Genealogy Research

Today I heard from a member of the Doris family in Missouri. He had seen some things I put on Family Search about the Doris family of Augusta and asked about where I got the information. One of my great grandmothers on my father’s side was Catherine Doris who married Thomas O’Leary. One of their children was my grandmother, Barbadee. The information I had concerned where in Ireland the Doris family came from. I went looking for the source of that information, going to a FOPAB article Uncle Edward wrote, and then also a folder of papers I got that had a xerox copy of Patrick’s 1880 funeral program that stated he was from “Dungamon, Rock County, Tyrone, Ireland” which I think means Dungannon Rock, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

Also in this folder were some very old letters (1925, 100 years ago!) to Barbadee from her brother William Doris O’Leary who was a doctor, priest, and president of Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama. I haven’t even read the letters entirely yet, but one seems to concern Barbadee’s engagement to Papa. That one was in an envelope from St. Charles College in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, which is where William went to seminary. But handwritten in the return address area it says “Author Leary” and gives an address in East Boston, Massachusetts. The other letter does not have an envelope (and the date given on the letter is “Sunday”) and written on the letterhead of Charles Gilmore Kerley, M.D., New York City (signed “Your Buddy”). Reading the letter, he says he had just attended a college football game the day before in New York between Columbia and Williams and that Columbia won 27-3. The internet says that game happened on October 25, 1924. Before he became a priest, he was a doctor, graduating from the Medical College of Georgia in Augusta in 1922, with an internship in Boston. So this was a critical juncture in his life. He must have been working with Dr. Kerley in New York. I found an article that said that William was “associated with” Dr. Kerley for four years. Kerley was a prominent pediatrician in New York and wrote a textbook on pediatrics. In the letter William also writes that it seems like he wastes a lot of time getting through traffic to make housecalls (!). I wonder how many doctors were working in Dr. Kerley’s practice at the time? That name seemed possibly familiar.

I have also done a lot of research on Mom’s family, going back to Alexander Grant, the immigrant from Scotland, and his son, Alexander Grant Jr., the Civil War river boat captain, my great great grandfather. One of Captain Grant’s daughters, Catherine Clemence Grant, married a very wealthy man in Pensacola named Martin H. Sullivan in 1872. They had several children, including Julia Sullivan (who Mom says she may have been named for and I think they met once). In 1901 Julia married a doctor in New York named Myles Tierney. They had a son named Myles Tierney, Jr. I had done research on all of these people when I was big into genealogy a few years ago and came across an interesting story about Myles Jr. marrying a debutante in New York City in 1924 who then quickly gave birth to their son before getting divorced not much later. That debutante was Priscilla Kerley, the daughter of the prominent New York City pediatrician, Charles Gilmore Kerley.

It is interesting that Mom’s second cousin, Myles, married Priscilla while Dad’s uncle was working for Priscilla’s father and writing letters on Dr. Kerley’s stationery to my grandmother 100 years ago, before my mother or father were even born.