Stick To It

Whenever I am working on a family tree, be it mine or someone else’s, I inevitably learn something new. It’s not always what I started looking for (did someone say “squirrel”?), but I come away from most work sessions better informed and more educated.

My lesson this past week: never, ever give up.

Nine long years ago, I obtained the death certificate for my great-grandmother, Anna Marie (nee Miller) Glacy.[1] That record identified her parents as Frank and Annie Miller and stated that Annie Miller had been born in Germany. My grandmother Mae (married to Anna Marie’s son Anthony) had maintained that Annie Miller’s maiden name was “Lattrell.” Indeed, “Lottrell” is shown as her maiden name on Mae and Anthony’s 1915 marriage certificate.[2] However, in addition to the death certificate, every other record for Anna Marie Glacy showed Miller/Muller for her maiden name.[3] Time and time again I struck out researching the Lattrell name. I should also mention that my grandmother Mae was not the most reliable of informants – she misidentified her father’s first name on her own marriage certificate, failed to tell her children when said father died, failed to mention that she found her father-in-law’s body after he committed suicide, and on and on. That the Lattrell name was a fiction was highly probable.

Fast-forward to 2019 when I find the baptismal record for one of Anna Marie’s daughters.[4] Find My Past had recently started publishing records pertaining to eight million sacraments from the Archdiocese of New York spanning more than 130 years and 230 individual parishes.[5] Anna Marie’s ninth child was baptized at St. Nicholas in Manhattan on 8 August 1882. Her baptismal sponsors? George and Mary Lattrell. 

Wait. What? 

I immediately do some digging into George and Mary and some of what I found was a bit of a mess and hard to track. I don’t find anything helpful except that in 1880 George and Mary are living in the same apartment building in Brooklyn that Anna Marie and her family are living in! The census tells me that George and Mary are German-born, he sixty-three (born about 1817), and she fifty-four (born about 1826). No children are shown. Still, I cannot figure out the connection with Anna Marie. Maybe since this was her ninth child, she’d run out of relatives to be sponsors and asked the neighbors. IDK That’s all I got so I move on to bigger and better things.

Still the Lattrells nagged at me. I came back to them again and again, with no success

This past week, I got back to them determined to figure this out. I contacted a cousin on that side of the family who had previously provided me with some great pictures and information to see if she had any thoughts.[6] But I needed to think outside of the box because clearly inside the box was not working. You know those little leaves Ancestry gives you for “hints” it has found? What if, on my Ancestry tree, I added Mary Lattrell as Anna Marie’s sister? What hints (i.e. records, documents, etc.) would I get? So, I link her and George to my tree and BOOM. I’ll cut to the chase because the info out there on Mary and George is a little complicated and you don’t really need to know it. 

It turns out that Mary Lattrell was Anna Marie’s MOTHER although Muller/Miller was Anna Marie’s maiden name after all. 

Awesome.

It took me some of an afternoon put all the right people with all the right families. Fortunately, I found a series of documents that tied them all together: Mary’s 1901 will and the accompanying probate file. In her will, she identified two daughters (that I didn’t know she had), a grandson (that I didn’t know she had), and – wait for it – the seven surviving children of her deceased daughter “Maria Anna Glasy,” including my grandfather Anthony.[7] Not only does her will name them all, but the probate file shows their home addresses and I was able to cross-check and verify those addresses with the 1900 census. Woot.

While I have more work to do, I’ve learned so far that my second great-grandmother, Mary Lattrell, was born Anna Marie Mandery in Bayern, Germany on 4 June 1826, the sixth child of Martin and Francisca (nee Christiany) Mandery.[8] She married Nicholas Muller in 1846 and they had seven children (including Anna Marie).[9] Nicholas died in 1866 and four years later, Mary married George Lattrell, a widower who had three daughters.[10]

So why did my grandmother Mae think Lattrell was her mother-in-law’s maiden name? Thinking about the timing of events, the answer is simple. Anthony must have known his grandmother Mary. The year before she died, he and his father were living about two blocks away from her and he was in his late teens.[11] Since Anthony’s mother died when he was a toddler and Mary married George thirteen years before he was even born, I can see where they grabbed onto the Lattrell name (although clearly it would NOT be his mother’s maiden name). Anthony died in 1927 when my dad and his sister were quite young and they never had much of a connection with the Glacy family after that.[12] Otherwise, I’m guessing I would have known these great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Well, it’s never too late as long as you never give up!

[1] New York, New York City Department of Health, Certificate of Death no. 594288, Annie Glacy, 1887; Municipal Archives, New York City.

[2] New Jersey, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate and Record of Marriage no. 548, Glacy-McDonough, 1915; New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Trenton, New Jersey.

[3] Including a couple of baptismal records and birth certificates. Once again for those of you in the back, spelling is irrelevant. Miller, Muller, Müller, Mueller – it’s all the same in this case (Müller likely being the original German spelling). Same with Lattrell, Lattrall, Latrel, Latral and Glacy, Glazy, Glasy, Glacey, Glaese, etc. Don’t get me started on how many different ways Gläschen is spelled.

[4] St Nicholas Parish, Manhattan, New York, unpaginated, Maria Anna Glaese, 8 Aug 1882; digital image, "New York Roman Catholic Parish Baptisms," Findmypast (https://www.findmypast.com : accessed 4 February 2019).

[5] Findmypast Blog, “Findmypast brings New York Catholic records online for the first time!,” 6 March 2018, (https://www.findmypast.com/blog/family-records/findmypast-brings-new-york-catholic-records-online-for-the-first-time : accessed 24 June 2021).

[6] Thanks much Kathleen.

[7] Surrogate Court, Brooklyn, New York, Wills, Vol. 286:209-13, will and other records pertaining to the estate of Anna Marie Lattrell; image, FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-899T-X9PN-5?i=476&cc=1920234&cat=317954 : accessed 21 June 2021), FHL microfilm 5,533,889, images 477-479 of 852.

[8] Goßersweiler, Rheinland-Pfalz, Taufregister [baptismal register] (1806-1853), Anna Marie Mandery (1826), 222; image, FamilySearch, (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:3QS7-892X-7WCT?i=231 : accessed 22 June 2021), FHL microfilm 4,034,324, image 232 of 485.

[9] St. John the Baptist, Manhattan, New York, marriage register, unpaginated, Muller-Mandery (1846); digital image, Findmypast (https://www.findmypast.com : accessed 24 June 2021). 1900 U.S. census, Brooklyn, Kings Co., New York, pop. sch., ED 444, p. 18B, dwell. 213, fam. 437, Mary A. Lattrell in household of Catherine Heydinger; image, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 25 June 2021); citing NARA microfilm publication T623, roll not noted.

[10] German Genealogy Group, “Church Marriage Database,” St. Benedict, Brooklyn, New York, George Lattrell-Anna Marie Miller, 5 July 1870 [original record has been requested]. 1855 New York State census, Kings Co., pop. sch., Brooklyn, unpaginated, dwell. 296, George Lattrall household; image, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 25 June 2021); “New York, U.S., State Census, 1855,” image 72 of 120.

[11] 1900 U.S. census, Brooklyn, Kings Co., New York, pop. sch., ED 443, p. 20A, dwell. 240, fam. 473, Joe Glacy; image, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 25 June 2021); citing NARA microfilm publication T623, roll not noted.

[12] New Jersey, State Department of Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics, Certificate and Record of Death no. 134, Anthony Joseph Glacy, 1927; New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services, Trenton, New Jersey.

Anna Marie (Muller) Glacy. Photo courtesy of Kathleen Adams.