Today during my coffee break at work I headed over to Preservation Park in Oakland.
I love these old houses- back when they were built with creativity before everything went pre-fab or tract style because demand was high because people kept and continue to move here. The Bay Area is the opposite of a ghost town. Even the outskirts, and the Bay-Adjacent towns keep growing. I don’t care what you hear about people leaving California, because we are crowded as ever. But today, during my coffee break, for a little while, everything slowed down as I wandered through this area and traveled back in time.
It’s easy to romanticize the past. I had to remind myself when these houses were built, women couldn’t vote or have their own credit card. A bit of a buzz kill. The homes sure are pretty though.
In family research news, I continue to go down the line of the woman my Great Grandma Katie called “Grandma Ellen”, even though she wasn’t really her Grandma, but supposedly her father’s cousin (same last name -Connolly). I still can’t officially link Grandma Ellen to my tree because I don’t know how we are related, but she did have a ton of descendants, so I am having fun going through those profiles and looking for a connection. I know Grandma Ellen’s daughter Nellie, married a man with the last name of Pegnam, who was part of a Gaelic Dancing Club in Oakland.
And one of Grandma Ellen’s other daughters, Margaret, married a man with the last name of Kingston. He had a nephew who drowned at the Baths in Alameda in 1881. Before the area was called Neptune, it was called the Long Branch Baths.
And Grandma Ellen’s daughter, Katie A., married a man with the last name Leonard, and I know the Leonards are family. My Great Grandmother wrote that they were her father’s cousins, but again, I don’t know how they were cousins. Even my Grandma Gerry, in one of her letters, writes, “My mother and her sister were raised willy nilly by several relatives. They were for a while, with the Leonards, (I think their mother was a Connolly).
If my Grandma Gerry didn’t even know how they were all related, how much harder will it be for me? Well, maybe easier for me because the year my Grandma Gerry passed, the World Wide Web was born. She just missed getting online. I guess every generation has a different responsibility when it comes to preserving family history.
Friday, May 2, 2025:
Theresa Donahoe 