Adventures In Irish Civil Registration

 

Baltinglass, County Wicklow

     Today's project was to find the civil registration of the birth of Mary Quigley, the daughter of James Quigley and his wife Anne McGarr.  Anne was a sister of my great-great-grandmother Maria McGarr from Ballyraggan, Kildare.  Six years ago I followed a DNA match on Ancestry and ultimately learned, to my surprise, Anne had come to America around 1890, many years after her sister Maria; settling in Rochester, twenty-seven miles from Maria in Manchester, New York.  Anne appears in Rochester city directories and in census records as a widow.  I've been trying to find the exact date Anne's husband James died.  The death registration I believe was his is dated 1869 and is included in the index at irishgenealogy.ie, but images of death registrations only go back to 1871 on that site.  I've been waiting for earlier dates to be added, but so far no luck. Grasping at straws I hoped something in Mary's birth registration, also in the year 1869, might hold a clue to James' death, though I doubted it. 

     Oddly, while I found the birth registrations of two of Mary's brothers, John in 1864, (the year registrations began), and Daniel in 1866, I couldn't find Mary's in 1869.  I have her baptism record so I knew the year was right; I decided I was going to find that registration!  I went to the site, typed in her name and exact birth year, then hit search.  I didn't fill in the box for registration district which should have been Baltinglass, I'd done that before with no results, so this time I left it blank.  Thankfully only fourteen possibilities came up, many of which were in places I knew couldn't be her.  There was one however, for a birth in "Balrothery" a place I'd never heard of.  I clicked on the link and there at the very bottom of the page was Mary Quigley, daughter of James Quigley and Anne "McGaw" -- in Baltinglass.  How on earth anyone could mistake Baltinglass for Balrothery is quite beyond my comprehension, but there we are. 

     The registration said Mary was born 15 April of 1869 which is at odds with her baptism record which puts her birth at 30 April with her baptism on 2 May.  I would guess 30 April is the correct date for Mary's birth. It would be unusual to wait over two weeks to baptize an infant at that time and place.  A woman named Kate Heydon supplied the information to the registrar, the same woman also registered Daniel Quigley's birth in 1866, making me wonder if she was a midwife?  I don't have any Heydon's in my tree so I doubt she was a relative. The really revealing bit of information in Mary's registration appeared in the column for father, written there was, "James Quigley, deceased".

     That bit of information very much agreed with the 1869 death in the index. There were only two hits in the search for James' death record, one in 1955 and one in the first quarter of 1869.  The year 1869 obviously had to be the right one.  He must have died just a few months before Mary's birth.  Now I was exceedingly curious, how had he died at a relatively young age?  And why was the darn image not available?  I checked at Family Search but they had no image of the registration either leaving me only one option, I ordered it.  The site was amusing, it apologized for the wait time of, (get this), 30 days.  Clearly they have never dealt with New York State where one can expect to wait endlessly for a response.  It took them an entire year one time to fulfill a request of mine, while charging $20 for their trouble.  I can do 30 days standing on my head, research copies of Irish certificates are a bargain and one doesn't grow old waiting for them.  Given the current state of the US postal system I opted to have the results emailed to me.  I now anxiously await the response!