I’ve adapted Amy Johnson Crow’s 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks challenge.
Each week I follow my children’s ahnentafel numbering to select the featured ancestor, ensuring no one through the mid–sixth generation is left behind.

52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks: 2026 Week 26: A Hard Choice

Introduction

My Week 26 ancestor is Francis William Carey. Great Grandpa’s hard choice may not have been made once. It may have been made again and again over the course of a long marriage.

Leaving Home Young

Frank was the ninth of thirteen children in a large Irish immigrant family in rural New Jersey. He moved to Manhattan as a teenager to work. This shows early independence and suggests he was no stranger to difficult transitions.

Marriage Was Not Always Simple

He married a girl from near his hometown, so clearly he visited home, and they settled in Manhattan. The family story is that Nanny and Great Grandpa frequently split up and got back together. Nanny would send one of the boys to collect money from him as needed.  

In one census year, Nanny and the children appear in the household, but Francis does not. I do not yet know whether that absence reflects work, separation, circumstance, or something else — but it fits with the family memory that their marriage had difficult seasons.

The hard choice may have been one they both faced: whether to keep finding their way back to each other.

I am glad they did, as their later marriage seems to have been a good one.

It is easy, from a distance, to flatten a marriage into a single sentence: they stayed together, or they did not. But real marriages are lived day by day, through work, money, children, pride, disappointment, forgiveness, and ordinary exhaustion. A census can show us who was under one roof on one particular day. It cannot tell us everything that happened before or after that moment.

Figure 1 Nanny, Great Grandpa, and their great grandchildren at their 60th wedding anniversary

The photograph from their 60th wedding anniversary does not erase the difficult seasons, but it does remind me that their story was larger than those seasons. In the end, they reached 66 years of marriage.

It is tempting to treat a 66-year marriage as a simple success story. But family history rarely fits so neatly. Sometimes longevity does not mean a life was easy. Sometimes it means people made the hard choice, more than once, to keep going.

AI Disclosure

This post was created by me with the help of AI tools. While AI helps organize research, the storytelling and discoveries are my own.

Next Week’s Topic: A Record I Read Differently Now