Additional sources have been added:
Genealogical research inevitably ends up in a brick wall, where there is no information on an ancestor’s parentage. Such is the case with my great grandfather James William Figueroa (1848 – May 2, 1919), whose parents are unknown.
First of all, we need to clarify that his full name is known from the birth records of his children, which show him as James William or J. William, even though his tombstone says William J. Figueroa. Perhaps he was known as William, and when the monument was placed 46 years after his death, perhaps the engraver was being cautious, as his death record listed him as John William Figueroa.
The only information I have on his birth comes from his death registration, which stated that he was 71 years old and listed his occupation as a house painter. But the informant was presumably not at his birth, so his age at death might be in error.
On 21 Sept 1871, (James) William Figueroa witnessed the wedding of Charles Brandon to Emily Aitchison both of Kingston. Charles Brandon was at the baptism of James William’s son William Ignatius Figueroa, who subsequently married his daughter Emily Louise Brandon.
On 9 April 1877, James William Figueroa married Theresa Eugenie Perneau in Kingston. Witnesses included the aforementioned Charles Brandon, Charles Remy, Mary Jane Dorrington, Sarah Kelly, Ada Barnett, and Louis Bell. Their children were:
On 22 April 1908, James William Figueroa witnessed the death of his infant grandson Joseph Francis Xavier Figueroa, son of my grandfather with his first wife Annie Wilhelmina Muschett.
Could my great grandfather be the William Figueroa who was born to Joseph Figueroa and his wife Jane on 18 June 1850 in Kingston?
James William Figueroa is not listed in the index to Roman Catholic baptisms in Kingston between 1837 and 1846 so perhaps he wasn’t baptized or perhaps he was born after 1846. We don’t have a record of his parents, so we can only speculate about how he got his family name.
Genealogist Richard Dear speculates that James William’s father was Jose Angel Figueroa, who married Emily Wright on 11/9/1844 . She was the daughter of of Andrew Wright and Eveline White, natives of Kingston. The wedding was witnessed by his father Jose Maria Figueroa, John White, John Wright, Jose Ysidoro de Cordova, Jose Maria Moreu. In Dear’s family tree, his mother is listed only as ‘Jane’.
So far there aren’t DNA matches that lead back to Jose Angel Figueroa. But there are very interesting DNA results that point in another direction. Ancestry DNA shows that Dorothy M. Figueroa, granddaughter of James William Figueroa, shares 101 cM with Steven Stanhope.
Ancestry estimates that they are second cousins, twice removed, but there are a number of alternative relationships.
| Frequency | Relationship |
| 35% | half 2nd cousin 1x removed 2nd cousin 2x removed 3rd cousin half 1st cousin 3x removed |
| 31% | 2nd cousin 1x removed half 1st cousin 2x removed half 2nd cousin 1st cousin 3x removed |
| 19% | 3rd cousin 1x removed half 2nd cousin 2x removed half 3rd cousin 2nd cousin 3x removed |
| 10% | half 3rd cousin 1x removed 3rd cousin 2x removed 4th cousin half 2nd cousin 3x removed |
| 5% | half 1st cousin 1x removed 1st cousin 2x removed 2nd cousin half great-grandnephew half great-granduncle |
He is the son of the 11th Earl of Stanhope, whose royal ancestry is documented in Burke’s Peerage, although I used Wikipedia to derive this chart of his relatives.
Assuming the Ancestry prediction is correct, then as second cousins, the connection would be via Dorothy’s great grandparents, the unknown parents of James William.
If Steven Stanhope is two generations removed, counting his father (11th Earl) and grandfather (10th Earl) as the two generations, we go up through the 9th Earl, the 7th Earl (grandfather) to Rev. Hon. Fitzroy Henry Richard Stanhope (1787-1864) and Ann Wyndham. The Rev. Stanhope was son of the 3rd Earl, represents right generation to have sered or given birth to James William Figueroa (b. 1848).
To be a true second cousin, James William would have to have been born to the Rev. Stanhope and his wife, but the probability table shows that a half-third cousin is equally plausible. This means the brothers and sisters of Rev. Stanhope are good candidates. It’s fair to assume that his sisters were not involved as they were all in their late 50s or 60s in 1848.
So what about the brothers? The brothers who were alive at time were:
Intriguingly, the 5th Earl married Ann Green, whose parents William Green and Ann Rose Hall resided in Jamaica. It seems to me that one of James Williams’ parents was fathered by the 5th Earl, but we can’t conclude whether the child was male of female.
So my money is on the 5th Earl as the father and an unknown woman as the mother, possibly a sister or friend of the Earl’s wife. Once she was with child, my conjecture is that she was dispatched to Jamaica to give birth away from society’s judgemental eyes, where baby James William could be adopted by the Figueroa family.
The family tree has been updated with additional information gathered from about 80 new source documents.
My Dad would have been 93 years old on 17 January, so in honor of his birthday, I decided to update the family tree.
Frankly, I haven’t been doing much genealogy work over the last 23 months, but I got the bug again after the recent election (I may wanted a distraction). I have included 165 new sources, many of which pertain to multiple individuals in a family.
I added an unrelated person, Bill Timmerman, who was my grandfather’s close friend and whom my mother called Uncle Bill. We have a doll that Uncle Bill gave to my Mom upstairs.
My big focus in December was trying to resolve the connection between my great grandmother Alice Lyons and the Lyons family that lived out here in San Francisco. My Dad and my uncle Joe both visited Nellie Lyons, and 20 years ago we went looking for (and found) her house in the Twin Peaks. And their Aunt Alice would send money out to two priests who were sons of Nellie’s sister Katherine. I have found a DNA connection, but so far have not found a common ancestor.
Many of the new sources help to flesh out the stories of the Figueroa cousins on my Mom’s side, but I didn’t add many new individuals. I continue to search for the Reinhard connection in Niedernberg, Germany but keep coming up empty. The information I have on the Reinhards, provided to me some 20 years ago, is starting to look a little suspect, so I will have to dig in.
When I first began this family tree, I naively imported a GEDCOM file full of people that looked like they might be related. After I got some experience, I realized I shouldn’t take anyone’s research for granted, and needed to verify everything. So as my final step before updating the online tree, I double-checked and then deleted those (several hundred) unrelated individual.
It has been about 20 months since I last posted an update, so here is a revised tree dated 17 Feb 2019.
This update includes additional source citations, which begin around source number 950. Most of these are associated with events, for example residence as culled from directories. Many are also duplicate sources, as I try to add them into my tree whenever I update records on ancestry.com or familysearch.org.
As always, if you see any errors or can suggest additions, please let me know.
Memorial Day is a good time to update the family genealogy web site. Since I published the last update on 29 August 2016, I have found 270 new source documents covering birth, marriage, death, immigration, military service, residence, etc.
Many of these new sources confirm facts already known, but there are some interesting new findings, too. In addition to including the reference documents here, I have taken to including references from multiple sources, mostly from ancestry.com or familysearch.org to make sure other researchers can access this material.
Along the way, genetic genealogy confirmed a new line of cousins, descended from Timothy Kelley, the heretofore unknown brother of my great great grandmother Bridget Kelley. The first clues came from the persistence of Pat McGrath, whose husband is descended from Timothy Kelley. Pat noticed repeated references to my great uncle James T. Conlon and my grandfather Martin J. Conlon, as pall bearers.
We ultimately used DNA tests to confirm that her husband and I are 4th cousins, which makes our great great grandparents siblings. We will likely never know the names of their parents, but this was a good example of collaboration between conventional and genetic genealogy.
I last published my family tree on 28 August 2015, and am pleased to issue an update with more than 150 additional source documents, mostly focused on my Irish ancestry from my father’s side of the family.
My research has been most productive on my Fogarty line, including confirmation that they came from Ballyporeen in Ireland (in Gaelic, the town is called Béal Átha Póirín), and identification of the surname of my Great Great Grandmother, Margaret Walsh. In addition, I resolved some long-standing rumors.
Let’s start with the rumors. My grandmother, Margaret Elena Fogarty, died of breast cancer in 1927 at age 38. In 1931 my grandfather, Martin Joseph Conlon, married Ella Fox, who gave birth to my uncle Ed (Martin Edward Conlon) the next year. Six weeks later, the family was in a major car accident in Cohasset, killing Ella, sending my uncle Joe (Joseph F. Conlon) to the hospital for a few months, and giving my father the scar on his chin (the dimple on my chin was not inherited from him).
My father recalled that there was a court case (I hope to someday find the records), and my grandfather never again drove a car, despite owning the Jenney gasoline station in Whitman. I remember my Dad saying that he thought Ella Fox and Elena Fogarty were related, and that there might have been some bad blood between my grandfather and his Fogarty in-laws after the accident. Despite the accident, the Fogarty family in Whitman was very close to my Dad and his brothers.
Two years ago I visited my Dad’s first cousin Manus Getchell, whose mother Mary Frances Fogarty was the younger sister of my grandmother. We spent a few hours talking about the family history and looking at pictures, and he gave me Aunt Alice Fogarty Collins‘ photo album from when she was young. Manus told me about taking his family to Ireland some time back and visiting the Fogarty home town of Ballyporeen, which is also the ancestral home of President Ronald Reagan, and that the locals took him down to the cemetery where they said our relatives were buried.
An Irish researcher, Breda Nolan, has put together an extensive tree of the inter-connected families of Ballyporeen, but the source documents are not linked to individuals, so I viewed this as indicative but not conclusive. In genealogy, as in politics, an oft-told lie eventually becomes the truth, so before publishing this as a fact I wanted some documentary confirmation.
We began with a DNA test in the hope that it would turn up some mutual cousins, who I hoped would help me confirm the origin. I have found though that the autosomal DNA comparisons only allow us to confirm a family connection, they don’t replace old fashioned research.
So I turned next to the nephew of Ella Fox, who was the son of Ella’s brother Thomas Joseph Fox. My Dad had given me a scanned photo of Tom and Ella, and Uncle Ed’s daughter Rita gave me some information about the nephew. My telephone conversation with him and and some emails confirmed that Tom and Ella were from Ballyporeen, but were they related to us? For this, a DNA test was perfect, and it showed that he was indeed a second cousin on the Fogarty line.
At this point, I decided to renew my Ancestry subscription to see if I could find any documents to add to what was now a very convincing story.
So thanks to a team effort, I have a new travel destination. And best of all, there are handball alleys in Ballyporeen, so I will bring my gear and seek some matches to make room for a Guinness afterwards.
