Listening to the Voices of Our Ancestors - A Practical Manual for Developing Your Intuitive Genealogical Abilities

Chapter 5

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Once I became aware that my family research discoveries went way beyond luck, I was hesitant to mention my experiences to people other than my children and my sisters. After all, who would believe such a thing? Everyone would think I was crazy. Even I could barely accept what was taking place, so how could I expect others to believe it? Although my children and sisters were supportive and interested in hearing about my experiences, I knew that most people, including my husband, would think that I was crazy or would chalk up the occurrences to coincidence.

It wasn’t until 2012 when I attended RootsTech, a genealogy conference held annually in Salt Lake City, Utah, that I began to hear other genealogists speak publicly about ancestors guiding them to locate records, photographs, or cemetery plots. I also discovered books like “Psychic Roots: Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy” by Henry Z. Jones (3) and “In Search of Ancestors: 101 Inspiring Stories of Serendipity and Connections in Rediscovering Our Family History” by Megan Smolenyak (4). These publications included stories of ancestor contact that were like what I was experiencing.

I realized that I wasn’t crazy at all and that my experiences of being guided by ancestors were common among genealogists, so I came to embrace them. When ancestors came into my dreams, I always knew that within days I would find information about them that would break through brick walls. The dreams never failed to amaze me, and in some cases, amuse me.

Stop Fiddling Around and Get Back to Work

Around the same time that I took up genealogy as a hobby, I also began learning to play Irish fiddle. A year or so later, with a goal to attend Rocky Mountain Fiddle Camp for the first time – a fiddle camp in Colorado for all ages and levels of experience – I decided to take a three-month hiatus from genealogy. I wanted to devote more time to practicing my fiddle in the months preceding camp.

Although I still had genealogy dreams featuring various ancestors, I chose to ignore them and continue to play my fiddle. After two such months, I had an extremely vivid dream in which Mary Downy Reilly, the first wife of my 2nd great grandfather, Lawrence Reilly, came to the side of my bed along with her oldest child, Bridget, and shook me awake. In a lovely Irish brogue, they told me, “Stop fiddling around and get back to work. We want to be found!” I couldn’t refuse such a clever request, so I got back to work on genealogy.

At the time of this dream, I was stuck on not being able to find Bridget Reilly in any records after she became an adult and married. Thanks to a family tree that my Uncle Dan Reilly III had put together, I knew that Bridget had married a man named John Furry, and they had several children. Also, I was having difficulty finding out what had happened to Bridget’s younger brother, Michael Reilly, in his later years.

One of my main goals when starting genealogy was to reconnect lost branches of the family. In my Reilly family, although my grandfather Dan Reilly, Jr. had been an only child, his father was one of six children. Dan Reilly, Sr. had two full older siblings – John Joseph Reilly and Ellen Reilly Waldron, a half-sister, Bridget, and two half-brothers, Michael and (Reverend) Dennis Reilly. Somehow over the years, all contact with the extended families had stopped. But because my branch of the family had inherited the Bible belonging to my 3rd great-aunt Catharine Reilly Morley, which included the names of the six children of Lawrence Reilly, I had long been aware of the existence of my 2nd great aunts and uncles.

After experiencing the dream and returning to work as instructed by my Irish ancestors, within a short time, I found an obituary for Bridget’s half-brother, John Joseph Reilly, the eldest son of Lawrence Reilly and my great-great-grandmother Catherine Donohoe Reilly. The obituary listed Bridget as living in Greenfield, Indiana, with her husband, John Furry, and mentioned that her brother Michael lived in Greenfield as well.

With these new pieces of information, I was able to find Bridget and her entire family in Greenfield census records. I researched several generations of Bridget’s descendants and was able to track down and connect with Kim Whalen Marcus, a living third cousin, therefore reuniting family branches that were lost to each other for over a generation. In addition, the obituary included information about his sister Ellen Reilly Waldron who lived in Buffalo, which led me to find Ellen’s living descendants, again connecting another long-lost family branch. All because I was awakened and told to stop fiddling around!

There’s No Blarney with This Dream

In another dream, my father came to me. Sitting on the foot of my bed, he shook me awake, saying, “Don’t forget that your grandfather kissed the Blarney Stone.” Until that moment, I had completely forgotten the story my dad had told in my childhood about my paternal grandfather, Dan Reilly, Jr., going to Ireland as a young man and kissing the Blarney Stone, thereby giving him his wit and charm. I woke up happy, not only because I had seen my dad again, but also because I realized from a genealogist’s point of view that if my grandfather had gone to Ireland, there had to be passenger records documenting his travels. I immediately went to my computer to research and, right away, found passenger records for both my grandfather and paternal great-grandfather, Dan Reilly, Sr., on their trip to and from Ireland. From the dates of the trip, I pieced together that it took place the month after my grandfather graduated from high school.

What struck me in finding the passenger records was that my grandfather and great-grandfather sailed into Queenstown (modern-day Cobh) and not into Dublin, which I sensed was important, and the main reason why my father led me to this particular record. Since I had always been told that our Reilly family was from County Cavan, which is one of the northern-most counties of the Republic of Ireland, I found it odd that they would have chosen to sail into southern Ireland. It would have taken a long time in 1905 to travel from Queenstown to Cavan to visit relatives, most likely by horse and wagon. I noticed from the passenger records that they remained in Ireland for almost two months before sailing back to the United States, which would have made for a costly trip had they been staying in hotels. I decided that they had most likely traveled back to Ireland to reunite with living relatives, which gave me another clue into my family genealogy.

I was very appreciative that my dad had pointed me in the right direction to find passenger records for my grandfathers. It filled me with happiness to think of the pride my paternal great-great-grandfather, Lawrence Reilly, must have felt to see his son and grandson return to the shores of his beloved Ireland. Unlike Lawrence, who arrived in America as an illiterate laborer in the crowded steerage section of a passenger ship, Dan Reilly Sr. and Dan Junior were both educated and literate and traveled as second class passengers to and from Ireland. The elder Reilly was a successful hotel manager in Niagara Falls. Dan Junior was ready to begin Cornell University and would later complete a Law degree at Cornell Law School. In just one generation, they achieved and embodied the great American dream.

When I expanded my record search for ancestors outside of County Cavan, I discovered through birth and marriage records that the family was from County Kerry. Additional records and DNA connections confirmed that the family had origins in both County Kerry and County Cork, but not County Cavan. Without my dad’s guidance to the passenger record, I would have believed the incorrect oral history stating that my family was from County Cavan, and I would have continued to search, in vain, for records placing them there.

When I asked my uncle Dan Reilly about stories claiming that our family came from County Cavan and told him records showed that to be false, he said an assumption had been made based upon the prevalence of the Reilly name in County Cavan. As a genealogist, this was a good lesson always to keep an open mind when hearing decades of family oral tradition unless there is documentation to prove the connection.

Look Again; You’ve Missed Something

A series of dreams involving my McGregor relatives were the most amazing and vivid I’ve ever had. From oral history, I knew my 2nd great grandfather Peter McGregor was born in Ontario, Canada, the son of Scottish immigrant Gregor McGregor. Several records I found indicated that Joan Davie was Peter’s mother, but I had been unsuccessful in finding anything about any other possible family members. I knew that Peter had at least one brother because I found his nephew Archie McGregor listed in the 1910 United States census. The census showed him as having lived with Peter and his wife, Jennett “Janet” McLean McGregor, in Buffalo, New York. No matter how much I tried, I could not find records showing Gregor (also sometimes called George), Joan, Peter, or any siblings. I did find a death record for a Jane McGregor, widow of Gregor McGregor, and I strongly suspected that she might be my 3rd great-grandmother. Still, with no corroborating evidence to support that hunch, I put the record aside in my virtual shoebox on Ancestry to refer to it later, if needed.

Around this time, my mother decided to move out...