Bringing Our Ancestors to Life

The purpose of this blog is to share the research and stories we have uncovered about our ancestors. At first, my interest in genealogy was merely a lark; as with many of my larks, it turned into practically a full-time job. From family lore, I knew we had a Mohawk Indian as an ancestor, but not exactly who she was or how far back she entered the scene. I had always been interested in knowing who she was. I found some information on Ancestry.com posted by one of our cousins, but reading the details required a paid subscription. I wasn't sure I wanted to spend actual *money* on this, but my curiosity got the best of me. I joined a 3-month membership to the poor-man's-version of Ancestry - Genealogy.com, for about $10 a month and within a couple of days found excellent information posted by a Cleveland cousin on the Monaghan side that detailed exactly who our Mohawk ancestor was: her name was Mary Bill, b. 1784 near or in Baltimore and was raised as an orphan. According to this story from Don Ranney (our cousin who was raised by Mary T. Dempsey Monaghan):

Ann DeBinder often spoke of her mother who was a Mohawk Indian (also called Iroquois), and raised in Baltimore by the Ursuline nuns. There was an Ursuline convent in Baltimore that burned to the ground in 1800, so no records from the convent survived. There is a cross stitch in the Dempsey/Schade family with the alphabet, numbers and the name "MARY BILLS HER WORK MADE IN 1796". She died when Ann was seven and there is no mention that Ann ever talked about her step mother Susan.

Mary Bill married Joseph Alexius DeBinder (b. 1776 in France) sometime around 1812, and their daughter, Ann DeBinder married James Dempsey. The Dempseys had eight children, one of whom was Mary Theresa Dempsey who married Marcus Gage Monaghan. Therefore, Mary Bill would be my generation's 4th great-grandmother, which dilutes us to about 1/64th Mohawk. I don't think that qualifies us for a college scholarship or a casino.

Well, I thought, that was too easy. Now that I had solved the Mohawk mystery, I had been bitten by the genealogy bug and wanted to learn more about both sides of the family and how far back I could find them in the USA. My sister (and partner in crime) and I decided that once we discovered an ancestor was born in the old world, we'd stop tracking them for two reasons: one, because neither of us was all that interested in their pre-America lives, and two, because we didn't have easy  access to foreign records. Plus, my German is just not that good.

After five months of research so far, we have discovered that our American-born ancestors trace back eleven generations on our father's side, to the mid-1700s, to New Amsterdam (now New York, of course) and Pennsylvania. This blog will reveal all the people we found and bring their stories to life.

Thanks to modern technology and the internet, we accomplished what would have taken years of painstaking research a decade ago in a fraction of the time. We did have to utilize some off-line sources such as baptismal records, history books, and historical society volunteers; we also enjoyed taking advantage of some excellent research done the hard way by our predecessor relatives (thank you, cousins!). But even with the availability of census records, military records, others' family trees, Google books, and a plethora of documentation extant in cyberspace, it was a long, tedious slog to find some of these folks!

We still have several unsolved mysteries we continue to explore. Most of what we will publish here is accurate based on real documentation, valid records and deductive logic. While our ancestors were, for the most part, ordinary people, there were some notable exceptions: intrepid pioneers, land owners, Patriots in the Revolution, veterans of various other military exploits (French-Indian War, Civil War, WWI, WWII), and heroic everyday people for whom we can be proud.

And that is the whole point, really. I wanted to be proud to be an American again.