Surname Saturday - Conner

Today I’m going to talk about my Conner family. Not the offshoots and other surnames- just Conner. Before I jump the pond, I want to figure out everything they were doing here. I know some. But I also know there are some holes to fill in and I wonder if assumptions have been made, so I’m starting from scratch. This is the first line I started with and I may have taken some things at face value. I’ll start with the first two, as I actually knew the rest and have a lot of records on them. These first two, I mostly have stories and census info. Not much else.

William Conner. William was born in Scotland and immigrated to Iowa in 1880 and died in 1885 in What Cheer, Iowa. This is not where his son Thomas was at the time.
For Follow-up: Son’s birth record to prove William as father. Find him in Scotland. Find his immigration records/ship list. Find death record/burial. Find what he was doing in What Cheer. Find other children. Find marriage info.

Thomas Conner. Thomas was born 22 June 1842 in Scotland and married to Janet Mason on 04 Oct 1861 in Barony, Lanarkshire, Scotland. Since his son said that he came to the US in 1872 when he was 6 months old, we assume that Thomas and Janet came at that same time. We do know that in 1880, he was in the Cass, Wapello, Iowa census. We were told that he was naturalized and that he worked in a coal mine (not sure if in Scotland or US) and was Presbyterian. He died 4 May 1920 in Madrid, Boone, Iowa.
For Follow-up: Birth records for him and Janet. Marriage records. Immigration and naturalization records. What was he doing in Cass? What coal mines- Scotland or US? Check Presbyterian records and historical info. Death records.

So these will be my searching for the next week or so. My Google class with Lisa Louise Cooke is today, so Grandpa Conners will be my guinea pigs.