More Madness - My Lehive Line

It's another Monday and I'm still mad. Not mad as in "this makes me so angry" but mad as in "this is driving me crazy!"

Last Monday I posted about my 2nd great grandfather Martin Slattery as part of Madness Monday and now I get to post about his wife Margaret Lehive.

As I said last week, since Slattery is a fairly common name in Ireland, I opted to work on Martin's wife whose last name Lehive is fairly uncommon. What I did not anticipate were all the variations of the surname as well as the multitude of errors made by census takers in entering information and in sites like Ancestry transcribing the name.

I spent the entire week tracking down the children of John Lehive (b. abt 1833 in Ireland) here in the United States. I was able to find the name listed as Lehive, Leehive, Lehine, Lehite, Lehigh, Lechive, Sehive, and even Lihiue. As best as I can piece together from various census and military data:

John Leehive married his wife (name unknown) prior to 1861 in England. The Leehive children - John J., Dennis, Margaret and Michael - were all born in Kent or Greenwich, England between 1861 and 1870. It was shortly there after that the family arrived in the United States since John Sr. first appears in the 1880 census living in Rosendale, Ulster County, New York.

What happened between the 1880 and 1900 census is not clear - it appears as if John Sr. may have passed away. In addition, Margaret Leehive and Martin Slattery were married, had six children (Mary Slattery, Thomas Slattery, John Vincent Slattery, Martin Slattery, James Slattery and Julia Slattery) and Margaret died prior to the 1900 census.

During the early 20th century, some of the Lehive children remained in Ulster County settling in Kingston, New York while others went to work in the oil refining business in Bayonne, Hudson County, New Jersey.

So my next steps to alleviating this madness? I need to work with some UK sources to find out more about the Lehive family in England and I would love to find information on exactly when they arrived in the United States.