Tracing lineage reveals web of history

When Mimi Patrick's great-grandmother traveled West, she came disguised as a man. She came alone by wagon train and needed the security.

Johanna Brockenauer - Patrick guessed how to spell her ancestor's last name - originally immigrated from Alsace Lorraine, Germany.

Patrick was one of 13 people who attended a genealogy workshop Saturday at the Historic Fourth Ward School in Virginia City. The afternoon sunlight filtered under the green vinyl window shades on the third floor. Through the back windows of the school was a view of yellow hills and a hazy blue sky.

"I'm curious to see if I'm related to any other people in Virginia City," said Patrick, of Gold Hill.

Patrick is a potter and executive director of St. Mary's Art Center. While waiting for directions, she had doodled lines and triangles on the brown paper spread over the tables, which rustled beneath elbows.

Her grandfather was a breakman on the Virginia & Truckee Railroad but he left here and raised his family in Reno. Patrick, 63, whipped out her "pedigree chart" and used that as a guide to fill out the ancestral chart handed out by the Fourth Ward School Foundation.

She has other interesting stories - her great-grandfather Robert Gracey took a clipper ship from the Isle of Man, in the Irish Sea, to Central America.

"He walked across the isthmus of Panama and then took another clipper ship to San Francisco and then walked to Virginia City in 1890," Patrick said.

Inside a red binder she had an old photo of her great grandfather, maybe cut out of a newspaper, posing inside the Old 62 Bar, where he worked as a bartender.

The last names of people in the workshop were written in cursive with white chalk across the blackboard. Ron Gallagher, 63, who is on the school foundation board of directors, pointed to those names and said many people just in the room are related. His mother was a Wilson, one of the names on the board.

"We thought people's interest in genealogy would bring them here," he said.

The foundation's goal is to gather enough ancestral information to make a "spider web linking families from the Fourth Ward, Virginia City and Gold Hill."

John Flanagan, of Virginia City, had his chart filled in up to his great-grandparents' names, then most of the lines were blank.

"It would be a good thing for the school to have the records, mine and other people's who attended the school," he said.

Barbara Mackey, the executive director of the museum, said these workshops have several purposes. One is to bring people back to the school, get connected and another is to preserve oral histories.

Contact Becky Bosshart at bbosshart@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1212.