How I Found my Elusive John Murphy

The Deadly Trail that Finally Revealed a Phantom Branch of My Family Tree

AI is convinced that John Murphy was handsome. Seriously, I made a concerted effort to get a more average-looking fellow, but ChatGPT wasn’t having it. Also, skyscrapers came on the scene in the 1860s so I’m letting that slide.

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.

Baptism of Edward Murphy, 21 March 1837, St. James, NYC (FindMyPast, Note: images are no longer available, only transcripts)

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…