I Just Found another Ancestor on the Old Sod

I have been sitting at home for the past couple of weeks recovering from a surgical procedure and getting a little stir crazy.  So I decided to start going through all of my old papers and either file them or throw them out (God forbid). I was already sitting, and I started reading through boxes of birth, death, marriage and census records trying to figure out how to organize them.  Organization is the bane of my existence.  As always happens, I started reading papers and came across ancestors that I had put aside before, and starting thinking about other ways to find more about them.  This is why I can never get organized.

I was looking at a record for Edward Bergin and his wife Mary Malone.  They are my great great grandparents, born in County Laois, Ireland.  There they had five children, 3 boys and 2 girls.  The thing that I focused on was Edward's parents: Timothy Bergin and Margaret Kavanagh.  So I decided to search Timothy Bergin on ancestry.com and I used a birth year of about 1820.  Well, lo and behold, I found a baptismal record for Dan Bergin, dated 9 Jan 1846.  The record lists his parents as Tim Bergin and Margaret Kavanagh, it also lists sponsors (Godparents) as Pierce Dowling and Mary Costello.  It appears that the place is Clonlahy (I think).

This record is 173 years old, handwritten in a ledger book and you can read it like it was written yesterday.  The place of baptism is listed as Borris-in-Ossory, Laois, Ireland and the Diocese is Ossory.  This is the same place that I found the record for the baptism of Edward, as well as, his marriage to Margaret Kavanagh.  I also found baptismal records for all five of their children in the same place.  So, I am confident that Dan is the younger brother of Edward (my 2X great grandfather).  If I'm wrong, I can always blame it on lingering effects of anesthesia, so this is a win-win.

The Peppers

As you may or may not remember, my great great grandmother was Anne Pepper.  According to her Death Certificate, she was born on 15 Nov 1848 to Patrick Pepper and Marcella in New York City, NY.  Ann aged quickly, in the 1850 Federal Census she is listed as 10 years old, living in South Cass Twp, Schuylkill County, Pa with her parents and at least 5 siblings.  This makes more sense because her eldest daughter, Susan, is born in 1863.  But that doesn't really matter for our purposes today, because today I am going to talk about her family a little bit.

So I was looking on ancestry.com and checking on my DNA matches, when I saw a new match.  It is for John E Pepper, (there is a second match further down my list of 4th - 6th cousins with the name T. P., both are managed by the same person.  I am guessing that T. P.'s surname is also Pepper (I was a detective for awhile you know).  This match also says that there is a common ancestor - Patrick Pepper and Marcella M Reilly (Anne Pepper's parents).

I started hunting around on ancestry.com and Newspapers.com (which has several titles from Pottsville, including the Pottsville Republican). I learned from this that Anne Pepper was not an only child - not by a long shot. She had nine siblings - eight brothers and one sister.  The best I can figure is that she had brothers named Francis, Thomas, Michael, John, James, William, Charles and Ainges.  She also had a sister named Mary, who married a man named Hugh Tye, and they had seven children: six boys and one girl, but I am getting ahead of myself.

Apparently the Peppers were a pretty prominent family in Schuylkill County, Thomas Pepper was a businessman, a distiller in Ashland.  Thomas also held the office of County Treasurer, a post he held from 1891 to 1894.  He also was a member of the Ashland town Council for two terms and a director of the Citizens National Bank.  He was married to Elizabeth McDonald and had five children: one daughter, Hannah and fours sons: Frank, John, George and Thomas.

I found an ad for the distillery on Google:

I kinda remember reading that the business was originally a soda bottling company and changed over to a distillery later.  This ad may be after he turned over the business to his sons.  I thought this ad was a great find.

Before I stop for the night, I wanted to mention one other sibling of Anne's, and that is her brother Ainges.  I have never heard that name before and I assume it is Irish, but I have no idea.  The other thing about him is that in 1922 he lived in Scranton, PA.  I know this from a newspaper article that says he was struck by a car, and suffered a compound fracture of the left leg and other minor injuries, according to the article.  The article also says he was an aged man, more specifically 62 (younger than me and I'm not aged) and he lived on North Hyde Park Ave. The worst part is that he was struck by the car on 28 Mar 1922, and I found his death certificate indicating that he died 3 Apr 1922 and the cause is listed as a fracture of left tibia (automobile accident).

When I find some more about her family, I will let you know.  But I do plan on doing this more often.