When you can’t find your ancestor’s parents, you stop staring at your ancestor and start looking at the people standing around them — the friends, associates and neighbours – the “FAN club.” People travelled, emigrated, lived, married and were buried in groups, and the group members records and stories often contain hints about our ancestors. With Bridget Sheridan, the first of those people was a single name at the bottom of a document.
A name begins a hunt
Bridget married Patrick Caughlin at Chicopee, Massachusetts on 7 November 1846, and her marriage record carries two witnesses: Charles Gilligan and Anne Sheridan.
A Sheridan standing up as a witness at a Sheridan bride’s wedding, three thousand miles from Cavan, is not likely to be a stranger to the family. In this period, in a small Massachusetts mill town only newly populated with the Irish, this witness is likely to be a sister, an aunt, a cousin, a mother – in – law.
So the question wrote itself: who was Anne Sheridan?
The clipping that pointed east
Bridget’s family had moved west — to Clyman, Wisconsin — but they had not lost touch with the east. The Juneau Telephone of 9 October 1891, in its Clyman column, reports: “Mr. Wm. Caughlin, engineer on the C. & N. W. Ry., is visiting relatives at Springfield and Chicopee Falls, Mass.” That’s William — Bridget’s own son — a Chicago & North Western railway engineer, using his own railways to go back and see relatives in the very town in Massachusetts where his mother had married.
And the traffic ran both ways. A niece of Patrick’s, Mrs. Charles King of Holyoke and then Springfield, came the other direction to stay with her uncle in Wisconsin — the Juneau Telephone of 14 November 1890: “Mrs. Chas. King, of Holyoke, Mass., is visiting with her uncle, Mr. P. Caughlin,” and the Watertown News of 28 January 1891 catching her return “to her home in Springfield, Mass.”
There’s a second familiar name in that very column, a few lines down: “Mr. John Kinney, of Boscobel, Wis., is visiting at the residence of Mr. P. Caughlin.” He’s family too — connected by Margaret Caughlin, daughter of James Coughlan and wife Ann Condron who lived on a farm in Clonfinlough, Clonmacnoise County Offlay. How that thread runs is a story for another post; for now I’m holding a great appreciation for that little Clyman social column – it was logging a whole scattered family checking in on one another.
Forty-odd years after Bridget married at Chicopee, her family and their Massachusetts relatives were still visiting back and forth — William riding east to Springfield and Chicopee Falls, the King niece coming west to Clyman. So the relatives were still there, in the very corner of Massachusetts where Bridget had started in America. If Bridget had a sister, maybe she’d stayed put right there, findable, while Bridget’s own family moved west. That told me exactly where to point the search: not out at Clyman, where Bridget ended up, but back at the Chicopee–Holyoke–Springfield cluster, where she’d begun her new American life.
Of course, William was Patrick and Bridget’s son, so the “relatives” he rode east to see could just as easily be Patrick’s Caughlin/Coughlan kin as Bridget’s Sheridans — the clipping doesn’t say which. Which household William actually visited, and whose relations they were, is something I’m still working out. It doesn’t change the useful part — some kind of family was still in that corner of Massachusetts, so it’s the right place to look — but it does mean I can’t yet claim the clipping proves Sheridans specifically were the ones he visited.
Finding Anne’s marriage
So I went looking for Anne in Massachusetts — and because a woman is almost impossible to follow once she takes a husband’s name, I didn’t search for “Anne Sheridan” living somewhere; I searched the marriage records – if Anne married there, it should turn her up and the name of her husband. (And then I can research all the people around them to see if there are more ‘family visitors’!)
And there she was. Anne Sheridan married Francis Brady at Chicopee on 2 September 1848 — the same town as Bridget’s wedding, same exact church, just under two years later. (FamilySearch index; the register image is Chicopee marriages 1848, p.283 no.46.)
And — this is the part that turned a maybe into a probably — she was the only one. In Cavan, Sheridans were like Starbucks : one on every corner (or more!). I deliberately widened the marriage search out in both directions to see how many Anne Sheridans were marrying in that corner of Massachusetts, and the answer was: essentially none but her up until her. The next Anne Sheridan to marry anywhere in that whole Hampden County area didn’t appear until 1882, and the one after that not until 1945 — thirty-odd years on one side, the better part of a century on the other, with nobody in between. So across the entire span around Bridget’s 1846 wedding there was exactly one Anne Sheridan on the books, and this was her. That mattered enormously, because it killed the “which Anne?” question before it could even start. This is a very helpful find. (Hold onto that feeling of a clean, unique name; it’s rare!)
Two women both surnamed Sheridan, both marrying in the same small town, within twenty-two months of each other, with one of them standing as witness at the other’s wedding. Any single one of those facts is a coincidence. All of them together is the signature of two sisters. It isn’t proof — she could still be a cousin – but it’s the exact shape the evidence takes as ‘family’ when it is true.
Building the Bradys out
The next move was to build Anne’s whole family out from the records.
Tracing Francis and Anne Brady forward through the enumerations — 1850, Holyoke: Francis (27, bricklayer, Ireland) and Anne (20, Ireland), newly married; 1860, Chicopee: Francis (35) and Ann (30) with John, Mary Ann, Bridget and Frances Brady; 1870, Chicopee: the older children still at home — gave me a coherent, real family: four documented Brady children (John ~1850, Mary Ann ~1854, Bridget ~1856, Frances ~1859), all born in Massachusetts, all consistent across the returns. I’ll be looking for testers from these lines.
The other witness, and the neighbourhood
There was a second name on Bridget’s certificate, remember — Charles Gilligan — and the FAN method says you follow everyone in the cluster, not just the promising one. So I did, and the 1850 census of Holyoke paid out beautifully: Francis and Ann Brady are in dwelling 94, and the household one door over — dwelling 93 — is a knot of young Irish tradesmen that includes Charles Gilligan, a bricklayer. The very man who witnessed Bridget’s wedding, living a door from the woman who witnessed it with him, both a short walk from where Bridget herself had married. Not scattered strangers on a map — a single transplanted neighbourhood. Patrick was a labourer – they may have very well worked together and been friends. Patrick’s friend Charles stood for him, and Bridget’s perhaps sister stood for her.
The rabbit hole I had to climb back out of
For a while I thought I’d found the document that might have been Anne’s will. There was a will for Anne Brady, naming a Mary Kirby as executrix; and I do have a Kirby in the family, so it felt like the two sides were signing each other’s paperwork. And then it came apart in my hands. When I actually read the will, it belonged to a completely different Ann Brady — the widow of a Patrick Brady, her own maiden name Wilkerson — a third Chicopee household that happened to share that impossibly common name “Ann Brady.” Mary Kirby was her daughter, not Anne Sheridan Brady’s.
The Kirby in my family is real — but it enters into an entirely different branch. It sits down among the descendants of Margaret Coughlin. I’d let a genuine Kirby in one corner of the tree talk me into a Kirby bridge in another corner, but it was absolutely worth checking into, just in case there was more fun to be had.
Anne’s death
In the 1850 and 1860 censuses, Francis Brady’s wife is “Ann.” In 1870, the wife in his household is recorded as “Margaret.” This suggests Anne Sheridan died sometime between 1860 and 1870, young. I haven’t yet found Anne’s death record to settle it — and until I do, there’s an open question. Divorce was probably not an option, so these circumstances tend to lean toward death or placement in an asylum.
Where it stands
Anne Sheridan is, by a distance, the strongest candidate for Bridget’s sister I have: she is about the same age, witnessed Bridget’s wedding, married in the same town within two years, raised a family whose children interleave with Bridget’s like two hands folding together, married a fellow Cavan emigrant, and sits beside Brady and McCabe -surname DNA matches on the modern side. That is a lot of converging circumstantial evidence. She could be a cousin, too, though.
It is still not proof. What would help a lot is one of two things: a document that names Anne’s parents (and ideally something of Bridget’s!), or a DNA segment that ties a documented Brady–Sheridan descendant to my own family’s kits. Neither is in hand yet. Lots of matches, but documentary holes galore.
If you descend from a Francis and Anne (Sheridan) Brady of Chicopee, or a Cavan Sheridan who reached western Massachusetts in the 1840s, I would very much like to hear from you.