The Jersey Journal and my Sterling relatives

So, in my last post about Helen Keogh, I told you about how I found out that she married and had children.  Well, since that post, I have found out a whole bunch of stuff.  Enough to keep me posting for awhile, which is good because I haven't posted anything for over a month.

So I went to the NJ State Archives and I found a marriage license for Helen Keogh and William Willard. They were married on 16 Sep 1930 at 4:00 PM. This took place at St. Patricks Church  at 492 Bramhall Ave, Jersey City, and the witnesses were William Gilane and Leona Pallander, who we will learn more about in my next post.  The Certificate of Marriage also lists Helen's parents as Margaret Sterling and Thomas Keogh, her age as 30, and her address as 161 Carteret Ave.  William is 28 years old, employed as a clerk and his parents are listed as William Willard and Carrie Tyler. William lives at 125 Audubon Ave, both in Jersey City.  You can really learn alot from a Certificate of Marriage.

My next stop was the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Newark website to see if Helen is buried in one of their cemeteries, with everybody else.  I found that she was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington on 27 Aug 1964. Then I decided to look for William, her husband, and found his burial in the same plot on 8 May 1965.

With this information in hand, I checked genealogybank.com, which is a collection of digital newspapers, that I have used in the past.  I searched their database, narrowing the search to 1961 through 1965, and Jersey City.  I found this item first:

This is the obit for William Willard living on Seventh St in Secaucus, NJ.  You can see that it mentions his wife Helen Willard, who passed away the year before, and two children: Joan Zaremba, who's death sent me down this road, and a son: William Willard.  There are also two grandchildren, who are not named, so I don't know if they are Zarembas or Willards.

The next article I found was this one:

Yes, this is Helen's obit from the previous year.  This gives basically the same information, but includes "interment Holy Cross Cemetery, North Arlington.  So I learned that there are at least two grandchildren here, that I may have to try to find.

I checked Helen's granddaughter, Joan Zaremba in the search engine, and I came across this article, which threw me for a loop:

WHAT? Friedenenberger - where did this come from?  After reading this one a couple of times, I realized who this was.  If you read it closely, it says Carrie (nee Tyler).  Remember the Certificate of Marriage for Helen and William?  It gives William's mother's maiden name as Carrie Tyler.  So this is William Willard's mother, who must have remarried to Frank Friedenberger.  I don't know what happened to William's father.  He either passed away or they divorced, either way Carrie remarried.

So I learned alot from these articles and the Certificate of Marriage, and I've added some new names to my family tree.  But it all started in Holy Name Cemetery, when I checked to see if there was a headstone for Margaret Keogh, after being told that there probably was not.