A genealogical saga

Only a genealogist could get all worked up about this: Late one night as I searched Rootsweb's online database of California births and deaths, I decided to see if I could figure out when my great-great uncle Edward Riehm died. He had lived in Sacramento for a number of years, but disappeared from its city directory in 1946.
So I searched with the data I had: Father's surname, Riehm; mother's maiden name, Sullivan. No match.
I tried several variations of Riehm (Reihm, Rheim, Rhiem) with no success.
Then I just entered Edward Riehm without a mother's maiden name. And there was Edward R. Riehm, father's surname Riehm, mother's surname... Burke.
Well, this just couldn't be! I told myself. Or could it?
I'd already barked up the wrong family tree once before trying to find Mary's ancestors. This is due to a peculiar combination of circumstances that had Mary hiding behind not only her (second?) husband's surname, but her (step)father's and then having a pseudonym slapped on the family by either her first husband or a brother-in-law.
Mary had an actress sister known as Maggie Moore. She turned up in Alfred R. Doten's Journals as being the sister-in-law of Mott Riehm, my great-great grandfather. It seemed self-evident: the family's named Moore, start with that. Some nice people in Australia did some look-ups on their CD-ROM indexes of births, deaths and marriages and turned up a family in Sydney who had daughters named Mary and Margaret, born in approximately the correct years. Their mother's last name was Johnson, and her mother's last name was Ross.
Then I sauntered down to the California State Library in Sacramento, where I was living at the time, and found that Maggie Moore was one of the people who had a biographical file. In the file I found clippings that indicated that Moore was not the family name, but rather it was Sullivan. Moore, they said, was the name of an actor who married one of Maggie's older sisters -- it may well have been Mary. Maggie had adopted it; so did her brother James; and the press was inclined to call everyone related to her Moore whether they used it or not.
So I deleted the Moores and started with the Sullivans. The 1852 California Census told me that James' wife was named Bridget, and that they had three daughters born in Sydney: Mary, Delia and Ellen. It didn't take long to turn up records of James Sullivan married to Bridget Whelan and three daughters named Mary, Bridget (of which Delia is a derivation) and Ellen. The subsequent records I have found confirms that Bridget's maiden name was indeed Whelan.
The only trouble was that the Mary Sullivan I'd found was born in March 1843, not March 1844, as indicated in her death notice published in the San Francisco Call and backed up by her ages given in the 1852 California census and the 1880 Nevada census. Well, typos happen, I decided. However, it puzzled me that it took so long -- at least a year and a half after Mary's birth -- for James and Bridget to get married. Oh well, I said to myself, they're convicts -- anything's possible.
Even having Mary bearing another surname.
Next thing I did was to search for everyone with a father's surname of Riehm and mother's surname Burke. And there was Grace Dezarate, Edward's sister, who also died in San Francisco.
Mind you, the records have the birthdates a little off. I think Edward R. Riehm was actually born in 1873, not 1872 -- if the 1872 birthdate were correct, then he was born three months before the death of his elder brother Edward R. Riehm. And Grace's was listed as 1881, when it was actually 1871. Also, I didn't know her surname, but had been told it was "something Spanish."
My source did know that her husband's first name was Al. So I looked up Al Dezarate.
There he was... Albert O. Dezarate, died in 1958.
Since there aren't that many Riehms floating around this part of the country, and since all the clues matched, I had to make some adjustments to my mental furniture. I'd worked and worked and worked on the Sullivan genealogy for quite some time, and only recently came to believe I'd found where James Sullivan came from, who his father was, and who two of his brothers were. He may be a sheep thief, but dammit, he was MY sheep thief! None of the information about Maggie Moore called Mary her half-sister, or made reference to any half-sister. On the other hand, James Sullivan would have come into her life when she was very small and would have been the only father she remembered. On the other otherhand, she does not seem to have gone by Mary Sullivan -- her children evidently knew she was Mary Burke.
I had also wondered, without connecting the thought to the puzzle of James and Bridget's late marriage, why Mary named two of her sons Edward Redmond. Not that she gave two of them the same name -- that was so common in the 19th century that I scarcely batted an eyelash at it (Edward Redmond Riehm I died in November 1872 and Edward Redmond Riehm II was born in August 1873) -- but I didn't understand Redmond. Where did they get Redmond? I wondered. Mattias Riehm's parents had both been born in Cologne, Germany, so he wasn't likely to have Redmond as a family name.
But armed with the information that Mary Sullivan was possibly Mary Burke, I searched the New South Wales births, deaths and marriages index for a birth record of Mary Burke.
And there it was, a record for the birth of Mary Burke in 1844 ... mother Bridget, father Redmond.
It would appear to me that I am finally on the right track, that Mary Sullivan was actually Mary Burke.
But the way things have been going lately, that's not my final answer.

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My link to the Burkes (the numbers are Ahnentafel numbers)

1 Me
3 Margaret Helen RIEHM
6 John Rex RIEHM Sr
12 John M. RIEHM
25 Mary A. BURKE

At this time, I don't have any further Burke information. Mary Burke/Sullivan's descendants are included in the Sullivan genealogy.