Yes, I know the proper spelling for "scary," the synonym of frightening. It's just an eerie coincidence that today I encountered the name "Scarry" in the 1860 U.S. Federal Census. This morning I was revisiting census records for the Quinn brothers, my husband's great-great uncles. James Quinn, born about 1826, was probably the oldest of six brothers who left Ireland with their widowed mother in 1850. By the late 1850s they'd settled in Dakota County, Minnesota. What ultimately happened to three of the brothers - James, Martin and Patrick - remains a mystery to me.

I was taking a closer look at the 1860 census, which reports James married and living in Inver Grove Township with his wife Bridget and young daughters Mary and Margaret. The screenshot at right shows what I'd overlooked before: on one side of the Quinn household lived Nicholas Scurry and on the other side lived Thomas, Mary and Michael Scurry.

I'll bet a dollar Bridget Quinn's maiden name was Scurry. Scurry isn't a surname with which I'm familiar. Grenham's analysis of Griffitth's data indicates most Scurry households were in Kilkenny and Waterford counties. What happened to the Scurry family in Minnesota? I wasn't immediately able to find much about them. In fact, almost nothing resulted from my first Ancestry query. No Nicholas Scurry in the 1860 census, despite what I'd just viewed. The surname had been transcribed on Ancestry as "Scarry" even though it clearly looks like "Scurry" to me.

Happy Halloween!