Finding Margaret Foley Doyle

It took me a few years to find my grandfather’s birth mother, Abbie Doyle. As I pieced together Abbie’s life as best I could from records and small town newspapers, it was clear that Abbie was very close to her her uncle, Michael Daniel Foley and his wife, Margaret Brown Foley. There were newspaper accounts of Abbie visiting them in Fall River, Massachusetts around Christmas time, and Abbie was visiting them while pregnant with my grandfather.

This raised questions for me. I knew Abbie’s father had died in 1881, when she was just eight years old. In my five years of searching, though, I could not find what had become of her mother, Margaret Foley Doyle.

Abbie’s parents had married in 1856. Her father was born in County Kerry, Ireland, likely near Killarney. Jeremiah Doyle was wounded early in the American Civil War. Abbie’s parents show up in United States Census records in 1860, 1870, and 1880. Nearly all of the 1890 Census was destroyed in a fire, so that time is a mystery regarding the Doyle family.

When Jeremiah died, Margaret was somewhere between 45 and 49 years of age–records give varying estimates of her age. She had young adult sons who likely worked to support the family financially after their father’s death. I had wondered if circumstances forced Margaret to go to work outside the home as well.

The psychologist in me wondered what life was like for Abbie. She lost her father when she would have been in the equivalent of 2nd to 3rd grade. Abbie’s mother surely would have been grief-stricken. Who would have been there for Abbie?

Why did Abbie’s mother disappear from the records? Record-keeping in Massachusetts and the rest of New England tended to be meticulous. I had found birth, marriage, and death records on many other family members from that time. Margaret Foley Doyle kept eluding me…

Then last week, I somehow hit upon the perfect search terms, and found a death record. Margaret Foley Doyle died of cancer on July 16, 1890. So, finally, I knew another piece of Abbie’s story. She lost her father at eight, and her mother at 17.

I could not help but wonder what those intervening years had been like…and then I discovered a partial answer to this question…

With the date of Margaret Doyle’s death, I searched historical newspapers and there, in the Transcript-Telegram from Holyoke, Massachusetts, I found a notice of her death.

This information about Margaret helped complete a picture of Abbie’s early life. Abbie lost her father, and to some extent it appears, she lost her mother that very same year. Two years later, in 1892, her brother, Jeremiah, died at the age of 23. Then, just 17 months later, Abbie lost her sister, Margaret, to tuberculosis at age 26, in 1893.

I began searching for Grandpa’s origins because his early life story was missing so many pieces. Who were his parents? Why didn’t they keep him? Did they love him?

Such simple questions–but simple questions have complicated answers.