Well That Was Way Off

    

                                                                                                                             Wikimedia Commons

     Have you ever begun research on a family and come to conclusions about that family only to have those conclusions completely upended?  That has been my experience with the White family of County Laois, or Queens County as it was known at the time they resided there.  Conclusion is probably too strong a word, it was more of a perception based on a census record indicating my great-great-grandfather James White could neither read nor write and the eventual loss of his farm to public auction.  Taken together they set an image in my mind of a poor, struggling immigrant.  Remember, at that time I was new to genealogical research and believed census records, as official government documents, were factual in every way.  I now know that is a far cry from reality.  For instance, I have yet to read a census record that has a correct date of immigration for any of my ancestors.

     My ideas about James began to change the day I found his naturalization papers, both his application and his final papers.  It was evident to me he had signed them himself.  The personal information contained in the documents was handwritten by a clerk, but the signature at the bottom was clearly in a different hand.  I saw that Grandpa James had a very distinctive way of forming the letter J in his name and it differed from that in the body of the document.  The letter J in the signatures was identical on both instruments, that was an eye opener!  

                  Signature bottom right, the J differs from that in the first sentence.

In going back to re-examine those census records I found that only one of them, the 1880, listed him as illiterate.  Somehow, I missed that.

     Then there were the Irish records.  It's only fairly recently I've discovered James' home county and parish.  Even at that, James White is not an uncommon name in the area around Rathdowney and I was never quite sure which James White belonged in my tree.  Looking at Tithe Applotments, Griffith's Valuation, etc... I originally discounted some of the individuals as unlikely, James White the baker?  That record couldn't be Grandpa James' father, who was also named James, or his grandfather could it?  But there was also DNA evidence, strongly indicating that a John White from the same place as Grandpa James was his brother.  That John White was a member of the RIC, which did not thrill me, but John must have been literate.

     Yesterday I received the death certificates of a James White and his wife Margaret who died in Donaghmore Parish in Queens County in the 1870's.  I know from James' marriage record in Palmyra, New York that his parents were James White and Margaret Keyes.  I cannot say with absolute certainty these are the correct certificates of  my James and Margaret, but the names, dates, and place match so there is a good chance.  When Margaret died in 1872 in Ballycoolid, her certificate states she was the wife of a farmer.  The informant was James White.  When James died, he was listed as a widower with the occupation of land surveyor.  What?  After some digging on the net, I found that there were any number of "amateur" surveyors during that era.  James the elder could well have been both a farmer and a surveyor--and may have been literate if that was the case.  The informant on James' death certificate was Julia White, a name I've come across before in my White research.  In Palmyra a woman named Mary Fitzpatrick from Ireland, living with Grandpa James' sister Catherine, was, (from her later marriage record), the daughter of a Julia White and her tombstone reads, "Born In Queens Co. Ireland".

     I've learned a lot from the evolving story of James White.  It's easy to make the assumption that post famine immigrants like James were seeking a better life in America due to things like landlord oppression, poverty, lack of education, or the wherewithal to attain one.  And in some cases that is true.  But it's also true that social and economic conditions at home were not conducive to even an educated Catholic doing as well there as he could abroad, so leaving may have seemed a smart choice.  Which reminds me of the answer my favorite Irish bartender gave me when I asked him if he didn't miss Ireland.  To my surprise he grinned at me and replied, "America, land of opportunity".