Master Sleuth
A professional genealogist explains how he unravelled my family tree
By Erin Phelan

Erin Phelan sat down with Paul McGrath, staff genealogist of History Television’s Ancestors in the Attic , to decipher how he managed to find nearly 1,000 of her ancestors and track down dozens of living relatives from all parts of Canada. (The story of Erin’s quest, “Finding My Family,” is in the March issue of Reader’s Digest.)

McGrath, who has been an avid genealogist for 30 years, has traced the lineage of dozens of families—but as you’ll see in this interview, even he found Erin’s mission daunting!

EP: On a scale of one to ten, how challenging was this assignment?
PM: This was a 15, mainly because you had so little information. Generally, most people can go back as far as their grandparents, and it’s expected your parents could go back to their grandparents to give us one more generation. That’s called the “living memory.” But because your father died so young we were missing a generation. More importantly, we need someone from before 1911 – the lastCanadian census that is available to the public. ( Canadian legislation allows public access to census information only after 92 years).

EP: Why are census records so vital?
PM: They do two things: they give you families, which is a good way to catch siblings you didn’t know about. And, they give you what we call in genealogy “a document of three.” In order to establish parentage it’s important to find a document with a child and his parents’ names—a marriage certificate, birth certificate, baptism record or census. A census specifies the head of the household, the wife, and the children. I knew I wouldn’t find your grandfather on the census, but I was hoping to find your great-grandfather. The problem was your mother was wrong about his first name.

EP: That really bunged up your research, didn’t it?
PM: (shakes his head): Your mother thought your great-grandfather’s name was Gerald Phelan. As it happens, there was a Gerald Phelan living in Montreal at the time who was also a baker, which was another clue you had given me to work with—a fluke: there were two distinctive Phelan families in Montreal at the time, and I ended up following the wrong line until the genealogy didn’t add up. So I decided to use an interesting genealogy technique: city directories.

EP: What are those?
PM: They predate phone books by 60 to 100 years. Every major Canadian city had them – from Vancouver to Calgary, Winnipeg to St. John’s—even towns the size of London, Ont. They listed the head of household (usually the man or his widow), his occupation and employer. So it would say “Arthur Patrick Phelan, baker at TP Phelan Bakery,” and give his address. I looked for your father as a young man living with his father sometime in the 1960s and moved back, where I found your grandfather, Thomas, as a young man living with his father. Sure enough there he was – but his father was an AP Phelan, also a baker, who had another son, AF Phelan, who I knew was your great-uncle. Once I placed you on the other Phelan line, I moved the tree forward again, finding modern descendents of both lines, and called all of them to ask further questions.

EP: You called every Phelan?
PM: Phoning relatives is very common in genealogy. I got lucky and found that a distant relative of yours, Carol Anderson, had done the Phelan genealogy about ten years ago. She sent it to me, and there you were at the bottom of her family tree! Then I went back and reproved her genealogy.

EP: So, what clues are useful for a budding genealogist?
PM: Knowing the occupation of one’s ancestors can be very helpful; the fact we knew there was a bakery in your family was crucial. And we knew the general location of where they lived—families tended to live in the same neighborhoods, mainly because there weren’t moving trucks in the earlier part of the last century; people often lived in the same area for 100-plus years. So you can use sociological facts to help pinpoint a family’s history.

EP: What else?
PM: Knowing the street your relatives lived on helps you find the parish they lived in. You can then contact that area’s archdiocese for records.

EP: That was another exciting moment in your quest for my ancestors, wasn’t it?
PM: (laughs): The crew of Ancestors in the Attic traveled to Montreal to film at St. Patrick’s Basilica. The records were held in an old-fashioned vault. I was in there on the second floor and I didn’t notice you and the crew had left the vault to go shoot footage. When I realized both of the thick, heavy doors—with locks—were shut and that there were no air vents, I figured I had about an hour’s worth of air. I had a phone signal, so I had two choices: call for help or go to work. I went to work.

EP: You hit a gold mine, didn’t you?
PM: I found all sorts of records confirming what we knew: marriage, baptism, birth. I photographed maybe 100 pages as quickly as I could– I didn’t want you to come back and find me doing this. I was so excited! It isn’t often you get to see the actual record and photograph it. When I realized the air was getting thin, I figured I had 15 minutes before I passed out. But I still had two more books to go through. About 10 minutes later the crew showed up, and oxygen filled the room. It was extremely productive.

EP: That’s amazing! One last thing: Phelan is an unusual name. What if my name had been something common, like Smith?
PM: I wouldn’t have taken the job!