Woodland Cemetery: Hurricane Damage Persists

Documentation and preservation efforts at Woodland Cemetery in Newark, Essex County, New Jersey remain thwarted by the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, which hit the area six months ago.

The remaining entrance on South 10th Street was accessible when I took this photo seven years ago.

Woodland Cemetery, Newark, Essex County, New Jersey
Entrance at South 10th Street
9 June 2006

Now the entrance is blocked by a tree.

Woodland Cemetery
Entrance at South 10th Street
16 April 2013

Old entrance at Rose Street by corner of Rose Terrace/Chadwick Avenue,
right off Bergen Street.
9 June 2006

Current condition of Rose Street entrance.

Most of the fencing around the cemetery is destroyed, so you can simply walk right in,
even though the entrances are blocked.
The gravestones are shifting onto the sidewalk, where not everyone is interested in preserving them.

This was beautiful once.

Me at Woodland in 2012.
Photo by J Wertz.

This is sad that a cemetery has been allowed to decay over the years.  This is not an isolated story.

Confirming WEIRD

Last February, I wrote about the WEIRD situation in studies:  subjects are usually Western and Educated and from Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic countries.  This is true in the genetic genealogy testing field as well.  My father has hundred of relatives in the database at 23andMe.  My mother has thousands.  Rarely does the African-American lady whose account I manage receive any new matches, leaving her still hovering around sixty matches.

23andMe recently offered a new survey asking the people in their genetic database to report their ethnicity.

Here is the snapshot of the answers:

23andMe
Replies to the ancestry/ethnicity question.

People who identify themselves as European comprise three quarters of the database.  If you are not of mostly European heritage, you will likely not find many relatives in the database.  As more people test, additional relatives will become available, but you need to keep this in mind when you either find very few relatives or all of your relatives look European, especially if you know otherwise in your family tree.

Albany Research Trip: Sorting through the Finds

The research trip to Albany, New York lasted three days.  I found a lot of useful information.  I was unable to post because Internet service was spotty.  I refueled the car in Albany and set out for home, where electric service was coming back after Hurricane Sandy.  I was wise to stop in Albany for gasoline.  The entire way back home was dotted with lines at gas stations, growing larger and with more police cars as I approached Northeastern New Jersey.  My home suffered no real damage and the electric and heat had returned Saturday morning after going out on Monday.  The food stores were slowly receiving new shipments of perishables.  Schools were closed because they either had no electricity or were too damaged.  More people were out riding bikes or walking to their destinations.  Traffic lights were out at many intersections and large trees blocked roadways.  At this moment, many blocks in town are still without power, heat, and water- while the first snowfall, Winter Storm Athena, is blanketing last week's destruction.

One of my goals in Albany was to uncover more information about Mary or Margaret Campbell, wife of Patrick Joyce.  I have not found either of them in the 1860 census and the earliest child I can find was born in 1861.  In the 1870 census in Pawling, Dutchess County, New York, Patrick Joyce is head of a household of four children under the age of ten; no wife.  Mary Joyce is listed on the Mortality Schedule, having died in May of 1870, "Railroad run over by cars."  She is a tail in my family tree- I do not know her parents.  Growing up, I heard the story often about how the train caught her skirts and dragged her to her death- after she threw a baby from her arms to safety.

At Albany, the index of deaths for New York State begins in 1881, or eleven years after Mary's death.  No luck there. A consultation with a researcher from the New York Genealogical and Biographical Society raised an important point:  A death by train could have occurred anywhere there was a railroad- not just in Pawling.

I expanded my search of digitized newspapers at GenealogyBank (you can access from home for a subscription or use Ancestry.com) and found a small article about the incident.

According to The New York Herald-Tribune [actually called the New York Herald in 1870], Margaret Joyce died in June of 1870, not May.  The researcher was right:  She was not killed in Pawling, but about 25 miles south, in Katonah, Westchester County, New York.  She was not killed instantly, probably lingering a few days after the train severed her leg.  I can only hope she was unconscious for those last days.

It is interesting (and fortunate) that she appeared on the Mortality Schedule because only deaths before May 31st of that year should be listed.  The newspaper article places her death in June.  So we have two dates of death.

My plan of action:
Contact St. John's Cemetery in Pawling where her husband was buried in 1905.
Contact the local historical society and town clerk for records they may hold for this family.
Search through more online newspapers using keywords of "Katonah" and "Harlem Railroad."

Sorting The Parental Matches and WOW!!!

23andMe has been adding some new features, some of which are helpful to us genealogists, such as family tree capabilities.  A new feature was added today which will greatly help some of us:  sorting your matches into paternal and maternal.

Let me clarify first:  You have two sides to every chromosome.  Twenty two of your twenty three chromosomes have two sides consisting of the side from your mother and the side from your father.  Current science, or the science available to us genealogists, cannot tell you WHICH side- maternal or paternal- is reflected in any one of your results.  As such, autosomal DNA tests produce a pool of genetic matches from both of your parents and you need to sort through them by comparing family tree and triangulating DNA matches with other known close relatives.

The new paternal and maternal sorting feature at 23andMe only works if you have a parent in the database who is sharing genomes with you.  In my situation, I have both parents in the system, so this works very well for me.  This feature does not work at all for my parents because their parents are dead and not in the system.

I set up my family tree and linked my parents to me and voila!  Of my 1600+ matches, 600 are credited to my mother and 200 to my father.  There is no specification for the other 800.  Very correctly, the people who match both my mother and father are credited as such.

I eagerly looked to see if my mystery 5% match from one year ago was attributed to my mother or father, especially since this person is blocked in my parent's account because the relation is too close.  As I hoped (feared?), this anonymous close relative is my mother's cousin.

My mystery second cousin is as close as my mother's first cousin or uncle.
Who is he?

See the pink M by the predicted relation of 2nd cousin?  That means that this person related to me on my mother's side.  So who is he?

We can use the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) to rule out some possibilities.  MtDNA is passed from mother to child; males do not pass mtDNA to their children.  My mtDNA group is H1, the same as my mother and her uterine brother, and the same as their mother, Jeannette ODonnell.  Jeannette's four siblings are also all H1, so this man is not a sibling of my grandmother because his mtDNA group is H3a.  It is possible that this person is a son of Jeannette's brothers, or an unknown half-sibling of Jeannette by her father.

Basically, the percentage of shared DNA drops in half for every generation removed or is cut in half when the relation is by one ancestor instead of two.  Full first cousins (two grandparents in common) match 12.5%, while half first cousins (one grandparent in common) match 6.25%.  This is to put in perspective how close a relation this 5% match is to me.  Double that for one generation up and you have an approximate 10% relation to my mother.

Missing Marriage Returns

If you cannot find a marriage return filed with the State, this article from 1897 could explain why.  It seems that Father O'Connor of Hudson County, New Jersey, was remiss in completing and filing marriage returns for several years.  When prompted, he filed seven years of marriage returns.  If you come across one of these returns, you need to keep in mind that they may not have been made at the time of the event and some were made on behalf of other priests.

I am still searching in the Trenton Archives for a marriage from 1887 performed in Bayonne, Hudson County by Reverend Egan.  The marriage turns up in the index at familysearch.org.  (Remember to use any index as a guide for where to locate the actual record.)

Familysearch.org
This marriage record should contain names of parents, which would be wonderful, if I could locate the record.

St. Mary's Church is still active in Bayonne and has a record of this marriage.  They kindly sent me a transcription of their record.

Record of 1887 marriage of Patrick ODonnell to Delia Joyce in Bayonne.
Courtesy St. Mary Star of the Sea Church

The next important step is to locate the actual marriage return.  Marriages in New Jersey in 1887 are indexed by the name of the groom.  But there is no listing in the index for a marriage between Patrick ODonnell and Delia Joyce.

Index of Marriages in New Jersey
June 1, 1878 to December 31, 1900
Surname ODonnell
(No listing for Patrick ODonnell to Delia Joyce)

There are possible explanations for the marriage not appearing in the index:  it was misspelled, it was left out of the index, or the return was never filed with the State.  For now, the above church record is what I use for a source of the marriage date and place, but with a notation that the record cannot be located in the State's records.

You may ask, "Why does this matter?"  For this particular couple, we are dealing with some common surnames.  We would like to pluck this Patrick ODonnell out of the vast sea of ODonnells inhabiting Hudson County in the late 1800s.  This particular Patrick ODonnell was born in Ireland, but we know that he was in the United States by 1887 because he married in New Jersey.  This 1887 marriage record is actually the earliest definitive record that I have found on this man.  The 1880 United States Federal Census does not provide us with a good match for an Irish couple named Peter and Margaret ODonnell with a son named Patrick.  The 1890 census was destroyed.  In 1900, Patrick is living with his wife and children, but not his parents.  We need to link Patrick ODonnell to a set of parents, and the marriage return is a great way of doing this.  The luck of the Irish was with me when someone filled out Patrick's death certificate in 1931.  His parents are listed as Peter ODonnell and Margaret Gallagher, which bolsters the information supplied at familysearch.org.

We want to next establish the identity of the parents of the bride, Delia Joyce.  She died in Bayonne in 1929.  Her death certificate lists her father, but not her mother.

I previously wrote of the death of Delia Joyce's mother in 1870 in Pawling, Dutchess County, New York.  The record of this death is provided by the 1870 mortality schedule, a companion to the census.  In this record, Mary Joyce was killed by a train in 1870; she matches up to family 21 in the census, which is Patrick Joyce, age 40, with a bunch of small children, but no wife.

1870 morality schedule for Pawling, Dutchess County, New York
Viewed at Ancestry.com

While we can say with confidence that the father of Delia Joyce was Patrick Joyce, we need additional documentation to establish that her mother was Mary or Margaret and that her last name was Campbell.  We can use the name Campbell to help us perhaps find a marriage record for Delia's parents.  Having a copy of Delia's marriage return, rather than an online index entry, would lend more credence to a claim that Delia Joyce's mother was Ms. Campbell.  There are still other paths to try, such as marriage and death records for Delia's siblings.

Road Trip: Warwick, New York

For years, I had searched for the date and location of death of Rene Marion Duryea, wife of Eugene Cook.  They were living in Caldwell, Essex County, New Jersey in the 1930s.

1933 The Price & Lee Co. Directory
Montclair, Bloomfield, Caldwell, Essex Fells, Glen Ridge, Verona, Cedar Grove

Eugene died in Florida in 1979, survived by a second wife.  So where was the record of Rene Marion’s death?

One hindrance was the name.  She was known as Marion, but the family was surprised to discover that she was Rene for the first few decades of her life.  Rene was a popular female name on her father’s side; Marion was from her mother’s side.

The family story was that Marion died, was cremated, but not buried until her father died a few years later; they were buried together at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, Westchester County, New York.  Marion’s father was buried in March of 1944.  The problem was that the cemetery had a record of his burial, but not hers.  “The cemetery didn’t know we slid her ashes into his arms,” was the reason given for not finding a record.

Burial record from Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.  The year is 1944.
When the century is omitted, the records can become confusing.

Until recently, New Jersey death records were not searchable for my target time frame of the early 1940s.  I had to request a search by mail, which did not uncover a death certificate.  I did not know if this was because of a mix up with “Rene” versus “Marion,” or if Cook was spelled with a final E.  The slightest variation from your request could result in no record found.

An index for Florida death records is available online at Ancestry.com for the years 1877-1998.  There is no shortage of Cook findings, but nothing seemed like a good match for Rene Marion.

This year, New Jersey death records for the years 1941-1946 became searchable at The Archives in Trenton.  I looked under Duryea, Cook, Cooke, Marion, Rene, but found nothing.  It’s best to search yourself because you are aware of name variants and the little details that distinguish your records from others.

Then an observation by a relative gave me the lead I needed.  We were going through a box of family pictures.  The pictures are mostly of houses, buildings, cars, animals; few people.  A large picture of a house on a lake caught my eye.  The back of the picture was blank.

“Oh, that’s the house in Warwick,” was the answer to my query, which prompted more queries.

I hopped online to see what I could find out.  Warwick is in Orange County, New York.  It’s not where I would have thought to look for Rene Marion, but it’s close enough to Caldwell that I should try it.  The Albert Wisner Library website had an online index of obituaries from local papers that covered my target time frame.  There was a good match for Rene Marion’s death.

Online Index to Obituaries

So to Warwick I went.

The Albert Wisner Library had two local newspapers and both carried an obituary for Rene Marion Cook.  I had finally located a date and place of death.

Warwick Advertiser
3 June 1943

Next I visited the town clerk for a copy of the death certificate.  If you have to travel a great distance or you have limited time, you may want to call ahead to make sure that the town possesses death certificates and if someone will be available to retrieve the information.

No specific address was listed, so I can’t tell you if the house in the picture was Rene Marion’s house.

Winter Wonderland

The first snowfall for this region was December 26th.  Several inches to over a foot blanketed the area.  We were hit again a few more times.  I have not seen the ground since the first snowfall.

This stymies research.  Travel is difficult.  In the cemeteries, only the tallest of stones are visible, and paths are non-negotiable.  Feeling devoid of a good cemetery visit, I visited Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Sleepy Hollow, Westchester County, New York today.  Eight years ago today, my grandmother was buried there.

Corner marker at the Sewell grave.  I don't see too many butterflies.

Sewell grave with butterfly cornerstones.

Rendall and Fisher graves.  Newcomers to this gravesite may have to wait until spring to see what lies beneath.

Someone visited the Brewer family plot before I did.

One of the main attractions for tourists- the grave of Washington Irving.