Life’s Curveballs

I had looked at genealogy as a way of knowing who I am but I’m not so sure that is an accurate description now. I’ve been working on my ancestors for well over 10 years now and have really only traced a couple lines. I knew the names of my great grandparents on my father’s side but little else. My great grandfather’s name was William G Worrilow and he married a lady named Mary Slevin. No one in my family knew anything about Mary such as her parent’s names or much of anything about her. Two weeks ago, I set out to find more information on her.

Try as I might, it was very tough going at first. I searched every database that I could find but without a birth date and date of death, it would be next to impossible. My first break through was an old letter that I had found that had been sent to one of my distance cousins who was writing a book about the Worrilow family. She had sent me a copy of the letter but the script was so hard to read I just filed it away. On top of the hard to read script where the lines flowed into one another, it was a poor copy too. I spend one complete day deciphering the text and typing it so I could read it from beginning to end, and it contained a wealth of information.

After reading it and rereading it, I now had a starting point. I knew a lot more about the Slevin’s and now knew that they owned several homes and their locations. They lived in Chester Pennsylvania in the mid 1800’s and from piecing information from old city directories; I was able to confirm where the families lived. Now with somewhat of a time line I finally found two key census records from 1860 and 1880 placing each of the people with each other in the same locations. My greatest breakthrough came when I found two obituaries, which confirmed all of the other information. Mary Slevin’s parents were Lawrence and Ellen Slevin. They emigrated from Ireland, owned and operated a grocery store, and had 8 children. I was overjoyed to say the least because I now knew another set of 2nd great grandparents. I then wanted to know everything I could about them and started searching through old newspaper articles using NewpaperARCHIVE.com. I then found something that disturbed me and stopped me in my tracks. The excitement of finding my 2nd great grandparents had faded and my focus switched to another family member.

My Father

I thought that I knew everything there was to know about him but while searching for records for the Slevin’s I came across another newspaper article. You see, my grand father’s name was Lawrence L Worrilow and there are four of us now that bear the same name. We were the first Worrilow’s with the name Lawrence and now I know where the name came from, my 2nd great grandfather Lawrence Slevin.

Searching through the newspaper archives is not an easy task because many of the words in those old newspapers are faded so the letter W may appear in searches as AV or YV. So when search using combined search words like Lawrence Slevin Worrilow and many other combinations I found a record of my father’s first wife. I had heard rumors of my father being married before but there was nothing that was concrete, for he never spoke of it.

After my wife and I married, we had to live with my parents for a short time until we could find and afford an apartment. My wife worked in the evening and was home with my mother all day, women will talk to each other unlike a mother to son, and she found out things that I never knew. My wife may have told me about some things they talked about but my memory is such that either it didn’t register at the time or my focus was elsewhere.

The disturbing thing about finding this article of the death of my father’s first wife is that it was as if he had hit the delete key on her life. He obviously loved this woman at one time, but destroyed all memory of her. My mother told my wife that my father destroyed all of her pictures and wanted my mother to destroy photos of her past friends also. After my wife and I talked about this, it now explains why I found old photographs in a plastic bag in the basement rafters while cleaning out my father’s old house, photographs of my mother’s friends. I guess she hid them down there.

For some reason all of this doesn’t sit well with me, and it gets worse. I shot off an email to my Aunt, my father’s sister-in-law, and she told me that she thought that my father’s first wife was from England and died during childbirth.

The thought of someone from a foreign land being buried here and then completely forgotten is very disturbing to me. If you have read my other post, you know that I’ve been searching old cemeteries and photographing tombstones for people in search of lost ancestors. Is someone looking for Eleanor May Welsh Worrilow? The thought disturbs me. I find that I didn’t know my father as well as I once thought.