ROOTS & BRANCHES

It was some six years ago when “Roots & Branches” reader and adoptee Holly McGroarty of Clearfield was first looking around for information on her birth family.

With the deaths of her adopted mother and stepfather in the last couple of years, McGroarty’s interested in finding out more on her birth Elizabeth Hull, who was born in 1924 in DuBois.

A change in Pennsylvania law in the last decade allowed birth certificates to become public records after 105 years (death certificates have a blackout period, too, but only for 50 years).

Within those blackout periods, however, the certificates can be obtained by descendants, so McGroarty is eligible.

As do most such agencies across the country, the Pennsylvania Department of Health partners with a private company called VitalChek. For an additional fee, VitalChek speeds up the process, as explained on the Department of Health’s website at the URL, https://www.health.pa.gov/topics/certificates/Pages/Birth-Certificates.aspx

McGroarty’s contact made me interested on how much family information might be available from sources such as the U.S. Census and the publicly available vital records.

It appeared that Elizabeth Hull’s grandparents were James Patrick Dempsey (1871-1938, son of Joseph Anthony Dempsey and Sarah Ann Brittan) and Cora E. White (1885-?), daughter of John Charles White and Annie Catherine McCormick.

Elizabeth or “Betty” was listed in the household of James and Cora in the 1930 U.S. Census and as Cora’s granddaughter in the 1940 census.

But further records—plus McGroarty’s information that Elizabeth was the daughter of Effie Dempsey—confirmed the information on James, but revealed that Cora was his second wife and, as it turns out, stepmother to Effie and step-grandmother to Elizabeth.

The website Find A Grave gave the information that James’s first wife was Lillie May Byerly Dempsey (1881–1913), which matched information on the subsequent marriage of James and Cora. While Find A Grave often shows photographs of tombstones, in the case of Lillie it shows a newspaper death notice that indicates she died as a result of childbirth.

The 1917 death certificate of James’s father Joseph A. Dempsey (remember, those death certificates are public records at 50 years and are available on Ancestry.com) shows he was born in 1838 and was the son of David Dempsey and Jane Arthurs. The 1850 U.S. Census shows the David Dempsey family in Venango County in that year.

While Find A Grave memorials are fine starting points, the information they provide should be verified with other, preferably contemporaneous sources. In the case of Jane Arthurs, Find A Grave has her father listed as War of 1812 veteran James Arturs (1790–1859) and grandfather as Revolutionary War private Richard Arters, who supposedly was the first settler on the Allegheny River at the mouth of Tidioute Creek in Warren County.