You may have never heard of Tom Tryniski, who's scanned and uploaded millions of newspaper pages to his free website, Fultonhistory.com. But if you have ancestral connections in the state of New York, you'll want to learn more about the man and his work. Tryniski's commitment to providing free newspaper images is incredible.  Columbia  Journalism Review featured a recent story: www.cjr.org/the_profile/tom-tryniski-fultonhistory.php. Reading the article combined with curiosity about Tryniski's website reminded me of two things:

1) A fact from Bartholomew Hickey's 1900 obituary: Emigrating from Ireland in the 1840s, Bartholomew "located in Oneida County, NY, where he remained until 1853."

2) A photo posted on Ancestry (circa 1940, shown here with its not-exactly-accurate caption):  L to R: - Mary Hickey Lynch, Bid Hickey Murphy, Margaret Hickey, Relative from Utica, NY Mary Dewyer [sic]

From other posted pictures, I believe the "relative from New York" is the woman second from right, in the dark-print dress, and Margaret Hickey is pictured at far right.

Here are a few other germane facts gained from my decade of research:

• Bartholomew was a brother of my husband's great-grandfather, Patrick Hickey.
• Bartholomew had three daughters, all born in Minnesota: Mary (1864), Margaret (1865) , and Bridget Eileen "Bid" (1870).
• Bartholomew and Patrick's mother was Margaret O'Dwyer Hickey.
• Utica is the county seat of Oneida County.

Could the fourth woman be a cousin? Might a Dwyer relative have remained in Oneida County and raised a family? From the photo, I've postulated that Mary Dwyer 1) never married, 2) is approximately the same age as her "cousins," and 3) since she had the means to travel to Minnesota in 1940, she'd had a professional career. Could the Fultonhistory website help me connect the dots? I won't kid you. The website isn't easy to negotiate and requires some patience, but "there's gold in them thar hills."

My "Mary Dwyer, Utica" query brought up four results. One is extremely hard to read, and two others don't appear to be the right person.

But could the clipping pictured here, from the Utica (NY) Herald-Dispatch, dated November 20, 1913, be the "right" Miss Mary Dwyer?

Might she have been elected as an assistant secretary of the New York state charities and corrections conference?

The pictured Dwyer cousin could have been in her 40s in 1913.

Tweaking the query slightly to "M Dwyer, Utica," I found a 1907 article about a teacher's training course in nearby Clinton, NY, which named Margaret M. Dwyer, Utica. Oh no. Might her full name be Margaret Mary Dwyer, named after her grandmother? Will I spend the remainder of the day looking at old newspapers on Fultonhistory.com?