First, I would like to apologize for the long break between blog postings. Sometimes life gets in the way of a person’s hobbies and passions.
Part 3 is the last blog posting of a short series on how to get started researching your Cosgrove family line. Part 3 is actually broken up into two sections: A and B. As stated previously, the Cosgrove surname is an uncommon last name, which can present significant challenges in researching your family line as I found out myself when I started my genealogy research. It wasn’t too long into my research journey that I encountered a formidable brick wall. After the first year of research, I had to come to terms with the possibility that I may never be able to break through the brick wall. However, I took a step back from my existing findings and recognized that I needed to expand my research efforts beyond the methods I had been using. This blog post summarizes some of the steps I took to break through my brick wall. Hopefully some of you can use some of my techniques to do the same for your brick walls.
Introduction to My Brick Wall
My surname line was the one family branch that piqued my interest the most so it was a natural place to start my genealogy research. I had the name of my paternal great-grandfather (Roy Cosgrove) and his residency thanks to the 1920 Federal Census record. By sheer luck, a mistake occurred with the census collection in which my paternal great-grandfather was recorded twice in the census. One entry had him living with his wife and daughter while a second entry had him still living with his parents and sisters. After a couple of weeks of fairly routine research, I was able to find and link sufficient evidence to my great-grandfather, his parents, and his siblings to substantiate that the families in the two census entries were in fact all members of the same family unit.
However, I ran into a significant roadblock regarding Roy’s father (my 2nd great grandfather), John Patrick Cosgrove. The road block pertained to his actual place of birth/origins. While I know beyond a doubt that John Patrick existed, I could not confirm his place of birth. The earliest known record I had for John Patrick was his 1897 marriage record. Since Massachusetts required grooms and brides to provide information on their places of birth, ages, and their parents’ names for their marriage records, I thought it would be a fairly simple task to find records that documented John Patrick’s birth in the Boston area. Bottom line, after a year of extensive searching, I could not find ANY records that I could positively link to John Patrick Cosgrove prior to his 1897 marriage record.
To complicate matters, I found discrepancies pertaining to John Patrick’s actual place of birth. While Charlestown (MA) was listed on his marriage record and death certificate as his place of birth, several of his own children’s birth records had Watertown (MA) listed as John’s place of birth (a couple more of his children’s vital records listed Charlestown as his place of birth). For those not familiar with the geography of the Boston area, Charlestown lies on the eastern side of Boston while Watertown lies to the west of the city. An exhaustive search of each town’s record collections as well as for Boston proper itself did not yield any results.
While I didn’t find any records for a John Patrick Cosgrove, I found Watertown records for people who shared John Patrick’s parents’ names (John Cosgrove and Theresa Dunn/e). The John Cosgrove and Theresa (Dunn) Cosgrove were adults who had lived in the town in the late 1880s when John Patrick would have been a teenager. I also found two prospective people who could have been John Patrick’s siblings. The problem I had was that while all of this information was interesting, it was largely circumstantial in nature. I did not find enough conclusive evidence to confidently state that these people were directly related to my 2nd great grandfather. Several more months of research yielded little useable information. My research was complicated by the fact that many men and boys with the last name Cosgrove who lived in the Boston area in the 1870s-1890s had the first name John as well. I found it next to impossible to distinguish them from one another. It felt like the brick wall grew taller and thicker with each passing day.
Expanding My Research Efforts
The brick wall only served to remind me that I was still a novice when it came to genealogy research. While I was happy that I discovered as much information I had about my Cosgrove line up to this point, my lack of research skills and knowledge of genealogy were apparent with the brick wall. In order to improve upon both, I began reading blogs and books about genealogy with emphasis on Irish genealogy. While insightful, I didn’t feel like the information contained in the blogs and books pertained to the specific challenges associated with my brick wall. Many of the books and blogs started with the premise that a researcher knew which specific family member(s) immigrated from Ireland to the US even if the exact location of origin in Ireland may not be known. Since I didn’t know this critical piece of information, I felt even more discouraged and lost. I assessed that this and other recommendations were useless at the stage where I was in my research because I was still trying to confirm my Cosgrove ancestors who were born in the US let alone trying to figure out which ancestors were born in Ireland. I decided I needed to chart my own path in order to break down my brick wall. The following is a summary of tips on the different steps and factors I had to consider that eventually contributed to achieving my genealogical goals. While there were other steps and considerations I made along the way, the following 8 tips were the most significant in helping me break down my brick wall:
Tip #1. Develop a hypothesis or a theory to help formulate more specific research questions.
I realized I needed to focus my research efforts. I was all over the place in my research and none of it was helping me move forward. Thus, I decided to work off of a theory, whether it was right or wrong, as a way to focus my research efforts. If I was right, then that would be terrific! If I was wrong in my theory, I could at least cross off a possibility as being invalid…..progress nonetheless. My working theory was that John Patrick Cosgrove was indeed born in Massachusetts and his parents were indeed John Cosgrove and Theresa Dunn. I theorized that the female and male who also had lived in Watertown whose parents were also named John Cosgrove and Theresa Dunn were John Patrick’s siblings. Instead of working with one person, I was now working with five people who could potentially be from the same family unit.
Tip #2. Expand your geographical area of your search.
Initially, I focused my research efforts in Massachusetts in hopes of confirming the identities of John Patrick’s parents, John and Theresa. Without realizing it, I was limiting my search options, which in term were not yielding any conclusive results. I decided to expand my research regionally to New England and New York. Eventually, I looked for a married couple who shared their names across the United States and Ireland. I came across an 1871 marriage index from Limerick City that listed ten people’s names: five males and five females in random order (obviously there were five married couples but the index did not link the brides with the grooms). Two names were on the record that were of interest to me: John Cosgrove and Teresa Dunne. This was the only marriage record I could find ANYWHERE that could possibly confirm Patrick’s parents marriage. I made a note to obtain an actual copy of the record to see if it listed the John and the Teresa as husband and wife. This was the only record I could locate in the time frame which I thought was most logical for John Patrick’s parents marriage.
Tip #3. Use smaller genealogy websites to supplement research conducted on major sites.
I felt that I had exhausted my research of the various records collections maintained on major genealogical websites such as Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org. I needed to find different records collections so I searched not only for different genealogy research sites, but I also looked for different types of genealogy sites in general. I found one called Family Tree Circles. It’s a crowd source site where researchers can ask other forum members questions about their research problems. I posted a summary of my brick wall and some of the evidence I had collected to include names and locations. A very kind person took the time to respond with a significant amount of records from across the US that contained names similar to those that I was researching in my Cosgrove family line. While I was able to dismiss the vast majority of them due to the years and locations listed in the records, several records did catch my immediate attention. The person located several records for an adult male and adult female who lived in the Boston area whose parents’ names were John Cosgrove and Theresa Dunn. It didn’t take much effort to confirm that the two adults were siblings. I found a social security record for the sister and not only were the names of the parents listed on the record, but her place and date of birth were too……the place of birth was Limerick. I decided to add them to the Cosgrove family unit I was researching (which now included a total of 7 people).
Section B will discuss Tips #4-#8.
Cosgrove Genealogy 