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!

The British Army?

 

Recruiting Poster

     World War 1, The Great War, was an entirely different sort of war than the world had seen before.  The invention of  modern weaponry made old methods of fighting impractical, protection on the battlefield was now essential.  In September of 1914 the first trenches were dug to shield soldiers from gas and automatic gunfire; by war's end the landscape would be defiled by over 30,000 miles of them.  Life in the trenches was hellish, rains filled them with muddy water, latrines overflowed, rats and disease abounded.  Ever vigilant enemy snipers picked soldiers off with disturbing regularity, even in quiet periods death was always present as were the graves located within the flooding trenches.  

     It was in those trenches at the western front my second cousin twice removed, John White, fought in WW 1.  John was born in County Wexford on 24 April 1889, later living in County Kilkenny with his parents John White and Bridget Neville before moving to England where he was employed as a constable in Liverpool.  His photograph at right in uniform, his policeman's helmet resting on his leg, shows a confident, self assured, young man.

     At the outbreak of war John enlisted with the 1st Brigade of the Irish Guards in England (there was only one brigade then).  He landed in France the 13th of August in 1914, joining what would eventually total almost 140,000 other Irishmen. I found it difficult to understand why they chose to do that, and why John in particular?  After all, he was not in economic need as some of the Irish enlistees were.  A laborer in Ireland could easily double his income by joining up, making enlistment an attractive option for him, but John had a good job. Was it a misguided feeing of patriotism, or could it have been the words of John Redmond that inspired him?

     Ireland was deeply divided at that time between nationalists who wanted freedom for Ireland and unionists who demanded Ireland remain part of the British Empire.  John Redmond, leader of the nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party, encouraged Irish enlistment as a way to avoid the imposition of conscription in Ireland, improve relations between the opposing sides and bolster the Irish Home Rule legislation which had recently been passed, but suspended for the duration of the war.  Redmond's pro-enlistment declaration in September of 1914, supporting the British war effort, enraged the Irish Volunteers and Irish Republican Brotherhood, resulting in a splintering of Redmond's Irish Party.  Less than two years later, the IRB along with the Irish Volunteers, and the Irish Citizen Army staged the Easter Rising in Dublin. 

      John was no rebel, however.  I've seen no evidence he was a member of the Irish Party, indeed, his father and grandfather had both been members of the RIC in Ireland and John, in addition to sharing their names, seems to have followed in their footsteps; joining the constabulary and in his case, enlisting in the British Army.  In that way, John found himself at the western front.  The picture at right shows a very different man from the one above.  John's armband, bearing the letters SB, identifies him as a stretcher bearer.  The haggard, haunted expression on his face speaks to the trauma of war and the suffering he certainly witnessed as he carried the wounded and dying from the fighting, all the while doing his best to survive in the trenches with his health and sense intact.

     I don't imagine I'll ever know John's reasons for enlisting.  I admit to having mixed feelings about this branch of the White family. My sympathies lie with the Irish Brotherhood and the others fighting for Ireland's freedom, which is not to say I can't summon any for John and his comrades. They too suffered.  John lost his life the tenth of October 1917 in a rain soaked place called Poelcappelle in Flanders, Belgium.  The War Diary of the Irish Guards, in the British National Archives, recorded that on that day, "the enemy sniped our front line continuously and caused us casualties". That may well be how John was killed.  A fellow soldier who survived the battle left this description of it's beginning early on the morning of the 9th--

We stood in the rain looking towards the line.  It was still very dark...suddenly, on every side of us and above us a tremendous uproar arose, the ground shook beneath us; for a moment we felt battered and dizzy.  The horizon was lit up with a sheet of flashes; gold and red rockets raced madly into the sky...

     John was awarded the British Victory Medal and Military Medal, he was buried at Artillery Wood Cemetery in Belgium.  Records available online merely state he was killed in action.