Mary Mahoney and Kate Lyden constitute two of the most difficult ancestors I have traced and they happen to be mother and daughter.

Mary Mahoney is my maternal great-great-great grandmother. She married three times, and her daughter Kate, was my great-great-grandmother. My own own grandmother, told me many stories of Kate growing up, of the bar she owned with her second husband and the fire that claimed it at some point in my grandmother’s childhood–I would imagine in the late 1940s.

Despite the heavy family connection, I know less about Mary and Kate than I do about some of the other ancestors. Their records are messy and a mix of family tales and mistakes on various documents. Kate used several forms of her name throughout her life and Mary’s three marriages make it difficult to track her before 1890, particularly since the first two were short-lived.

So I’m going to take them apart, piece by piece: Their birth records and family, their marriages, children, deaths, and information about how they lived.