Ancestry Magazine

My female relatives can be as slippery as secret agents. They pop up on my radar, only to blip out again. They use nicknames, aliases, and other sorts of identity tricks. With chameleon-like proclivities, the women in my searches have pushed me to the limits of my skills and over the edge of frustration. Consider the case of my father’s cousin about whom my generation knew virtually nothing.

I began my family history search more than a decade ago with a hand-drawn diagram of four generations of family made by my father’s cousin Paul, the eldest of our clan. I sorted out the uncles, aunts, and cousins I knew from childhood and, in the intervening years, discovered cousins the family had lost touch with.

Now I was left with a single unknown. Under the neat boxes for Paul’s uncle John, and his wife Rose, was a daughter noted as Alice “Addy.” I had no dates or locations, but Paul did remember the name of the man she married.

On a research trip to Lowell, Massachusetts, the hometown of my Irish immigrant forbears and subsequent generations, I surveyed the city directories. I logged every individual with a matching surname from 1853 to 1960 but didn’t find a single Alice or Addy. Oddly, I did find a “Maureen A.” I had never heard the name of Maureen in the family, but I knew that the A might stand for Alice.

Sifting through the directory data, I found Alice’s parents, John and Rose, and was able to match up home addresses to show that Maureen was a student living with them. She was almost certainly their daughter. The Lowell city clerk’s office cinched her identity when they located a birth certificate for Maureen Alice. So there was a Maureen in the family after all.

I also accessed images of the Lowell Sun online at Ancestry.com and found two articles that mentioned this mysterious cousin. She was a spelling champion and a Sunday school honors graduate, except in the articles the name of the exemplary student was not Maureen, but Alice.

I searched the Internet for more information, using both first names, which resulted in a big nothing. I got better results when I searched for Maureen Alice’s husband, James. He had passed away and I found an obituary for him. It did not originate in Lowell, but in York Harbor, Maine, and, unfortunately, it didn’t mention survivors. Maureen Alice “Addy” was hiding from me still.

Next, I tried an online directory that listed the address for another James who currently lived in York Harbor. This could only be James’ and Addy’s son! I wrote him a letter that explained our family connection and detailed my search for the woman I believed was his mother. I mailed it off with a self-addressed, stamped envelope and hoped he would answer me soon.

On Friday evening two weeks later, my telephone rang and I heard a woman’s voice, with a tinge of playfulness in it, say, “I bet you’ll never guess who this is.”

Of course, I never dreamed I’d be speaking to the very object of my search. Addy was on the line, animated and delighted to make contact with a member of the family she had never met. We chatted for a while about her life and mine. Then I confided to her that her multiple names had greatly confused my research. She replied that throughout her life she’d used both names. Half of her friends called her Maureen and the other half called her Alice.

“What was funny to me,” she added, “was what you said about `Addy.’ No one ever called me Addy.”

Christine M. Roane is a Massachusetts writer, family historian, and former history museum docent. Her articles have appeared in American History magazine and Scribner’s Dictionary of American History.