Evolving Genealogy Strategies and Successes

It has been frustrating tracing the Cushing family back beyond what we already know. In all fairness, we began by knowing a lot, since one of my uncles recorded the family genealogy in about 1931 in a  document untitled "Family History (Exclusive of Darwin's Age of Monkey)". My parents, my sister, and some cousins have travelled to the town and visited the church where many of Cussen family was baptized and where Dennis Cussen and Katherine Casey were married. One of the great milestones in American genealogy research is locating a family prior to emigration, and with this family we were fortunately handed that information before beginning our research.

Now, though, finding more information about the Cussen and Casey families is very difficult. There are very few records from the early 1800s and earlier. It could be that Dennis' father was a Francis Cushen who worked land in the Galbally area, but I haven't spent much time pursuing this because tithe applotment books do not list family members. Church records are rare before about 1825, so I've been unable to research there, either.

My principal strategy for extending the family backwards has been to publicly publish what I know about the family and to seek out genealogists in other branches of the family through which more information may have been preserved. While this has not extended my tree back in time, it has been very productive. Dennis and Catherine had about thirteen children. At the time I began my research, we knew descendants of only one other branch of the family. Of the remaining eleven children, three disappeared (appeared in only one record at some point) and one died unmarried at the age of 22. So that left seven branches of the family, perhaps some who had stayed in Wisconsin, to search for. Through the Internet, especially through message boards like Rootsweb and Genforum, I was able to contact four more branches. It turns out that one of the remaining branches left no children, hence no descendant genealogists, and the remaining two were women, for whom tracing marriages and name changes and moves can be very difficult. I was finally able to track the last two branches about two years ago. During all of this, we were able to share our respective genealogies and learn about the spread of the family. A disappointment for me, though, was that there was no documentation about our family prior to our Age of Monkey.

A second strategy I attempted was a search for Caseys. It turns out that a Casey family lived on the farm adjacent to the Cussen/Cushing family in Fort Winnebago in about 1850. I researched this Casey family and found that they had emigrated from Ireland at about the same time as the Cushings, that there was another closely related Casey family that also lived, albeit briefly, in Fort Winnebago, and that the Casey fathers, Patrick and James, were both just a few years older than our Katherine Casey Cussen. I thought there was a good chance these three were siblings. In the years since, however, I have found no evidence of a family connection. Meanwhile, with the explosion of paid membership-based genealogy services, especially ancestry.com, genealogy research has gone largely behind walls and I have made no contacts with the Casey family that I researched in and from Fort Winnebago.

Now, a new strategy has emerged: DNA. I've been researching DNA genealogy for about a year and a half, now, with disappointingly little to show for it. Perhaps that's too overstated. I feel that given the enormous amount of work I've put into DNA research, I should have more to show for it. But I see that I actually have made significant progress in several branches of the tree.

Yesterday, I was able to connect a DNA match back to one of the Fort Winnebago Casey families, one of my most important goals in my DNA genealogy research! The amount of shared DNA makes is very likely that Patrick Casey was indeed a brother to Katherine Casey Cussen. I was more confident of a close relationship between the two Casey men, since they were living together at one time, so James Casey is probably also a sibling. This gives me enormous incentive to start searching through online baptismal records at the National Library of Ireland to locate these Casey families. The kids were mostly born in Ireland in the late 1820s through early 1840s, and baptismal records were widely available.

Mark Mathias Connell 1876 - 1957

   This is the 10th and last post following the family of George and Johanna Cussen Connell of Lodi, Wisconsin.
   Mark Connell, youngest of George and Johanna Cussen/Cushing Connell, was born in Lodi, Wisconsin in 1876. His father died just one year later. I think that Mark was living with his mother in Lodi then Portage until the mid 1890s, but I can't definitively locate him between 1880 and 1910. In 1910 I think he has just arrived in Seattle, since his occupation is listed as farmer, but he's living in a hotel in the city. By 1917, he was living in Burke, an unincorporated location that I cannot find on any map, where he runs a store. He married Loretta Hanson there that year. There was a post office there from 1907 to 1925, of which Mark was the postmaster in 1918. By 1920, they had moved to Eastside, Oregon (near Coos Bay) where Mark was a grocer. By 1930, Loretta and Mark were living in Pomona California, 50 miles east of Los Angeles, where they were running a pool hall and cigar store, which they did for many years. Mark passed away in 1957.  Loretta Connell Walters, remarried, passed away in 1990.  Mark and Loretta had no children.

Joanna Olive Connell 1866 - 1924

My eighth post in a series on the descendants of Johanna Cussen and George Connell of Lodi, Wisconsin.

Joanna was born in Lodi in 1866. She, too, headed to Chicago.  In about 1897, she married Edward H Kerrigan, son of Irish immigrants.  Their only child, Edward N, was born in 1901 in Chicago.  I'm not sure how specialized Edward's (dad's) work skills were.  In 1910, he is a "foreman in a plumbing supply house"; in 1920 a brass worker in a manufacturing plant. Joanna was a dress maker working out of the house in 1920, and they had bought a home on Gladys avenue, not far from where United Center is now. Joanna passed away in 1924 and is buried at Mt. Carmel Cemetery. Their son married Helen (don't know her last name) in about 1926. Edward H (aka Dad) passed away 1928 and is also buried at Mt. Carmel.

In 1930 Edward and Helen lived in Detroit, where he was an "ice machine" salesman, which is probably those new iceboxes. By 1940 he is selling refrigerators and they have bought a house. They had no children.  They probably retired many years later to Florida.  Helen died in 1987 and Edward in 1988.  They are buried in Largo, Florida.

George and Johanna Cussen Connell in Lodi, Wisconsin ca. 1870

I sat down for a few hours to gather more information on the children of Johanna Cussen Connell.  Four days later, I'm posting some articles about these families.  As usual, dates and places only tell me where they lived. If you are related to any of these families and can share stories or more information, please contact me (find my e-mail in my "profile" link) or post a comment.


Johanna Cussen was born in Galbally, Ireland in 1836, travelling with her family to Newfoundland, Boston, and Fort Winnebago by about 1848. In about 1858 she married George Connell/O'Connell, I believe a recent immigrant from New Brunswick, Canada, and they settled in Lodi, about 25 miles south of Fort Winnebago. They were farmers. From 1860 to 1876 they had thirteen children in Lodi.  George died in 1877, leaving Johanna with 11 children between the ages of 1 and 18. Information is sparse, but I assume that life was difficult. Usually, someone stays with the elderly parent and works the farm, but by 1895 Johanna had moved to Portage, presumably having sold the farm, where she remained until her death in 1923. She is buried in the Catholic cemetery there with her husband, George, the three kids who died as children (Frances, age 2, William, age 1 month, Daniel, age 14), Mary, the lone daughter who remained in Lodi as an in-home servant and nurse her entire life, and Nellie, the only child to be returned to Lodi for burial.

I initially thought this family name was O'Connell.  Indeed, I stumbled across Johanna on FindAGrave.com, where volunteers post inventories of cemeteries, usually with photographs. Johanna Cushing O'Connell's grave marker is shown there, in St. Patrick's cemetery in Lodi, Wisconsin, as are five other members of the O'Connell family.  Having just extensively searched for George and Johanna's descendants, however, I now know that the cemetery is the only place where the name O'Connell was used. All appearances in the census, newspapers, birth, marriage and death records, etc., use the name Connell. The use of O'Connell in the cemetery is a mystery to me. I would suspect that a well-meaning descendant just got it wrong when they replaced headstones, but the stone for George appears to be an original (at least it looks very old), and it does say O'Connell.

I'll trace their descendants in the following posts.