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How I Found my Elusive John Murphy
The Deadly Trail that Finally Revealed a Phantom Branch of My Family Tree
My earliest American-born ancestor was my great-great-grandfather, Edward Murphy. It took a while to figure this out as the skimpy traces he left claimed both New York and Ireland as his birth place, but then I stumbled across his baptism. To my delight, he was christened in historic St. James church in Manhattan not long after it opened in 1836 — the 175th child in the register.
I had long known about Edward’s sister, Hanora “Nora” Murphy who married a man named John Nelligan, but he also had two brothers — John and William — who remained a mystery. Since Murphy is the most common Irish surname, both of them became lost in an ocean of John and Williams Murphys as soon as they left home.
It didn’t help that this portion of my family had scattered. Most worked on the Erie Railroad, so many migrated from Piermont, New York to Jersey City, New Jersey when the terminus moved south, but others went elsewhere. Massachusetts, Illinois, and Brooklyn, New York all came into play, meaning that even if John and William had survived childhood and stayed close to some pocket of the family, I had a handful of cities in four states to wade through Murphys in.
As a professional genealogist, I’m always busy researching other people’s families, but recently, I grabbed an opportunity to tackle this nagging gap in my own. I began by reacquainting myself with records retrieved decades ago, and after just a few minutes, did a double take.
The 1900 census for Edward’s sister, Nora (Murphy) Nelligan, showed her in Chicago, Illinois with her husband, daughter, and 30-year-old niece, Julia Murphy. Huh. Edward didn’t have any daughters of this name, so unless this was a niece through her husband, Julia must have been a daughter of either John or William. I berated myself for failing to notice this before, but swiftly resolved to be…
