Ever since Frances turned on the stove while I was gone and nearly burned the house down, I’ve removed the knobs when I’m finished cooking. Last night, I dropped a knob, and it rolled under a shelf. I left it, thinking Thomas wouldn’t be able to reach it, and I’d look for it today.
I was wrong. I came home to find the knob on the couch, full of teeth marks. Thomas found it and made some art. And of course, he’s totally unrepentant.
From: Daily Inter Ocean, Chicago IL, 22 Nov 1880, page 8, column 7“BASQUILL — William Basquill, aged 64 years. Funeral from his son-n-law’s, Thomas Raycraft, residence 20 Courtland street, to-day, at 10 o’clock, to the Church of the Annunciation, thence by cars to Calvary Cemetery.
San Francisco papers please copy.”
Here’s another puzzle. I had a vague recollection that, while every person with an Ancestry tree for the family I’ve been working on thinks the daughter, Bridget, married a man named Thomas Raycraft and moved to Chicago, I had doubts. But I couldn’t remember why.
This is why. I suspect, but cannot and may not ever be able to prove, that the William mentioned below is the brother of Patrick (who married Ellen Cannon and settled in Hamilton, Ontario), Nicholas (who married Eliza Hawkshaw and settled in Jackson, Ohio), and John (who married Margaret Daughan and settled in Jackson, Ohio). William and his wife, Ann, showed up in the US at about the same time that Patrick and Ellen appeared in Ontario. They appear and disappear and reappear then drop off the radar until William dies in 1880.
According to this death notice, Thomas Raycraft was William’s son-in-law. That means that the Bridget who married him cannot be the daughter of Patrick Basquill and Ellen Cannon, right? I have no idea what happened to Patrick’s Bridget. I haven’t even started digging into this mess.
Also notice that there is a request for San Francisco papers to please copy. I think this means that the John Basquill registered to vote in San Francisco in 1877 is the son of William and Anne, NOT Patrick and Ellen. It would make sense, if William’s son were in San Francisco in 1880, that the family would want to get word to him of his father’s death, and this might be the quickest method of doing so.
I thought I’d spend the next few days working on Bridget, but maybe not, if she’s not the droid I’m looking for.
The sky this morning wasn’t very showy, but it was still lovely.
screen shot from Ancestry
This is just a screenshot from a stubby little branch I uploaded to Ancestry[1]. It’s public, but I think you have to have an Ancestry membership to view trees. Hmf. I wanted to share it here, though, and this seemed the best work around.
Some very kind soul left a comment with a link to a page on the Canadian Headstones website. It was a couple of months ago, and I did look at it at the time and filed it away mentally. But I didn’t look carefully. For shame!
Well today I finally took a closer look, and it solved several little mysteries surrounding this family of Basquills in Canada I’d been fussing with on and off for ages. It is not only the grave marker for Patrick and Ellen and their three sons, but the transcription of the inscription includes Ellen’s maiden name. So now I have death dates for the parents and three sons, plus a hope of finding the marriage entry in the Irish Catholic parish registers (for now I’m assuming they married before emigrating).
And for context, this family was in Canada by the time of the 1851 census. They are most likely famine emigrants.
——————————————–
1. I’m doing my work in Legacy Family Tree, and I’m being pretty obsessive about how I source things. Unfortunately, the only way to get my info into an Ancestry tree is to export a gedcom, and that does goofy things with some of the data. For a start, event addresses. If you handle them “properly” in Legacy, they’re entered in their own screen, not in the event description field. But when you do it properly, those addresses are lost when creating a gedcom. That means the tree at Ancestry is missing street addresses and burial locations. That information is there, in my master tree, but there’s not an easy way to automatically export it to Ancestry.
Secondly, some of the Legacy source citation information is mapped to funky fields when exported to a gedcom. It’s mostly there (some fields are truncated), but it may not make much sense when you look at the sources on the Ancestry tree.
Basically, exporting a gedcom from Legacy and importing it to an Ancestry tree is an exercise in frustration. I need to find a better way to share information.
There’s not much going on in the east, but the western sky sure is pretty this morning.
1884 Hamilton, Ontario Directory
You might be forgiven for not realizing that the second entry is for Ellen, widow of Patrick Basquill. I mean, how could you even guess such a thing might be possible?
I’ve spent (or maybe wasted) the entire day tracking this family through the Hamilton directories. Manually. City directories are awesome for tracking people. It’s tedious to do so, though, because the image quality is not great and the OCR is therefore really, really, really bad. Relying on even a smartypants search of the index only returned five entries for Ellen. By looking at each year’s directory, I was able to find a bunch more entries for her. Why would a sane person do such a thing? Because it gives me an idea of when her husband, Patrick, died. He was present in the 1853 Hamilton directory (under the name Patrick Bassfield), but by 1858 Ellen was being described as his widow. So now I know he died sometime between 1853-1858.
This family group had a daughter, Bridget, who allegedly moved to Chicago and married a man named Thomas Raycroft (I have doubts about that). But the exciting thing to me is that one of the sons was described in a Jackson County, Ohio newspaper entry as a visiting nephew to one of the two Basquill families living there (brothers Nicholas and John). And? I am pretty sure, when I take a closer look, that one of those brothers’ children went to the east coast to visit a Basquill relative that I have proved is one of “my” Basquills. So by fitting all these weird pieces together, I think I can finally connect the Hamilton Basquills with my own family.
But holy crap is it ever tedious.
Thomas was ready to go to bed before I was. That never happens. And now he’s snoring away.
I almost never see the library from this angle, because I approach from the opposite direction.
It was beautiful at 4am, when I was walking the dog. Crepuscular rays from all the street lights, and that peculiar dampening-and-sharpening of sounds that happens in thick fog. And it was just a little bit chilly.
On the one hand, I was trapped under the dog. On the other hand, this happened.
red paper boat 