Old School Genealogy - Finding the McCarthy Clan

Back in 1994-1995, my paternal grandfather John "Jack" Rothrock Philipps revealed to me that his mother had him as a single parent in 1922. Great Grandmother Charlotte told him on her deathbed that his biological father was named Gilbert McCarthy, a married traveling salesman from Boston. She'd met him working as a maid in a residence hotel in Manhattan. She thought he was about 15 years her senior and knew that he had a brother named John who was an attorney. But that was all she knew to tell my grandfather. Pre-internet, he'd been unable to find out anything more about his biological father.

McCarthy Coat of Arms & Motto: Strong, Courageous and Swift

At that time, our family had one basic desktop computer that we all shared in our finished basement. I'd convinced my mother to get me a genealogy software program for it so I could start building a family tree. I'd also convinced my parents to get AOL dial-up service after playing with it at my best friend's house. The internet was like the Wild West back then - websites and chatrooms were rudimentary. Very few genealogical records were available online at that point. I spent about a year or so scouring the internet for genealogy message boards, reaching out to every McCarthy from Massachusetts that I could find.

Eventually, one woman wrote me back (I'm embarrassed to say I don't remember her full name) and told me that while she did not recognize a Gilbert or John McCarthy in her tree, she lived not far from Boston and often went to the state archives to pull records for her own tree and that she would be happy to try to find my Gilbert. A short while later, she emailed me back and said she thought she had found them. Because my great grandmother was born in 1894, we had guessed that Gilbert was born around 1880. She looked through all birth records between 1850 and 1910 for a Gilbert McCarthy. Amazingly, there was only one - Gilbert Joseph McCarthy, born October 11, 1875 in Orange Massachusetts. 

Orange as it would have looked in Gilbert's youth, map from 1883

Gilbert was listed as the son of Michael F. McCarthy (1830-1912) and Rosamond "Rosanna" Mary Monaghan (1844-1908). Michael and Rosanna were both born in England to Irish parents and emigrated to the US in the late 1850s or early 1860s. They met and married in Fitchburg, Massachusetts on October 2, 1864. Michael initially worked in mills around the state to support their growing family. Later, he became an iron molder. Gilbert was the fourth of nine children. Their oldest son John Francis McCarthy (1873-?) was only two years older than Gilbert and census records listed him as an attorney. So far there were two pieces of my great-grandmother's story that aligned with the paper trail.

The path of the McCarthy family around Massachusetts

Then my research helper floored me with another detail - she'd found Gilbert's death record as well. He had died on August 27, 1938, when my grandfather was just shy of 16. The cause of death was listed as tuberculosis and his last address was listed as Tewksbury Hospital (which now houses the country's first public health museum). His occupation on the death certificate was salesman and he had a wife named Marion. Every piece of the story matched perfectly. I thanked Ms. McCarthy and told my grandparents I wanted to meet with them in person to tell them something.

I believe this would have been around the spring of 1997 - we did not yet know that Grandpa had lung cancer at this point. He had not had the knee surgery that would reveal the cancer and my grandparents were still living independently in their house at 457 Knoll Road. I was in my first year of college so I drove myself to their house and we sat in the living room in front of the big bay window. I quickly relayed what our Massachusetts research angel had found. 

My grandparents' house on Knoll Road

My grandfather seemed relieved. "So he was already dead when we tried to find him? That makes me feel better about not finding him then. I'm glad to know a little more about him. I still wonder if he knew I existed though." Then he thanked me for giving him some answers. For those of you who didn't know my grandfather - a demanding, stoic man - this was a rarity, acknowledgment for a job well done. Later that year around July, we learned that Grandpa had a slow-growing lung tumor. We were told he had at most two years left, to get his affairs in order, maybe take a family trip... None of that happened though. He passed away about two months later on September 23, 1997. 

In the twenty-plus years since then, I have continued to research Gilbert and his family, never knowing for certain that he definitely was my great grandfather. When I was in grad school in CT in the early 2000s, I decided to take a weekend road trip to MA. I drove around Orange and ate dinner there. Then I visited Tewksbury Hospital, where a very kind docent pulled up Gilbert's hospital records (he was only there 2 weeks before he died) and took me out to the cemetery where we found his marker (a non-descript series of letters and numbers on a stake). She assured me that it was actually unusual for the graves to have a marker at all since the cemetery was not maintained for many years. Somewhere I have a picture of the marker that I took that day with a disposable camera.

As far as I can tell, Gilbert only had one other child than my grandfather - a daughter named Mildred, who was born prematurely in 1904 and died a few months later. The circumstances around her birth and death are also a bit mysterious - her mother is listed as two different people on the birth (Ella F. Moore) and death (Mary O'Brien) certificates just 4 months apart. I suspect her real mother was listed on the birth certificate but since she was young and not married to Gilbert, another name was used for the death certificate to hide the illegitimacy. 

My grandfather's older half-sister, Mildred McCarthy

I've also tracked the descendants of Gilbert's siblings in the hopes that one day we would have genetic confirmation of our link to the family. I sent my spit to 23andMe in 2013 and then paid to have my father's DNA analyzed there too. I uploaded our DNA to GEDmatch and waited patiently for a McCarthy descendant to match. Finally, about a year ago, we matched to a woman who is the great-granddaughter of Michael Leo McCarthy (1880-1961) - one of Gilbert's younger brothers. According to the tree I'd worked out, that makes her my father's second cousin 1 time removed (2C1R) and my third cousin (3C). The amount of DNA my father shares with her is within the normal guidelines of the number of centimorgans expected for a 2C1R. So yes, Gilbert Joseph McCarthy was definitely my grandfather's biological father.

More recently, I enjoyed finding articles on Newspapers.com from the turn of the last century when my great grandfather Gilbert was a young man about town in Boston. He was apparently an accomplished actor and singer on the amateur circuit, along with a couple of his brothers. 

Gilbert and brothers James and John were the leads in a play in June 1900.

The closest thing to a picture I've found of Gilbert!

So in the end, my grandfather was the son of two children of immigrants - English/Irish folks who came to the US in the mid to late 1800s looking for a better life. Grandpa always told me his mother's family was from the Cork area of Ireland and historical records show that Gilbert's father was from Cork. My DNA results do confirm ancestry from that region, as well as the Galway and Dublin areas. Before COVID hit, Rich and I were planning to take Griffin on a one week tour of southern Ireland to see all the places our ancestors had lived. Once we can be vaccinated, we will schedule the trip again. After all, we are...

Strong, Courageous and Swift