3. Following the Trail

For the benefit of fellow researchers who read this site, how was the above information discovered? Remarkably easily, and basically in the reverse order to the way the material is presented.

Using Ancestry I did a search for Ann Eliza Birney, CTR’s mother. Almost immediately a birth came up in this name from 1855, in the records of the 2^nd Presbyterian Church of Pittsburgh. It turned out to be the daughter of Thomas and Mary Ann Birney. Thomas was Joseph Lytle Russell’s brother-in-law. They had simply named one of their children after her aunt. The 2^nd Presbyterian records showed that Thomas and Mary Ann had six children baptised there, although there are no extant records of their marriage. Still, here was definite proof that one branch of the family had been 2^nd Presbyterian.

With a little help from the Presbyterian Historical Society the church sessions records showed Joseph Lytle joined this church in 1849, and crucially that he had transferred from the 3^rd Presbyterian Church. All the surviving records for 3^rd Presbyterian are online, and conveniently past church members had compiled a rough alphabetical list of all members past and present. There were several Russells on the list – some obviously no connection - but two were. There was Joseph, who joined in 1845, and the extra big surprise, the original Charles T(ays) Russell who joined in 1834, the year the church opened. I still visually checked the complete listing of members in date order just in case the compilers had omitted a stray Russell, but they hadn’t.

Records of around 40 different Presbyterian churches in Pittsburgh are now available to online researchers, so the next step was to visually check them all. That wasn’t as difficult as it sounds – many were outside the time frame which narrowed the search considerably. But the only results found for the Russell and Birney families are in the preceeding articles. Of course, it may be that more records will surface in the future to fill missing pieces in the jigsaw.

I have a theory that maybe Ann Eliza was at one time affiliated with a Philadelphian Presbyterian Church. We know that later in her marriage she and Joseph lived in Philadelphia. We know that she had business interests there because after Joseph’s own business failed he ended up as her “agent in Philadelphia” in her will. And near the end of her life Ann and Joseph were mentioned in a Philadelphian church register. The trouble is that while Pittsburgh had around 40 Presbyterian Churches, Philadelphia had far more. If an Ancestry index doesn’t throw up any information, it would take a very long time to search them all. A VERY LONG TIME. Sometimes, life is just too short.