Browsing a GEDCOM File

A GEDCOM file is the standard for sharing genealogical information. The version 5.5.1 specification is old, but still widely used. A GEDCOM file is generally understood to be intended for output from one computer program, then input to another computer program. But the GEDCOM file is plain text. The file's contents can be browsed that way, and that may be the only way to see all the details that were output by the generating program.

At GitHub I have a little macOS app that I use to browse GEDCOM files. Some of my GEDCOM files are very old, sent by cousins when I first got into genealogy over 20 years ago. Some of the files were created only recently, when I downloaded information from WikiTree and from Ancestry. (It is the standard, so a GEDCOM file is what you get when you download your tree from somewhere.)

Why not just use a plain-text editor for browsing? Discussion follows this screenshot of the app.

In this example the opened file is my tree downloaded from Ancestry. That tree was created by me to aid Ancestry-DNA matches in determining common ancestors. Because of that sole purpose this file contains records for only 37 individuals (35 of them my known ancestors) in 18 families. (My private GEDCOM file on my personal computer has about 1500 individuals.) A single record in a GEDCOM file generally contains multiple lines. The beginning of a new record is indicated by, among other things, a zero as the first character on a line. Though not obvious from the screenshot, the entire opened file can be scrolled from beginning to end in the view on the left. I've scrolled to the point where the beginning of the record for Ann Cavanaugh, one of my great-great-grandmothers, is displayed. Having clicked on the "Process" button, the file has been separated into records which are sorted and selectable in the four views on the right. I can easily jump from one record to another. In the list of individual records I've selected Ann Cavanaugh--much easier selecting that one record than searching for and scrolling to Ann in the original file. But what if Ann had been in a file with thousands of individuals? I would have switched temporarily to sort the list of individuals by surname.

Each record in a GEDCOM file starts with a unique cross-reference label. Ancestry has generated very long cross-references for the individual records. Ann's individual record indicates that she is a spouse in family F17. Having selected F17 in the list of families, we can see that that family record is linked back to Ann's individual record--a two-way link between individual and family record, as required by GEDCOM. My little app is oblivious to most of GEDCOM's requirements and recommendations. Basically all it does is display whatever the content happens to be for each record.

While preparing this post and reviewing the earliest version of this screenshot, I noticed that there were too many families and individuals--duplicates and even triplicates, with the extras differing in having mangled links. Here is how I think that happened. Before last December I had already enjoyed connecting with DNA-test-match cousins at other sites. Worried that I might be missing something at Ancestry, last December I took advantage of their DNA test sale. Preparing for anticipated new connections I created for the first time at Ancestry my tree, adding only my ancestors, one at a time. After that I succumbed to the allure of confirming Ancestry's hints. I think that is how the extra, mangled relationships were generated. After several iterations of deletions and repairs, my tree is back to what I originally intended. So the point is, downloading and browsing of a GEDCOM file can help find problems that are not obvious using the vendor's interface.

I prefer WikiTree. These days my genealogical research results get transferred directly to WikiTree, either by updating existing WikiTree profiles, collaboratively if possible, or sometimes by adding new profiles there. The GitHub link for my GEDCOM Browser app has a README file on its main page which contains a screenshot similar to the one on this page. In the GitHub screenshot the file is a GEDCOM that I downloaded from WikiTree. In that file I've also selected Ann Cavanaugh for illustration, so the two screenshots can be compared and contrasted. The contrasts between a WikiTree GEDCOM and an Ancestry GEDCOM illustrate that there is a great deal of flexibility in how information can be organized in a GEDCOM file. That flexibility can be a hindrance when importing a GEDCOM from somewhere else.

There is a problem with GEDCOM files generated by WikiTree that transcends whether WikiTree follows the spirit of the GEDCOM law. The problem is well explained in this Tamura Jones web page from over five years ago. WikiTree exports the entire biographical section of a profile as one long note in the individual's GEDCOM record. A large number of continuation lines are needed. WikiTree breaks a line and continues on the next line when the line length is well short of the limit specified by GEDCOM. All of that is within the letter of the GEDCOM law. The problem comes when a two-byte UTF-8 character (for example, an accented letter in a Hungarian name, or an educated quotation mark) happens to straddle the arbitrary number of bytes where WikiTree breaks the line. A malformed UTF-8 file is generated. Fortunately my Mac text editor of choice follows orders when I tell it to open the file as UTF-8, but it complains and warns me, highlighting the problem spots. So it was relatively easy to manually repair the file. I only recently experimented with downloading GEDCOM from WikiTree, and it was surprising to eventually discover that the malformed UTF-8 problem had been identified five years ago and never fixed.

Soloheadbeg

Hundredth anniversary: commemoration ceremony; analysis of the event. Said to be the Lexington and Concord of the Irish War of Independence. The spelling on my map is Solloghodbeg. The site is about 5 km south-southeast of Clonganhue, townland of my Meagher ancestors.

Loose Ends: Cappawhite, Cavanaugh

Omissions over the last four years—
Six years ago I wrote a post entitled James Meagher, of Cappawhite Parish. Four years ago, two years after the original post, Richard J Crowe commented and confirmed that Clonganiff, Clongariff and Clonganhue are different spellings for the same townland in Cappawhite Parish. I should have replied to his comment at that time, but didn't. This is a very late Thank you Richard for that information.
Almost three years ago I wrote a post entitled Ann Cavanaugh, of Ohio/Ireland. A few days ago Helen Miller commented on that post. After the original post, I did find some additional information (documented in footnotes 12 through 17 on the MeagherCavanaugh page). The 1860 census lists Ann living wih her father and most of her siblings. Though Ann and siblings are recorded as all born in Ohio, I'm suspicious about that information, since I have not found a roughly matching family anywhere in Ohio in the 1850 census. I suspect that Ann's childhood family may have arrived to Ohio from Ireland via a circuitous route, with no desire to remember the past. For now, any town in Ireland might be the birthplace of Ann Cavanaugh.
A little over two years ago the young Catriona White, originally from Cappawhite, died in California. For a long while I thought that maybe there were two different Cappawhites, but no. From time to time there are news updates about her tragic story in California. And yes, it is the same Cappawhite.
I tell people that genealogy makes a good excuse for traveling. It is a particularly good excuse for getting to know locals in a small town off the tourist trail. Last year, after having studied the map for many years, I drove to Cappawhite.

The town square could easily be a Snow Village that you might set up under the Christmas tree. Below is a view looking in the same direction, but from near the intersection. In both views the greenish-blue (teal?) awning marks the Centra market, a small-town fixture in Ireland.

The proprietress, Breda Meagher Ryan, showed me a picture in the town history.

This Timothy Meagher, born 1843, was from a different, probably more well-to-do family than the one that sent three brothers and one or two sisters to eastern Ohio. But he may have been a cousin to the Meagher's of Clonganhue.

Clonganhue is about 2.5 km southwest of The Square (in the previous views of the square, ahead and to the left). The line of scraggly pine trees marks a creek that flows southwest through the middle of the otherwise flat townland. Old maps highlight Clonganhue Bridge at this point.

Ann Cavanaugh, of Ohio/Ireland

My resolution for this year is to try to find out more about Ann Cavanaugh, who married James Meagher in Massillon, Ohio, in 1862. I'm hoping that some reader of this post may be able to help. For most of the branches on my family tree we know exactly which townland in Ireland or which town/village in Hungary was the ancestral home. But for Ann Cavanaugh it is only a guess, probably a good one, that either Ann or her parents came from somewhere in Ireland. (My Brooks-Humbertson branch also has uncertainties, but those uncertainties predate Ann Cavanaugh by at least a generation.)
It is a common name, and so it will be difficult to identify the correct Cavanaughs. Probably the most reliable information about Ann was provided by her oldest son, Patrick (a great-grand-uncle of mine). When one of Patrick's younger brothers, James, died in 1931, Patrick provided the information for the details on his brother's death certificate. Patrick reported that their mother, Anna Cavanaugh, was born in Massillon, Ohio. That birthplace is consistent with both the 1860 and the 1870 census records, which show that Ann was born in Ohio. In 1936 when Patrick himself died, Patrick's son Daniel reported that his grandmother was born in Ireland. That Daniel thought his grandmother had come from Ireland provides some basis for assuming that Ann's ancestry was no more than two generations removed from Ireland.
Ann's husband was, of course, a first-generation immigrant from County Tipperary. As a still single man in 1860, James Meagher was a coal miner living in Mineral City. As a married man in 1870 and 1880, James and his family were living in Mineral City. But I suspect that Ann and the older children had spent considerable time in Massillon during the 1860's. Both Patrick, the oldest son, and my great-grandfather Thomas Meagher, the second oldest son, were familiar with their Massillon origins. Father James himself could perhaps have found alternative employment in Massillon during the early years of his marriage, before eventually settling back to coal mining in Mineral City. It's even conceivable that James could have commuted from Massillon to his work near Mineral City. Still it's reasonably clear that the connection to Massillon was through Ann's side of the family.
A Thomas Cavanaugh was a witness for the wedding in 1862. Thomas would have been the name of Ann's father, if the Meagher-Cavanaugh family followed the traditional naming conventions, which they did in fact follow for the names on the Meagher side of the family. (This Thomas Cavanaugh would be the namesake for many contemporary Thomas relatives of mine.) Ann could have incorrectly remembered being born in Massillon, but if so she probably at least had arrived there at a very young age accompanying her parents. If Ann was in fact born in Massillon, it is still probably the case that her parents were relatively recent arrivals there. Census records have Ann a decade younger that her husband, so her parents could have emigrated either well before the Famine, or at the very beginning of it. Possible itineraries are described in the history of Massillon's St. Mary parish:

The majority of the early Catholic settlers were of German heritage. ... They had come overland through Pennsylvania, or had arrived in the United States and proceeded by boat from New York, up the Hudson River to Albany and then westward on the Erie Canal to Lake Erie, Cleveland, and then southward on the Ohio and Erie Canal to Massillon. With the building of the canal through Massillon, there was an influx of Irish immigrants. They labored in building the canal and also worked in the local coal mines. ...

Oct 11 Update, including Powers to Higgins to Hagarty

Having restored and updated a number of the families on my genealogy pages, a priority has been to restore and update the BrooksHumbertson and the BrooksPowers pages. Those two families, when complete, will fill in key links on the Trees page. There is much information, and yet many missing pieces.
While looking back through my notes and rechecking the facts on Brooks, expecially in the Frostburg area, I ran into some new information. For example, my great-grandfather Thomas Meagher appears in the 1895-96 directory for Frostburg which is available online at the Western Maryland Historical Library site. We already knew that my grandmother had lived in Frostburg as a young girl. But since we know so little about her father, it is nice to see his name in print in the directory. The directory also lists several members of the Powers family living near the corner of Maple and College. That is the vicinity where I remember my grandmother pointing out she had lived [see footnote no. 8 on the MeagherBrooks page]. The 1895-96 directory lists the residence for Thomas Meagher as New. I don't know if that was a street name, or if it indicated a new entry.
The 1895-96 directory also helped with sorting out the Powers-Higgins-Hagarty connection. You can see that connection in the descendants for PowersKilleen at the bottom of the Trees page, as well as on the new HigginsPowers page. When I mentioned to my Mom that I had figured out where the Hagarty name fit, and that the Hagartys had lived in Duquesne, my Mom immediately exclaimed, Oh, Margaret Mary! As memory has it, it seems that neither Nell (Meagher) Thompson, who lived not far from Duquesne, nor her sister Irene (Meagher) Murtha were close to their second cousin, Margaret Mary Hagarty. But their brother Tom Meagher, the funeral director, stayed in touch with Margaret Mary. My Mom recalls a day ca. the early 1930's when her Uncle Tom took her mother to visit Margaret Mary in Duquesne. The Murtha children stayed behind in Mt. Pleasant with Grandmother Annie babysitting. Besides living in the town of Duquesne, it appears also that at the time Margaret Mary would have been attending or would have recently graduated from Duquesne University. While visiting Margaret Mary, Tom took his sister to Kennywood [Amusement Park]. Kennywood would have been an easy half-mile walk from Margaret Mary's house on Oakmont Avenue. Margaret Mary's mother, Ellen (Nellie), would have still been alive then. Ellen's brothers (Margaret Mary's uncles) Dennis Higgins and possibly Patrick Higgins may also have been there. (This rootsweb post has Dennis and Patrick living with the Hagartys in 1910). I suspect that Dennis Higgins (b. 1873) may have been the namesake for Dennis Meagher (b. 1902).

Thomas and Annie Meagher Web Page

I finally updated and restored the web page for the Thomas and Annie Meagher family. Twelve years ago I started researching Thomas and Annie. One thing led to another, and the branches on the family tree increased. Over the years, as new details emerged about Thomas and Annie, I updated family members with mailings. Yet the information about Thomas and Annie on the old (att) web pages had never been updated, except for a few feeble improvements to the citations. Now all of the information is available and organized on the new web page. There are also some new links and attachments that may be of interest.

Looking at their history side-by-side on the web page, the most interesting question for me is still what brought each of them to Mt. Pleasant. Did the teenaged Annie travel there with her childhood family, or did her mother Ellen and/or her twin sister Mollie remain behind in Maryland. It seems that Thomas left his childhood family behind in Ohio and never looked back. Obviously when you look at stories of immigrants from Europe, there were hundreds of teenagers who left their childhood families behind and traveled on their own (maybe tagging along with friends or relatives) to the coalfields of western Pennsylvania. My Hungarian grandparents did that. It was something that many of their friends and relatives in the old country were doing. The streets of America were paved with gold, etc. But I doubt that teenagers growing up in the coalfields of Maryland or Ohio would have any illusions about the streets of Mt. Pleasant. What did they hear about Mt. Pleasant in the mid-1880's that attracted them there? Did organizations in the Irish community provide support for traveling and getting settled in the new town?

I have not been satisfied with any of the genealogy software that I've tried. Initially it's fun to enter all of the links and create expansive charts. But the static links don't tell the whole story. Families grow and shrink as individuals join and leave. Traditional families become extended families. Individuals migrate from one family to another. I've taken to entering information directly into web pages, with each page attempting to tell the story of a family.

Dignitaries Visiting the Irish Midlands

Queen Elizabeth today completed her four-day stay in Ireland. President Obama will be in Ireland on Monday. Their visits to sites in the the Irish Midlands have connections to some of my ancestors.

“O'bama” will visit Moneygall, from where F. Kearney, the President's great-great-great-grandfather on his mother's side, emigrated in 1850. Moneygall lies along the N7 highway, in County Offaly, but very close to the boundary with County Tipperary. (The Offaly-Tipperary boundary crosses the N7 highway five times within about ten miles of Moneygall.) Traveling east from Moneygall towards Dublin, the N7 crosses into that part of Tipperary that is Ikerrin, the ancestral homeland of the O'Meagher clan.

Two of my ancestors on my mother's side emigrated from locations that are within 20 miles of Moneygall. My great-great-grandfather, James Meagher, emigrated from near Cappawhite, about 20 miles southwest of Moneygall. My great-great-grandmother, Ellen Powers, left from Kilcormac, about 20 miles northeast of Moneygall.

Today Queen Elizabeth visited the Rock of Cashel, which is about thirty miles south of Moneygall. Although it is a bit of a stretch, there is a connection with another of my ancestors, my great-grandfather John Murtha. John, along with most of his Murtha siblings, emigrated from County Cavan, which is a long way northeast of Tipperary. About the time when John Murtha was a very young man, there was a land survey known as the Griffiths Valuation. Griffiths recorded that the Murtha homestead and farm was owned by “Dean Adams” (the Reverend Samuel Adams, a Cavan squire holding the office in the Church of Ireland, “Dean of Cashel”).

James Meagher, of Cappawhite Parish

This post, and and later ones, will refer to information in my online genealogy pages. Those pages are back, but only a few of them so far.

The MeagherCavanaugh(1862) page summarizes information about the James Meagher family. Included on that page is a link to the Meagher YDNA surname project. That project has taken on a fascinating life of it's own. Unfortunately, it's yet to prove anything in my line. My mother's cousin took the test, establishing that our Meaghers are in the I haplogroup. (Most of Irish ancestry are R's, with the I's a distant second.) Because the I haplogroup is relatively rare, the test should prove convincing for a connection (or lack of it), if I ever manage to convince a presumed distant cousin to take the test.

In the meantime, there is the vexing problem of a missing baptismal record for my great-great-grandfather James Meagher (see footnote #11 on his parents' family page). Sometime in 2009 I happened to find an email address for the parish priest at Cappawhite. Later that year I sent an email explaining the situation. For awhile I did not hear anything. Then last April a letter arrived from Cappawhite. The parish priest enclosed a copy of the original record for 1837, carefully trimmed to a thin strip, thus excluding records immediately before and after.

The original record, at the top of the image, can be compared with the extracted information (bottom of image) provided by the Tipperary Heritage Unit, Family History Research Centre in June of 2000. The original record clears up one minor discrepancy. The townland is in fact spelled Clonganiff, with two n's, not Clongariff. The double n spelling agrees with the ca. 1850's standardization of the spelling as Clonganhue. (Another of the earlier variant spellings: Clonganhve.) It's still unknown whether Conor (Cornelius) became James, or whether the record for James is just missing.

Exactly 150 years ago, the following advertisement appeared in the Boston Pilot, a Catholic newspaper with national circulation.

Actually the image above is a copy of the advertisement as reprinted in The Search for Missing Friends. It would be interesting to check a microfilm copy of the original issue. (Online searches indicate that microfilm of the originals may be available at Notre Dame and at Catholic University of America.) The timeline in the ad makes sense if Mary left home before visiting her brothers. So she probably left home 8 years before the ad (She would have been 23 years old in 1853; James would have been about 16-18 that year.) As explained in footnote 4 on the MeagherCavanaugh(1862) page, James could have left Ireland as late as 1856. There are many interesting James Meagher scenarios yet to explore both in Ireland and in America.

Connections to Meagher and Murtha on the NBC Show

A week ago Friday my Aunt called in the evening from LaFayette Manor to tell my Mom that she was watching a show about Rosie O'Donnell, and that the name of Rosie's mother or grandmother (my Mom wasn't clear on this) was Murtha. My Aunt did not know which show or station she was watching, so my Mom began flipping through the cable channels. I googled, and eventually discovered that my Aunt was watching an episode from the second season of the NBC show Who Do You Think You Are. In Tucson the show would begin a half hour after the call. I never watched any episodes from the first season, imagining them to be one long commercial for ancestrydotcom. On the contrary, I enjoyed the Rosie O'Donnell episode. It emphasized travel to the original locations, even to the point of literally fingering the original records. Although my Aunt was interested in the Murtha connection, I was more excited about the last 15 minutes or so of the program, specifically that latter segment's connection to my ancestor Ellen Powers (mother-in-law of Thomas Meagher--see the previous post, Ellen Powers).

First, the Murtha connection: My cousin Jim Naureckas has information on his Jim's Genealogy Pages about our Murtha ancestors. They were from County Cavan, close to the northern border of Co. Meath. Our great-grandfather was not a Famine Immigrant; he left Ireland about 35 years after the Famine. My understanding from the show is that Rosie's ancestors were from the northern part of Co. Kildare, close to the southern border of Co. Meath. The Murtha/Murtagh surname is centered on Co. Meath. (You can explore the frequency of the Murtha/Murtagh surname in Ireland by doing a search at the Irish Family History Foundation site. Registration is not required to obtain merely a summary of the total number of relevant records of various types for each county.) So we are interested in the connection between Murtha families on the northern and on the southern fringes of Co. Meath. My guess is that the common ancestor would go back considerably more than 200 years, although we may never know for sure.

Rosie O'Donnell was fortunate to find a Famine-era record from her ancestors' Poor Law Union (PLU) showing that her ancestors had been approved for emigration. The expert on the show explained that this meant that her ancestors would have needed to stay in the local workhouse for a certain period. Thre were well over 100 Poor Law Unions established in Ireland, each containing a workhouse. Intially the PLU aid system was shunned by the poor. But when the Famine hit, the system was overwhelmed.¹ Continuing with the show: Rosie went on to visit what is considered to be the best surviving workhouse complex in Ireland, similar to the one where her ancestors would have stayed. She visited the Birr Workhouse (aka Parsonstown, an earlier name for Birr), which happens to be the workhouse where the Powers family (see the previous Ellen Powers post) would have gone. Their parish, Kilcormac, is only about 8 miles northeast of Birr. Four-year-old Ellen Powers could easily have spent the winter of 1846-1847 in that very workhouse. More likely, the Powers family would have fended for themselves that winter, before being evicted by their landlord in the summer of 1847, then making their way south to Cobh. Still, even with that scenario, Ellen may have known less fortunate orphaned friends who spent their winters in that attic. Viewing the reaction of Rosie O'Donnell to the workhouse setting is especially moving, realizing that the Powers family must have at least passed by that very complex, also imagining the conditions inside.

1. Peter Gray, The Irish Famine, Thames and Hudson Ltd., London, 1995, 191 pp., ISBN 0-500-30057-7

Ellen Powers

While visiting St. Pius cemetery in Mt. Pleasant I had always heard of Ellen, one of my great-great-grandmothers. Ellen's daughter was Annie, my great-grandmother. In the spring of 1903, Annie lost her first husband after an accident in the coal mine. Thomas Meagher was buried at the head of town (the city cemetery), with the specific location now forgotten. The Irish have a way of avoiding tragic memories. Two years after losing Thomas, the widow Annie Meagher lost her mother. By then (1905) a new Catholic cemetery had been established in Mt. Pleasant. Ellen was an early arrival at the new cemetery, the first to be buried in a block of eight gravesites. Annie, on the other hand, was later buried with her second husband in an opposite corner of the cemetery. As a result, the eight gravesites purchased by the widow Meagher are all now devoted to surnames other than Meagher. The eight gravesites skip Annie's generation; they represent the generation before and the three generations after.

Just beyond the entrance to St. Pius cemetery, the drive splits into a one-way loop. Ellen's gravesite is close to a curve in the driveway. Visitors often found her site a convenient spot to pull completely off the road, allowing other cars to pass effortlessly. Over the years my Dad concocted a variety of flags to draw attention to the corner of Ellen's gravesite, all of which proved no match for a metal bumper. We concluded that he would not rest in peace until Ellen had her own stone marker. That meant finding out more about Ellen.

A little research quickly revealed that Ellen's maiden name was Powers, that she belonged to a large family that had moved from New York to Frostburg MD in the 1850's, and that she and her entire family were Famine Immigrants, arriving in New York on 13 Sep 1847 aboard the Issac-Walton. By chance, a death record in Frostburg indicated that one of Ellen's brothers was a native of Kings County. That led to a request for information from Irish Midlands Ancestry. (The current, presumably much faster way to do this starts with an online search at the Irish Family History Foundation.) The report from Irish Midlands Ancestry revealed that Ellen and all of her siblings were baptized in the parish of Kilcormac, in the western part of County Offaly (formerly Kings County). Ellen was only 5 years old when her family left Ireland. Her oldest sister, Catherine, was 16 and her youngest sister, Anne, was only 1 year old. So, thanks to the baptismal records, we know that the Powers family was in or around Kilcormac from 1831 into 1846. Then we have the ship manifest placing them in New York in 1847. That leaves only a little over one year of uncertainty, extending from July 1846 (when Anne was baptized) to September 1847. It would have been a hectic and difficult year. The family would have made the decision to leave Ireland (or else have had it made for them by their landlord or some agency). They would have needed to gather the resources to pay for their trip (or the landlord or some other agency did that for them). They would have had to make their way over land to a port city (probably Cork). Records for the Famine years, even when they have managed to survive, can be especially cryptic. So we may never know the details of Ellen's last year in Ireland. But for one possible scenario, see the next post in this blog.