OUR Grandmother Matilda...

Pretty sure we've found out for sure that Matilda was Ida Mae's grandmother!

Ida Mae's father is listed as Isaac Delana on the Census of 1910.  From there we went back to the Census of 1880 and found Isaac at age 28.  At that time he was living with his mother Matilda (already widowed) and his sister Malissa.  We also find a granddaughter, Adda J. Delana, with them and she's only 2 years old.

Adda Jane is Ida Mae's sister.

This had us scouring even older records and we were looking in Greene County, Pennsylvania since that's where many of the West Virginian Foxes and Dulaneys hailed from.

We'd found Isaac at age 11, born in Pennsylvania and still in Perry Township at that time, 1860. 

But Isaac is NOT Ida and Adda's father.  For a minute we were confounded by the conflict of information.

Their father is John Delaney who married Rebecca Blaker...we'd gleaned from vital records such as Ida and Adda Jane's death certificates.









We were actually looking at some Fox families searching for Grandfather Henry's origins, and, we found our Matilda and her husband John DELANA, with a mess of kids--living WITH some Foxes!  If we hadn't read into the records around the family we were looking at, we wouldn't have found them because they weren't landowners.

We are so excited.

THERE they are in 1850!


AND, we can put this information together with some other stuff we've been reading, like...

Historical papers.  We were very lucky to find some genealogical work done by John Conklin in the late 1880's.  He was an actual grandson of John and Matilda Delaney!  John Conklin's mother was MALISSA DULANEY!  Isaac's SISTER!

This is incredible to find such a confirmation.

In some letters about John Conklin's genealogy we find another list of John and Matilda's children. 


AND, we find out that Matilda was a Calvert!  That was her maiden name, Matilda Calvert.  She was actually born (not in 1810 as the estimation reads, but) on the 9th of March 1811.  And she married John Delaney born in 1804.

We have a lot more reading to do now.  But here we go again grounding around our elders to understand our whole story.  Mama's ECSTATIC of course.  She's a devout Catholic and nothing is as exciting to her than learning about anything Catholic.  To find a Calvert in our family tree, well that opens up an exciting chapter in our family tree.  And brings forth a lot of questions like...If our Calvert was related to Lord Baltimore what was she doing so far from Maryland?  How exactly does a grandmother born in Kentucky tie up with some people getting off a ship and having a first mass?

Mama waits patiently for us to do all our textbook reading AND family tree rendering.

These papers of John Conklin, they are filed with the Cornerstone Genealogy Society and they are technically named, "The Descent and Ancestry of Isaac Calvert of Greene County, Pennsylvania."







Malissa wasn't born until 1857 so she wasn't on the Census of 1850.

That Census of 1850 also tells us that Sarah was attending school but she was "dumb."  Maybe she was just really quiet and shy or maybe she was autistic but nobody knew that word way back then.

It's John Delaney, the younger on John and Matilda's household list who is one of our grandfathers! So that makes Matilda one of our grandmothers!


Reading Censuses we came up with another question for our list of questions....
What was Matilda Delany doing in St. Louis, Missouri (7th ward of St. Louis City) in 1860?