Ancestral Ties

A few years ago, I developed an interest in genealogy, especially along the distaff sides of our families.

My uncle Willy, my father’s brother, had maintained and extended a family tree that included, as near as I could tell, every Fancy in North America, but his interest stopped with the spouses of our ancestors. Tracking female ancestors can be more difficult, since women used to lose their identity when they put on a wedding ring.

That is too bad, because there are some very interesting women back there. One woman, Abbie Bowie, was a doctor in the early 1800s, when very few women had careers of any sort. Her husband, Enos Thacher, was also an MD. They were my great, great, great grandparents through my paternal grandmother. I tried tracking their educational history. A medical school had been established about the right time in Woodstock, VT, near where they practiced. It turns out that medicine was mostly taught in an apprenticeship system then. No records or licenses exist.

No one has made much progress tracing our family on my mother’s side. Her father was a Healy. My great grandfather, Bartholomew Healy, probably emigrated from Ireland around 1883, but I found Irish vital records to be sparse at best. From his naturalization papers, I confirmed that he was born in county Kerry, but I could find nothing definite. 

According to family legend, he and his brother collected seaweed to sell when they first arrived. Apparently there actually is a tradition of that in Ireland. They used it for fertilizer. By 1900, Batt was a conductor on a street railway in Northampton, MA, and by the 1920s, they owned a bakery. All their children went to college.

After returning from Galway, I renewed my interest in my Irish roots. I soon found birth and marriage records for Batt and his eight siblings, along with the names of his grandparents. Thanks to Google Earth, I have photos of all the homes in their neighborhood. If I wanted to fund a title search, I could probably pin down their actual house. That couldn’t have happened even five years ago.

I have less than a half dozen pictures from those Irish ancestors, fuzzy tintypes from the 1870-80s that tell me little about the people portrayed.

My maternal grandmother was a Schütz. Her father had emigrated before 1870. The family owned a bar in Detroit. They were wealthy enough to also own their own home only three years after arriving, so they weren’t poor huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. By 1900, they owned a brewery in Ionia, MI. According to Goggle Earth, the location is a Pepsi bottler, now.

My uncle Bill tells of visiting the Schützes in Ionia. He remembers going over to the brewery building, turning a tap and filling a bucket with beer. Had to have been in the 1930s, after prohibition.

A few names and dates on a chart form a barely visible path back in time. I know when and where, but almost nothing about what happened back then. 

Why did Batt and his brothers immigrate to the US and Australia? They left long after the potato famine. Their father, Jeremiah, was listed in civil records as a farmer and a mason. They weren’t starving, landless laborers. Maybe there is more of a story to be uncovered in Annascaul, Kerry.

I couldn’t write much of a family history with what I have. Even the facts of my own parent’s lives are rapidly fading. If no one writes them down, they will be lost forever, too. No one really cares, now, but what about a generation or two from now? Will some future Fancy fret away about those lost life stories? 

I’m trying to capture what I can. I hope it isn’t so boring that it ends up in a trashcan fifty years from now.