range throughout all of Ireland, we didn’t find another John and Ann siblings. This felt huge, not proof per se but a huge lead that could mean we were going to break down a brick wall. If we squinted hard enough we could chalk all the dates up to the fog of history, this matched the family pattern we we’re desperately searching for, and with no other matching pattern from that critical year we were pretty certain this was our family!
It wasn’t until we started typing up this finding to share with our newly hired genealogists that reality smacked us in the face: this wasn’t the EIGHTTEEN twenty-six Irish census, it was the NINETEEN twenty-six census. A full 100 years later than we’d read it, well after Michael, his children, and many of his grandchildren had passed away. This census had zero value to our research.
Once we misread the original IG post, the various 1926 designations escaped us. When we found a record that MIGHT work, we mentally twisted it until we were pretty sure it did work. Had that been an 1826 census we would have started treating that as a valid record despite knowing better. Sure, it could be a thread to pull, and we would have shared with our researchers, but it proved nothing and shouldn’t go any further until we knew it did. This is the kind of thing that pollutes the Ancestry.com algorithm and becomes cannon, and we almost plowed through doubt even as we thought we were being skeptical and reserved.
And it happened as we were staring at Samuel FB Morse trying not to repeat the mistakes of our predecessors.