The McPherson Line

Annoyingly, the Scotland's People archive at the Register House, isn't open on weekends.  So I haven't been able to do anymore Raulinitis or Kisielius searching for a while.  Instead, I've made a few trips to the Genealogy Centre to use their ancestry.com membership.

The first thing that I did was pursue a lead given to me by the Rolwich's.  Their family lore said that Annie Raulinitis emigrated to the United States.  And I was able to confirm it!  Unfortunately, I couldn't get much farther than that.  More here.

Since I was at the Centre, I decided I'd start looking into my Scottish roots from my mother's side of the family.  The annual gathering of the McPherson Clan is coming up in August, and it would be nice to go with some knowledge of which McPhersons it is that I'm related to.  I started with some very basic information:  my great-grandmother was Margaret McPherson and the family was based in Buffalo, NY for at least a generation before the rest of my family arrived in the United States.

I quickly uncovered hoards of McPhersons in the Buffalo area, and most of them seemed to be named Mary, Joseph, or John.  They were Catholic and they had massive families.  I was confident I was related to most of them, but sorting out who is who is a real nightmare with such common names - turns out I'm related to (at least) five Mary McPhersons.  Two of which were born in the same year!  The other complication is that they were really inconsistent with how they reported names on the censuses.  Also the head-of-household responding to the census taker apparently couldn't keep track of the ages of his all his children!  They're all plus or minus two years from census to census.  This is the tree that I've come up with so far:

The McPherson Lineage

I was conservative in how I connected up the documents to form this tree because it would be really easy to mix in Marys and Josephs of other McPherson families (it's an entirely different game than searching for "Rolwich" or "Kisielius"!).  I'm confident what I've got is accurate.  What was really great is that a couple of in-laws showed up on later census records, which helped to trace back even farther.  Mary J Stanton, for example, shows up on the 1910 census as the mother-in-law of my great-great-grandfather, and her father gets listed with her on 1880 census.  That's my great-great-great-great-grandfather, and he was born almost 200 years ago!

1910 Census:  Mary J Stanton is the mother of my great-great-grandmother Frances.

1880 Census:  William Burke is the father of Mary J Stanton.

I've nearly exhausted the census records because I've gotten back far enough to identify which were the actual immigrants and approximately when they came.  They are John P (born about 1820) and Mary (abt 1826) McPherson, who had two children in Scotland before they came, James F (abt 1852) and Mary (abt 1854).  And Joseph and Mary Stanton, and father William Burke, all came from Ireland.  That was interesting to find because I knew I had some Irish ancestry, just not from this branch.  I found more Burkes in Buffalo too, but I'm uncertain about them because there's a big age discrepancy for William.  I'm pretty sure it's an error on the 1880 census because it says he's only 14 years older than his daughter, but I'm not confident enough to make the connection at this point.  Unless there's two William Burkes who are shoemakers in Buffalo, though, it'll be them.

Now the challenge will be to figure out which towns in Scotland and Ireland they came from.  With that information, I ought to be able to trace them in the Old Parish Records and potentially find some still living here!  Unfortunately, the passenger records that I've seen so far don't give nearly enough information to confirm any of their entry dates or their places of origin.  The one below, for example, could very well be us (names and ages match), but there's just no way to be sure.

SS Glasgow passenger list.  Arrival in NYC, 20 Oct 1853.

I also haven't been able to find any record of them being in New York City yet either, which was almost certainly their port of entry.  The family lore says that somebody from that branch (or maybe the O'Neil branch?) made the journey from NYC to Buffalo by foot.