Putting Names to Faces of Long Ago
Meet Timothy and Margaret Ford of County Cork with two of their daughters, Eliza and Margaret, and two of their sons, whose names are still to be discovered. Timothy and Margaret are my great-great-great-grandparents. I have known their names for only two days. Based on a consultation last year with Maureen Taylor, the Photo Detective, I believe that the above picture of Timothy and Margaret with four of their children is a photograph, possibly taken in the 1880s, of a daguerreotype dating back to the early 1850s. On Saturday I went to a class on New York City research offered by the California Genealogical Society (CGS) and taught by CGS’s President, Steve Harris. Steve told us about an indexed collection of probate records, New York, Kings County Estate Files, 1866-1923, now available for viewing at familysearch.org. I perused several of the probate files and oh joy! I found a probate file for one of Timothy and Margaret’s daughters, Catharine Ford. The file rev...