The Researcher and the Cousins
The Researcher and the Cousins
Eleven episodes have quoted her. The family group sheets that open the Connors line, the pocket notebook carried to Prince Edward Island, the typed narratives struck through in red ink and corrected — all of it is the work of one woman with a master's degree in history who spent her sixties and seventies finding out where her family came from. Mary Ellen Molony Brady was born in Chicago on 28 July 1928 and died in October 2022. This episode is not a document trail. It is what happened when the researcher put down the microfilm and got on a boat.
What She Built
She was the granddaughter of Thomas P. Kenny and Ellen Xavier O'Connor, the daughter of Mary Frances Kenny and John Francis Molony. She took a B.A. in history from St. Mary's at Notre Dame in 1950 and an M.A. from Loyola in 1953, taught at St. Scholastica and Maine East, and came back to history four decades later with her own family as the subject.
What she left is a working archive rather than a finished book: family group sheets for the Kenny, Connors, O'Connor, Molony, Brady and Hopkinson lines, several signed from 1202 West Milburn in Mount Prospect and dated 1991 and 1996; a pocket notebook of Island research; typed narratives she later went back over in red ink, striking out what she had first believed and writing in what she had since proved. She recorded burial plots, deed numbers, hospital names and microfilm accession numbers — #3271/28, the St. Eugene's parish register, appears at the foot of her Connors sheet so that whoever came after her could find the same page.
Why This Series Exists
The single most consequential document in this whole series is her family group sheet for Hugh Connors and Mary Henepy, which carries the Connors line back two generations to County Wexford and an emigration in 1832. She signed and dated it at her kitchen table in Mount Prospect on 4 November 1991.
1991: The Island, with Art
She went to Prince Edward Island that year with her husband. Arthur Maher Brady was from Providence, Rhode Island, had served with the 90th Depot Repair Squadron at Bari in 1945, and had married her at St. Paul of the Cross in Park Ridge on 15 June 1957. On the Island they worked the parish registers and the land records together; the notebook she carried is full of half-finished notes — Meacham's Atlas acreages, a struck-through reminder to write to the St. Eugene's Parish History Committee, "Hugh Connors, donor for Chapel altar 1869," "Lawrence Kenny — arrear of pew rent 1877."
On one page she wrote down the burials in the Calvary plot and, beside the name Mary Murphy, put a star and three words: "Sister of Margaret?"
She answered her own question that autumn. The group sheet is dated 4 November 1991.
Ten Weeks
Arthur Maher Brady died at Holy Family Hospital in Des Plaines on 15 January 1992 — seventy-two days after she signed that sheet. The last research trip they took together produced the document that this entire series is built on. She was sixty-three. She outlived him by thirty years and never stopped working.
1995: Father Tom's Jubilee
Three years later the cousins came to Chicago for the golden jubilee of Rev. Thomas P. Conley — fifty years a priest. They gathered at Mary Ellen's house in Mount Prospect, the same address that appears at the top of the group sheets.
Jim Conley, Joanne Molony Hopkinson and Rev. Thomas P. Conley. Mount Prospect, Illinois, about 1995.
Rev. Thomas P. Conley, Mary Ellen Molony Brady and Jim Conley, at Mary Ellen's home.
Rev. Thomas P. Conley with his sister Eleanor Conley Nauman, about 1997.
Who These Cousins Were
The Conleys — Father Tom, Jim and Eleanor, three of the four children of Eleanor Kenny and Joseph C. Conley Jr. — descend from Thomas P. Kenny's first wife, Maime O'Connor; Eleanor was born in Chicago in 1896 and married in January 1920. Mary Ellen and her cousin Tom Hamall descended from the same father's second marriage, to Maime's sister Nell. Episode 10 tells that story: Nell witnessed her sister's wedding in 1894, and married the widower in 1902, and raised Eleanor and her brothers as her own. The people in these photographs are the proof that it worked. Two lines that could easily have drifted apart were still calling each other cousins a century later.
2000: Peaks Island
In September 2000 they did it properly. Six of them took a house on Peaks Island, in Casco Bay off Portland, Maine — a staging post for the drive on to Prince Edward Island and a week of genealogy among people who actually wanted to talk about it.
Mary Ellen typed the itinerary.
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"Sunday, September 10th. Arrive in Portland, Maine. (We can take occupancy of Rainbow House at 12:00 Noon.) Take Casco Bay Lines Ferry to Peaks Island." Round trip $45 per auto, $5.75 per adult; the Sunday after Labor Day schedule copied out in full. Rainbow House, Park Avenue — four bedrooms accommodating seven, two bathrooms, croquet, badminton, bicycles, puzzles, board games, and lots of books.
It is a research itinerary written by someone who had done this before: ferry times listed to the minute, the terminal's phone number, the fares for car and passenger, a note that an island map would be circulated in advance. The same hand that recorded microfilm accession numbers so a stranger could find the page again.
Jim Conley and Rev. Thomas P. Conley on the Casco Bay ferry, September 2000.
Tom Hamall and Barbara Hamall on the ferry deck after dark.
The Peaks Island landing.
Casco Bay from the ferry.
Sunset over the bay.
The shoreline at last light, from the island.
The Table
Somewhere on that trip, in a restaurant with a window onto the street, somebody took a photograph of the six of them around a table. There are papers everywhere — documents being passed, a folder open, someone holding a page up to read from it. They are all looking at the camera and all of them are pleased.
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The cousins at work, September 2000. Papers on the table, a folder open, a page being read aloud. This is what a family genealogy actually looks like when it is being done.
Everyone at That Table
One by one, every person in that photograph has left us.
Read the table from left to right and the two halves of Thomas P. Kenny's family are sitting together: three of Maime's grandchildren and two of Nell's, ninety-eight years after Nell married her sister's widower and took on her sister's children. Nobody at that table would have put it that way. They would have said they were cousins.
Covehead
And then they drove north, and stood where the series begins.
St. Eugene's, Covehead. Lawrence Kenny paid ten shillings toward painting this chapel in January 1861 and rented pew 17 in the North Aisle in 1865; Hugh Connors gave toward the altar in 1869. Three Kenny-Connors marriages were celebrated here between 1866 and 1868.
Mary Ellen Molony Brady and Barbara Hamall at the church sign. Nine years earlier Mary Ellen had read this parish's register on microfilm.
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"FATHER — In Memory of LAWRENCE KENNY, Feb. 20, 1899, Æt. 95. MOTHER — Also His Wife, CATHERINE CORCORAN, Jan. 23, 1855, Æt. 53. Their Son JAMES, Died June 25, 1872, Æt. 40." Photographed by the cousins in September 2000.
That stone settled something twenty-six years after it was photographed. The family papers had always given Catherine Corcoran's death as 1853; the monument says 1855, and carries her age as well as her date. In September 2026 this series adopted the stone. The evidence was standing in the grass at West Covehead the whole time, and the cousins had already taken its picture.
They found Lawrence and Catherine and their son James — the James who was baptized in Newfoundland in October 1832, who married Margaret Connors on a November day in 1866, and who died at forty, leaving a widow with four small children who would take them to Chicago. Everything in Episodes 1 through 11 runs through the three names on that stone.
What Was Kept
When Barbara Hamall died in February 2022, her daughter found the itinerary, the map and the photographs from that trip among her things, carefully preserved. Mary Ellen Molony Brady died eight months later.
The cousins who sat around that table in 2000 did not leave a monograph. They left something more useful: group sheets with accession numbers, a notebook with a question mark beside a name, a typescript corrected in red ink, and a set of photographs that show six people enjoying themselves enormously while doing careful work. This series is the continuation of their week on Peaks Island, carried on by the next generation with better databases and worse handwriting.
We hope to repeat that trip one day, with the next generation.
