A Successful Search for Family in Old Virginia City
It all started when we walked by a house with a white picket fence
My wife and I spent a weekend at Lake Tahoe during the summer of 1995. And on one of those days during our visit we drove up to Virginia City, my mom’s hometown. She told me once that she thought I had at least a dozen second cousins still living in the area. And I had been thinking about my roots and wondering whatever happened to all those cousins.
I couldn’t ask my mom any more questions about her family. She came down with Alzheimer’s a few years earlier and by this time had lost her memory and was living in a nursing home. She didn’t even recognize me the last time I visited her.
My mother’s maternal grandparents were Thomas Muckle and Bessie Gallagher. Tom was born in Ballycopeland, County Down in 1846. Bessie was born in Sheegorey, County Roscommon in 1845. Both left their native Ireland in the 1860s and made their way to Virginia City, Nevada where they met and married.
At the height of the silver mining boom in the 1870s the town had a population of about 30,000. But by the late 1880s most of the silver was gone and people started to leave. By the 1950s there were only 500 people left in Virginia City. In 2020 the population had risen slightly to 770.
My mother and her parents and grandmother left Virginia City for San Francisco in 1925, joining up with two older brothers, an aunt and two uncles. They left behind two aunts and one uncle. And another aunt died in infancy and is buried in the local cemetery not far from my great-grandfather Tom, who died in 1922.
My mother gradually lost touch with her first cousins who were the offspring of her aunts, Aggie and Mamie, and her Uncle George.
So, we went for a walk. First to the Catholic Church, St. Mary in the Mountains. The house where my mom grew up was about a block away from the church. But it had burned down years ago and there was just a bare hill there now.
We then walked along for a few more blocks and came across a nice-looking old house with a beautiful garden on the other side of a white picket fence. We stopped to view and smell the flowers and soon started up a conversation with a gray-haired lady who was busy gardening on the other side of the fence.
We introduced ourselves and told her about my quest to find some of my mother’s relatives. She told us that she moved to Virginia City about 50 years ago, 20 years after my mother had left. But during the last fifty years she had met just about all of my mother’s cousins who remained residents of the town. My family members had all moved on, though, mostly to Carson City, the state capital, where work could be found.
And she was very friendly with three of my mother’s first cousins: Dorothy, Shirley and Ruth Muckle, who were the daughters of Mom’s Uncle George. She then informed us that all three sisters had died along with two of their husbands.
But my mom’s cousin Ruth had married a man named Clarence Elkin who was very much alive and living in a retirement home in Carson City! She even had lunch with Clarence not long ago.
I called Clarence the next day and we made arrangements to meet soon. Clarence told me about his family and gave me some telephone numbers and addresses.
Clarence also supplied some information on other relatives, including the families of his wife’s two sisters. In the next few weeks, I obtained more information on more Muckles, mostly from two new-found cousins, both granddaughters of my mom’s Aunt Aggie: Doris Gillie and Carol Seymour.
I started making a lot of phone calls and writing a lot of letters. One call might provide another name or a phone number or a street address. And we soon had enough people interested in a family reunion which I organized with help from Doris and Carol for the following year in Carson City. About 75 people showed up!
Most of us toured Virginia City’s Fourth Ward School, now a museum, during the reunion. Here is a photo I found on one of the museum’s walls of the Virginia City High School Sophomore class in 1953. Four of the kids in this picture are my second cousins and two are future wives of second cousins.
Ten years later we had another reunion. This time our guests of honor were my cousin Henry and his wife Geraldine and son Paul whom we met in Ireland a few years before when we flew across the ocean to look for more cousins.
None of this would probably have ever happened were it not for our chance meeting with that gray-haired lady who was gardening in her Virginia City front yard on the other side of a white picket fence.
I retired in 1997 and for the next few years I concentrated on my genealogy research, often driving to Virginia City to obtain birth, marriage and death records from the County Courthouse. I also visited the state archives in Carson City a few times.
And I even spent a few afternoons at the University of Nevada in Reno reading old issues of the Territorial Enterprise, the newspaper Mark Twain wrote for in the early 1860s. Some of my Muckle relatives were rather rowdy back in the day and they made the news regularly.
Thanks for reading!
