The Week I Obsessed over New Jersey

“Obsession: an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person’s mind.” – Dictionary.com

So, I believe I mentioned in my first post that my genealogy project is made mostly possible by the website Ancestry.com (if you’re at all interested in your own family history, I strongly recommend this site).  If you’re not familiar with the site, here’s the basic idea: you create your family tree, adding as much information as you know, or can get from helpful grandmas J.  Then, once you pay them, of course, the website starts sending you “hints”, or documents they think may be referring to your relatives.  They have a truly remarkable collection of sources.  One of the most useful, and most accessible, sources is their collection of U.S. Census data, from 1930 and earlier.  Once the hints start rolling in, the challenge is to verify whether it’s actually your relative that the document is referring to.

                Thus the stage is set for the great New Jersey dilemma.  My problem revolves around the come-and-go father of my grandma’s mother, Marion Gorman.  You see, Thomas Gorman was such an absent father that Marion knew very little about him – and passed down even less information to her daughter, my grandma.  All I knew was that he was from New Jersey, that his parents were from Ireland, and that he was born in the late 1870s.  I was determined to trace my family beyond him, however, so I set out to follow him via the U.S. Census until I found his parents. So, when Ancestry.com’s hints relating to Thomas Gorman included the 1880 Census, I was thrilled – until I realized that it’d listed two different Thomas Gormans. 

Both lived in New Jersey.  Both of their parents were born in Ireland.  Both were born in 1879.  Both of their father’s names were Patrick (damn the Irish and their obsession with this name), but their mothers’ names were different.  One T.G. was from Middlesex County, and his mother’s name was Margrett.  The other was from Monmouth County, and his mother’s name was Catherine.  They each had several siblings (Mr. Middlesex grew up with Margretta, John, Bernard, Rose, and Catherine, while Mr. Monmouth grew up with James, Margaret, May, John, Willia, George, and Catherine).  

 

Frustrated beyond belief, I continued comparing the two possible T.G.s to what little I knew about the real T.G.  I knew that Marion, his daughter, grew up in Mercer County, NJ.  So, I drew a sad little version of New Jersey, and scribbled in the three counties, Mercer, Middlesex, and Monmouth.  The plan was, if one of the two possible counties was significantly farther away from Mercer, then it probably wasn’t that one.  However, to my dismay, the three counties all lie right next to each other.

Next, I returned to my grandma, explaining the predicament.  A little startled by the passion I had dedicated to my little investigation of New Jersey, she dutifully wracked her memory for any passing details about her mother’s family.  She remembered an Aunt Catherine, as well as an Aunt Margaret (apparently she lived to be 100 and ended up in the newspaper.  When I googled Margaret Gorman, hoping to find the article, I instead discovered that a different Margaret Gorman was the first Miss America, so she was hogging all the Google results.  Pushy beauty queen.)  This was good, but unfortunately both possible T.G.s had sisters named Margaret and Catherine. (Apparently the Irish weren’t too original when it came to naming their children).

Grandma suggested that Monmouth County was the better bet, however, on the hazy idea that she remembered her mother mentioning it once.  Something about a John Reddington – whether he was a friend, colleague, whatever, she couldn’t recall.  Desperate to leave New Jersey behind me, I decided to go with the hunch, and added the Monmouth T.G. to my Ancestry.com profile.

It wasn’t until several weeks later, when discussing Marion’s sister Georgia, that my grandma – as if she’d only just thought of it – mentioned that Georgia was named after her father’s brother George.  Grandma didn’t seem to grasp the significance of this detail, but I knew what it meant.  T.G. had a brother George, which only the T.G. from Monmouth had.  Grandma’s hunch was correct.  Although, since she knew about Uncle George all along, it wasn’t really a hunch, was it?