My Trails into the Past

For the 52 Ancestors theme for week 42, we are to compare our life to an ancestor’s. I have worked all my life, first as a babysitter to neighborhood children, then in the library at Cal State University, Hayward (now East Bay), a year at Alameda Sporting Goods as a clerk/computer operator, and then at the Bay Area Rapid Transit District first as a train operator and then as a train operator instructor (official title was Employee Development Specialist). I retired in 2010 after 32 years. My mother did not work outside the home. She raised six children while my dad worked in various grocery stores as a produce clerk. However, both my grandmothers worked outside the home. My paternal grandmother, Nana, worked because she had to. She left her husband and raised her four children alone. She worked in restaurants, and then in education, first in Napa at a one-room schoolhouse, and later in Concord, California, at Williams School. Because her credential was earned in Montana from a norm...

This has been a hard post to write in that I could not think of anything specific to write about. I’m sure many of my ancestors had the courage to make the journeys they did to come to the United States and later make the moves further west each generation. It takes a lot of courage to leave the place you know to go to a place that is unknown. I do not know the reasons they moved. No record has been passed down either by journal or letter, so we can only guess at the reasons they may have made the journeys. Things were bad at home and another place looked better. Or the place at home was too crowded and the land further west offered new hope. Perhaps someone else moved first and wrote back saying, come! There is one person I know who must have had some courage. First to leave her husband, and then to move across the state to a new place to live. This was my paternal grandmother. She was probably thinking about her four children: three daughters and one son. Like a mother hen, she w...

John H. Sullivan is my paternal great-grandfather, the father of Anna Marie Sullivan who married William Cyril Hork. I have no records naming him until he shows up in Dakota Territory getting land from the federal government. Below is a timeline of the information I have already gathered. Once this is created, I can then do more searching in newspapers, full-text search at FamilySearch , and regular searching at Ancestry and other genealogy database sites. Creating this timeline will likely spark new questions, which will be put into red text. I might even find conflicts that need to be addressed. 1854 June 20. John H. Sullivan was born 20 June 1854. There is no birth or baptism record for him. Other documents suggest his birth range: His intent naturalization in 1882 said he was born in 1853. [1] His land patent application in 1881 said he was over 21, and his own testimony as the claimant on 10 June 1882 stated he was 29 (1853). [2] 1900 census gave June 1854. [3] 1910 census i...