McIntire's & Mahaffy's in Wilmington

Do you believe in destiny?  This story is about my biological past meeting with my adoptive past.  Confused?  Let me explain.  I am adopted.  I've known my biological family for over twenty years now.  Before I started this journey, I was a Mahaffy, wondering who I was & where I came from.  Even though I have been researching for almost twenty years and have discovered many of my first queries, I have found that there is always a new question, just around the corner.  The only time I've been unable to research were the first couple of years after I lost my uncle to cancer.

In 2004, we lived in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania.  I occasionally took day trips to Wilmington, Delaware.  I knew that The McIntire family had once started out there in Colonial times.  On my final trip to The Delaware Archives in Dover, I came across a document that indicated that Thomas Mahaffy had paid rent to Michael McIntire.   I remember at the time dismissing it as nothing important, but thinking wouldn't it be interesting if my biological ancestors had known my adopted ancestors.

It seems that they did!

Until recently, I'd been unable to connect my Mahaffy to any particular area in the State of Delaware.  Census for 1850 on, indicated that his birthplace & that of his wife Sarah, was in Delaware.  I received in the mail last week a book that  I ordered titled Delaware Marriages & Deaths from Newspapers 1729-1853. Here I discovered the marriage record for Sarah J. Kirkpatrick and William A. Mahaffy at First Presbyterian on 16 Dec 1847 in Wilmington, Delaware.  Which proves to me that William was the missing son of Thomas & Margaret Mahaffy of Wilmington, as I have suspected for several years.

I also suspect that this is the church that the McIntires attended, before some of them converted to the Methodist Church.  Michael McIntire's wife, Ann, was buried at Old Asbury Methodist Church in Wilmington in 1813.  I've never been able to find a stone or burial place for any other McIntires.