u/Belcaster

Hey all,

I'm reaching out to this board because of this letter here, which is in my grandfather's grandfather's things. https://www.familysearch.org/en/tree/person/memories/L2FN-NDX (family search link)

The man in question, William Mulcahy, is an ancestor of mine who died in Halifax in 1869. He apparently came from a family outlined by this letter, that lived in New York. His parents, according to a marriage record, were named John and Catherine - but i have no idea if they ever made it across the pond from Ireland/Scotland.

The problem is, of course, that we don't really know how he spelled his name. It eventually became "McKay" in our lineage, but I don't know if this family, William McKay and his siblings, would have spelled it that way or something else. I've seen Mulcahy, McCahey, etc. in the records I do have.

The other problem is, I can't find the family referenced in this old letter anywhere in records from New York City. This letter is all i have to go on, and it's talking in the 1890's about a family in the 1860's, so I am sure there's a detail or two missing or misaligned here, which makes this even more challenging, on top of this incredibly common name. I've tried using ancestry's soundex and wildcard characters but haven't been able to turn up anything. Are there tricks/advice anyone can provide for me to researching a family with a common name in New York from this era?

My girlfriend's father is from Mexico. He was born in Chihuaha, and his parents were named Emiliano Urias, and Librada Saenz. He was born in 1957 or so. He never knew his father besides a few stray details and a couple of pictures, and I told him I was into genealogy and that I'd see what i could uncover about the guy.

Supposedly, he was from Sinaloa originally, and got married in Chihuahua and had a family in one of the towns there (maybe Cuauhtemoc?) before getting together with my girlfriend's father's mother. I guess he essentially had two families there. He was out of their life when he was young. My problem is this - I don't have a ton of experience working with records from Mexico, and I haven't been able to uncover any marriage records on ancestry or familysearch about an Emiliano Urias from that time (40's/50's) and i'm wondering if any of you fine folk have tips regarding looking into this kind of thing, as I'm sure I'm doing something wrong.