Blogger Amy Johnson Crow has
challenged us with writing about an Ancestor once a week for the year
2019. She will give us prompts to get us started. This week's
prompt is In the Courthouse.
My father-in-law, Thomas N. Murphy had a cousin named Ellen
(Nellie) McDonald Fitzgerald. Ellen married Michael Fitzgerald and they had a
son Gerald. When my husband and I were first married we took a ride with his
mother, Mary Glessoff Murphy out to Port Jefferson, New York. It was and still is a very cute town with
many shops and places to eat. While
there my mother-in-law said that Aunt Nellie had a house right up the street and
she pointed it out.
Many years later when I was working on the genealogies of
the Murphy and McDonald families I wondered if I could find out anything about
that house in Port Jefferson and Aunt Nellie living there.
I went to the Suffolk County Courthouse and looked for the
deeds of the houses on the street in Port Jefferson. By this time, I wasn’t exactly sure which of
the houses on that street was the one Aunt Nellie lived in. I had to look through several different reels
of film, first to find the lot number for each address, then the actual deed
itself. I think I checked every house on
the street and the neighboring streets but didn’t find her name on any of the
deeds.
I think she probably rented the house each summer. She did
live in Brooklyn her whole life and probably wanted a cooler place for the
summer.
That was my experience in the Courthouse.
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