In January 2001, early on in the building of The Family Tree, Bill and I had taken the three-hour drive up to Pottsville to look around for ancestral connections--clippings from the Pottsville Republican, houses relatives had lived in, and gravestones in some of the many cemeteries around Pottsville. (Bill has immortalized this trip on his web site.) In September, 12 days after the World Trade Center was destroyed, we decided we needed to surgically detach ourselves from MSNBC and get out of the house, so we again went to Pottsville. This time, we were armed with considerably more information to hopefully better target our search. We began with a quick stop at the Pottsville Free Public Library to see if we could find obituaries for some relatives for whom we now have dates of death, and were successful in finding them for A quick trip to the library got us obituaries for Boley Kulikosky (or Boleslaus Kulikauckas, as he was known when he arrived from Lithuania, and the father of Bill's grandfather Anthony Kull), and two more distant relatives on the Walsh side, St. Clair was in fact our next destination, since quite a few of Bill's relatives had lived there, and we were hoping to find evidence of some of them in the St. Mary's Cemetery (St. Mary's being the "Irish" Roman Catholic church in St. Clair in the 1800s). I had written to St. Mary's and they had generously hunted through their parish records to find listings for Heenans or Walshes, but unfortunately the church's burial records have not survived, so we were going to have to wander through the cemetery to see who we could find. But first, we had to find the cemetery.
Let me take a break here for a moment to say.... Why is it so dang hard to find cemeteries?!??! I spent hours before we left trying to find maps, lists, directions, anything, for most of these cemeteries in Schuylkill Co., but the data was sparse, and we spent an inordinate time driving around just looking for spots where there might be cemeteries. (What? Ask someone where the cemeteries are? Pick up the phone? Remember, you're dealing with someone who can't hardly call a store to ask if they have a book in stock.) To continue....
We went to Arnot's Addition, a little slip of land across the highway from St. Clair, where we had seen a cemetery on a hill as we drove around in January, and even though when we got there this time it said St. Boniface's Cemetery, we decided to pull in anyway. There was an old low stone wall down the middle of the cemetery, and as we wandered, we discovered the names were predominantly Irish on one side, and more German/Protestant on the other side. So we stuck to the Irish side and just started looking for any stones with Walsh, Heenan, Ryan, or Higgins on them.
By the time we covered the cemetery (and finished lamenting all the overturned and rubbed smooth stones, wondering if an ancestor was lost beneath), we knew we had only about another hour or so of daylight, so we decided to drive the 10 miles to Mahanoy City to just see if we could scope out the St. Canicus cemetery, with the plan of coming back on Sunday morning. As we got close to Mahanoy, we were met with a slew of cemeteries, none of which seemed to have many Irish names on the gravestones we would read as we drove past. We rounded a corner to head down the hill to Mahanoy and saw a driveway to one more cemetery, and I decided to swerve in there. Irish, Irish everywhere! (It was only when we left that we saw the tiny sign on a hidden driveway saying "St. Canicus." Gee, thanks!)
With that unexpected success story, we drove down into Mahanoy City to look around, then drove to Shenandoah, arriving there at dusk. After our usual bout of indecision, we decided to go back to Pottsville, pick up a pizza, and spend the evening sitting in the hotel room watching the Miss America pageant. (Do we know how to have fun or what?)
We got up relatively early (for us) on Sunday morning, and after eating at the hotel's breakfast buffet, we set off for St. Clair again, since I had become convinced that we still hadn't actually found the real St. Mary's Cemetery. We lurked around the church waiting for mass to end, though I did have the strength to ask a teenaged boy who had briefly come out of the church where the other cemeteries in St. Clair were (as it turns out, I had earlier started down the road that would lead to them, but had chickened out and turned back). We went up there, but no Irish cemeteries appeared to be there, so we went back to the church, where by this time mass had ended, and talked for a time with Father Gallagher, who had been the one to reply to my request for information a few weeks back. He confirmed that we had been at the St. Mary's cemetery the previous day, so we decided that our time in St. Clair was finished. We went back to Pottsville, to the St. Patrick's #3 cemetery (where in January we had found Bill's grandfather Mickey) to see if this time, with no snow on the ground, we could find Old Jim and his wife Margaret Bergan Walsh. The best we could do was a huge stone marked simply Walsh that we've now decided is them (until we can get someone to give us a map of the dang cemetery, since we have the plot locations!).
We drove through the Irish Cemetery (Assumption BVM), but it was quite large and I didn't have much hard data to tie us to anyone who might be there, and besides, we had already been more successful than we'd expected we'd be, so we headed down the road to Gilberton, ate at the McDonald's at Schuylkill Mall, and drove home. And I'm sure we'll do it again before too long.
Send JD a Message
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Our first find was 
But the best Heenan find in the St. Mary's cemetery was one that so easily could have been overlooked. At the very bottom of the hill I saw a white stone, with letters all but weathered away, but somehow the words "
Back up the hill (and this is quite a hill), we found a very interesting group of stones. There were 
Next to Francis and Helen was a stone with two names: William Higgins (Died Feb. 28 1880, aged 45 years) and Margaret Higgins (Born Kilkenny Ireland Died Oct. 6 1891 aged 82 years). We know that Francis and Estella's mother was Margaret Higgins Ryan, so it's a good bet that these Higgins are relations, but how, exactly? Having done some further research, my current thinking (subject to change!) is that the Margaret Higgins buried here is Francis and Estella's grandmother, and the William Higgins is her son and Margaret Higgins Ryan's brother. I've found on the 1870 Schuylkill Co. census a Margaret Higgins who's the correct age, living in East Norwegian, married to a Patrick Higgins and with a son William and a daughter Margaret, who are also the correct ages. I've requested a search of the Republican for the elder Margaret Higgins's obituary, which hopefully will shed some light. There were other Higgins stones not too far away, but no one at this point that I can conclusively (or even inconclusively!) tie to "our" Higgins clan.
We took a slow drive through the cemetery to see if any familiar names popped up--there were tons of Ryans (so many that I didn't bother to write them down), along with the Burkes and Brennans that were clearly the most popular names in Schuylkill, and a Walsh or two, but no big finds. I decided to stop the car and walk around a bit, and happened on a grave for 
I knew that 
It was a quite warm day, so we were dove back into the air-conditioned car, deciding to head to Shenandoah to look for the St. George Cemetery and Bolick and Elizabeth Kulikosky before going home. Again, we got to town with no idea where the cemeteries were, although I read something about St. George's Cemetery actually being in Shenandoah Heights. Driving up a huge hill, and letting my Spidey Sense guide us, I found Cemetery Central in Shenandoah--the Jewish Cemetery, the German Cemetery, the Irish Cemetery (more to come), and finally St. George's, final resting place of Shenandoah's Lithuanian population. Again, we split up, and again Bill made the find, discovering the gravestone of his great-grandparents toward the upper back of the cemetery.
