Vita brevis; genealogia longa
Kelly, Edward grave marker, St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery, Union City, Randolph, Indiana, USA; photograph by Suzanne Stamper-Youmans, 23 Apr 2008. Digital copy privately held by Jean Marie Diaz, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE], Linden, California. 2009.
Little Edward Kelly is buried here with his aunts, uncles, and grandparents, but his family moved to Dayton within a few years after his death, and his parents are buried there in Calvary Cemetery.
Today’s research is mostly not visible in my database, because what I have been doing is trying to make sense of the WEYRICH (WEYRICK, WAYRICH, WIRICK, WEYRAUCH, etc, etc) families in Dayton, Ohio between 1850 and 1930. My preferred method for a quick start on this job is to spend a lot of time on Ancestry with the “add this record…” button, and save the wrangling with TMG until I think I have something worth recording.
Phillip John WEYRICH (b. 17 Feb 1844, m. 20 Dec 1870, d. 10 Jan 1906) is a second great-grandfather of mine. His obituary lauds him as the first pretzel-baker in Dayton. He had four daughters and a son… so why, I ask, are there so many confounding WEYRICHs in Dayton in this time period?
Here’s a page from the 1891-1892 Williams’ Dayton Directory. (Writing that sentence caused me to take a quick peek at bookfinder.com, the best book search engine available. The only copy of a Williams’ Dayton Directory of this era available for less than $250 has several missing pages. I guess I can resist the temptation.) (Resisting parenthetical remarks is quite another matter.) (Oh, yes, the original selling price? $4.)
Right, we have two Adams (counting the WEYRAUCH) and two Phillips, and three of them are bakers. Fortunately I can pick my direct ancestor out of this mob, because great-grandmother Bertha Elizabeth is also listed at 501 S. Warren.
This is good and useful, because Adam WEYRICH had twelve children—so says a note in the Dayton Metro Library’s online obituary index; I haven’t received a copy of the obit itself yet. Census data from 1880 and 1900 agrees. I expect this family is the source of many of the Dayton WEYRICHs of later generations. Unfortunately no two of the death certificates (via a quick lookup on familysearch.org) agrees on exactly what Adam’s wife’s name was (the two censuses agree on Barbara), but that is a mystery for another day.
The question that intrigues me: Are Adam and Phillip brothers?
