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GENEALOGY LIFE
From Ellen to Eileen
A tale of genealogical serendipity
Many of us have a particular ancestor who calls to us louder than others, one with whom we feel a special kinship. For me, this is one of my great-great-grandmothers, Ellen Nelligan. Perhaps it’s because my own grandmother — her granddaughter — told me tales of her life. Or maybe it’s because she anchors the bottom row of my pedigree — my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother. Or it could just be because her name is fun to say, giving the tongue a workout pronouncing the syllables. But whatever the reason, I’ve always been a little more intrigued with Ellen than my other ancestors.
Ellen was born in County Kerry, Ireland in 1832 and lived until 1927, enjoying a generous life span that produced a healthy paper trail for her descendants to explore. She came to the U.S. in 1853, married a man named Edward Murphy, and settled in Jersey City. Records generated by her family hinted that she may have lived for a short while in New York before moving to New Jersey, but there were so many other leads to pursue that I never quite got around to the New York possibility — until a happy accident occurred.
Nun in the Family
Reading a family history publication, I came across a suggestion to try religious order records for nuns and priests in the family, and flashed back to a childhood memory of a nun in a wheelchair. My nana used to take me to visit her at a convent and I remember being told that she was the one who had come up with my mother’s unusual name, Seton (after Mother Seton, now Saint Elizabeth Ann). I knew that she was some kind of relative, but it was all hazy to me at the time — as was her name. The five-year-old Megan recalled her as Sister Algernon, but a few phone calls to older relatives quickly corrected that impression; her name was Sister Aldegonde. Fortunately, my relatives also remembered that she had been with the Sisters of Charity at Convent Station, New Jersey.
I did a little online surfing and was astonished to stumble across not only the order’s contact information, but an email address for the archives director. A brief inquiry was rewarded a week later with a single sheet of paper in the mail. The document provided various tidbits of Sister Aldegonde’s life, and…
