The chart shows what I currently know about the shoots of my wife's Powers ancestry. At the top are David Edward Powers (1857-1929) and Agnes Sullivan (1857-1936), her great-grandparents. David Edward's parents, David Powers Sr (died 1886) and Julia Callahan (died 1884) were alone at the root of the tree until March 2011, when my research associates and I discovered a sibling for David: Michael Powers (1845-1918) with wife Mary Brady (1847-1886).
Michael's eldest child, Josephine, died 22 Dec 1920 and the funeral was held two days later. A Christmas eve Utica Herald-Dispatch report named the pallbearers: John Daunt of Lacona, J.S. Powers of Watertown, James B. McIntosh of Albany, James and John Powers of Utica, Edward F. Dunn of Whitesboro. Five of the six names are in the chart and provide a wonderful means to tie the family units together. But who was James Powers of Utica?
Subsequent searches failed to identify such a family member, much as we might have liked to discover yet another branch in the tree. My best guess is that the newspaper put James and John together because they were both from Utica and then (for an unknown reason) omitted James' surname. So, probably, James Powers was in fact James E. Costello, whose family is the most likely of the three that are without a pallbearer representative to have contributed one.
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