Extended family makes connections These are some of the resources that James Crone is using to compile information on his family's history (photo by H. Marc Larson ). Family's Green Bay history long-lived like city's By Anna Krejci News-Chronicle Family trees can be tangled, complicated things. Just ask Jim Crone and Marian Murphy. Crone of Green Bay and Murphy of Oakland, Calif., recently discovered their family ties to one another after years of genealogical research. In 1992 Crone, now 79, began researching his family history. He collected newspaper clippings about the relatives who shared his last name - he found their names in the birth and death records pages of a massive Bible given to his grandfather during the Christmas of 1884. In 2001 a great-aunt to Marian Murphy, now 50, died, and Murphy inherited her great-aunt's genealogical research. Her aunt's research provided no further information about the Crone family past the U.S. Census of 1860. Based on the ancestors' names listed in the family tree she had constructed and a 1930 Census she researched, she located Jim Crone. As a result of the connection, Crone discovered he had several great-aunts, one that lived in his childhood neighborhood. Crone remembered answering the telephone last year when Murphy first contacted him. The voice on the line asked Crone if he had a great-grandfather named John, which Crone confirmed. "For a minute I thought maybe somebody's trying to make some money," he said. Murphy said she was happy to have located Crone, although he was not the first estranged relative with whom she connected. "I found that most people that I've contacted happen to be coincidentally interested," Murphy said. Having sifted through documents tracing where and when her ancestors have moved across the country, Murphy has devised some theories about their lives to accompany the dates of deaths and places of residence for which she has documentation. She believes her great-great-great-grandfather's family moved from Iowa to Green Bay to help Jim Crone's branch of the family after his great-grandfather, serving in the infantry, died from disease in Nashville, Tenn. in 1865, according to Murphy's research. "I feel like an historian but I also feel like I'm sharing the family's joys and sorrows along the way," Murphy said. To think that a father of six children spent his last Christmas at home in 1864 and never returned, "it just tore me apart," she said. Murphy also believes her great-great-great-grandfather taught Jim's grandfather, Joshua, the carpentry trade. Joshua Crone in turn raised his son, Norman Crone, as a carpenter and began J&N Crone Contractors in Green Bay. Jim Crone has a book of projects the Crone builders worked on. According to one newspaper article clipping he had collected, the Crone business built the Empire Building on the corner of Washington and Walnut streets. "They built the homes from the bottom up," Crone said. Jim's father, Norman, was a cement-mixer and his uncle, Walter, was a tinsmith who installed the eaves. While the city of Green Bay is celebrating its founding 150 years ago in 1854, Crone can revel in his family's Green Bay ties dating back at least 140 years when military records show his great-grandfather was drafted into the 13th Infantry while living in Green Bay. Crone said he has lived in Green Bay all of his life - except for the time he served overseas in World War II - and worked an ice cream route for Kemps Dairy, which had been Fairmont Foods. "Evidently we all enjoyed living in Green Bay, except for the cold weather for me," he said of his ancestors. Murphy, first exposed to genealogy in a 1976 women's history class at the City College of San Francisco and a second time in 1988 as a student in a family sociology course at San Francisco State University, has never visited Crone in the far-off land her research has taken her. Nevertheless, she said, "I feel a special connection to Green Bay now that I know what my relatives have contributed to it through their labor, love and military service." "There's more to history in Green Bay than the Packers," she said. Crone has five children and seven grandchildren that he hopes will take an interest in the pictures and research he has collected. He said that perhaps the new homes being built lack space for archiving. "They don't have closets and old rooms to store it," he said. At the same time busy lives leave little room for a look back at family history. "People don't have time nowadays but they should take time to find out about their past," Crone said. He himself does not have much time to track his history because he likes to see his grandchildren compete in sports, although one of his goals is to find out exactly where in Preble it was that his great-grandfather lived. He knows his grandfather lived at 1609 Cedar St., which is still standing, he said. His grandfather's previous house, built in 1854, stood on the corner of Morrow and Forest streets in Green Bay. Murphy's goal is to trace the Crone family roots to relations outside of the United States. Her research has come to a halt in New Jersey of 1820 with the marriage of Gabriel Crone and Charity Stackhouse.