The Relatives You Never Knew You Had
These discoveries are in their own way both comforting and exciting to me because a lone person in one of my family branches quite an anomaly (especially when one considers that I come from a predominately German, British Isles and Scandinavian heritage). Big families are the norm.
This was what happened in the case of my second great-grandfather, John Costelloe...
*****
In the course of trying to gather additional information on John Costelloe's birth and death, I had contacted the local library in Fairbury, Nebraska (its about 15 miles away from the family homestead near Alexandria) and the librarian there was able to find a transcribed funeral record for him.
In just a few sentences I learned that his youngest daughter, Nora, had made the funeral arrangements, that John was from Co. Galway and that his parents were Ulic Costello and Winnifred Burke. AH HA! Parents!
I must admit, I think I may have made a little noise and did a little dance at that particular revelation.
Armed with the new names, I took to the internet. First I went Ancestry.com...where there were no immediate matches, but I really wasn't too surprised by that fact. With some deliberate misspellings of the names, in any infinite number combinations, I was able to find Griffith's Valuation records for an Ulick Costelloe in Co. Galway, Killannin parish, Kilroe West dated to 1855. Good news, at least I had some place to start.
Next, I went to one of my favorite search pages, FamilySearch.org. Once again I imputed the names of Ulic and Winnifred and their variations, but this time I was able to search for them as parents of a unknown child and lo and behold, another name pops up: Bartholomew Costello of Newark, Ohio.
Could this Bartholomew be a relative of my John? Turning to the record found on FS, I found that the site had a digital copy of Bartholomew's death certificate.
Listed on the certificate were his parents names: Ulic Costello and Winnefred Burke (Although the transcriber who recorded the information in the FS system confused the U in Ulick with a V), he was born in about 1842 in Co. Mayo, Ireland and died a widow in 1917. The different county of birth concerned me, but the names of the parents were so similar it would be hard not to prove that Bartholomew and John weren't actually related in some manner.
With Bartholomew's death date in hand, I went in search of an obituary because he died in 1917. In one of the obituaries I found, there was mention of a brother named John Costello from Alexandria, Nebraska. Ding! Ding! Ding!
Just like that, I had a new second great-uncle, and 3rd great-grandparents...and yet...
Ding! Ding! Ding! Another stop in the family tree with two names: Ulic and Winnifred, no dates, and two counties: Galway and Mayo.
C'est la Vie in the world of genealogy.
Until Later,
Jessica
*****
Quick Summary of John Costelloe's Details:
According to family conversations, his funeral record and tombstone, John was born in Co. Galway around 1845 during the time of the 'Great Potato Famine'. By the late 1860s, between the ages of 19-23, he had made his way to the United States.
In 1870, he declared his intent to naturalize in Harrison Co., West Virginia and in 1874 he married my second great-grandmother, Mary King in Westernport, Maryland before moving west to Nebraska and setting up a homestead in 1876.
From that point on, he and his wife and their eleven children continued to live in Thayer Co., Nebraska, just south of Alexandria, Nebraska until his death in 1930.
