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.

These Aren't Even My Relatives For Pete's Sake

 

     I wonder how many other researchers do this?  I follow a family member, one I'm not directly descended from, in the hopes that something about my direct ancestor will turn up in their records.  I follow them through their childhood, their marriages, and the births of their children. I follow their career choices, accomplishments and tragedies. Then that peripheral relative of mine dies.  Do I then stop following their surviving spouse?  The one who isn't related to me?  Of course not!  At this point I'm invested, I've probably spent weeks living with these people, I have to know how their story ends.

     Today was a prime example.  I've been trying to figure out who were the parents of Daniel Gray who married my second great-grand-aunt Phebe Galloway in Phelps, New York on New Years Day in 1851.  Both Daniel and Phebe died while their three children were still quite young but I don't know exactly when.  They were last seen in the 1850 census of Phelps, both living with Phebe's parents Russell and Hattie Moore Galloway though they weren't yet married.  Daniel was employed at Russell Galloway's mill that year and resided with him and his family.

     The children of Daniel and Phebe were Charles Henry born in 1852, George Edward born in 1854, and Ella Harriet born in 1856.  I would no doubt find them in the New York State 1855 census, but it appears they had moved to Wayne County by that time, as had Phebe's parents, and the Wayne County census for that year is not online though it can be found at the historian's office for towns beginning with letters A-P.  Several years ago I found Russell in Arcadia in 1855 but Phebe and Dan were not with him.  At that time I wasn't aware of Phebe's marriage to Daniel so I hadn't looked for any Grays in Arcadia.  A surname index for 1855 online shows two Gray families in Arcadia and I believe one of them was "my" Gray family.  At some point I will have to visit the historian.  I've found no mention of Phebe in her parent's or sibling's records after her marriage, so that left the records of her children and of Daniel's parents to be searched, if I only knew who they were.

     I found a David Gray, also living in Phelps at the same time as Daniel and Phebe, who had a son listed in the 1840 census of the right age to be Daniel.  Being a head of household only census I couldn't be sure I had the right family but it was worth checking out.  Unfortunately, I could find no connection between David and Daniel.  Then a fellow researcher with ties to David Gray messaged me that Daniel and Phebe's middle child George Edward could be found with Hannah and Jesse Cole in Hannibal, New York in the 1860 census and that Hannah Cole's maiden name was Gray.  That was promising! That year Dan and Phebe's daughter Ella resided with her Galloway grandparents in Wolcott, New York and Charles was living with John Arnot and his wife Livona Douglas in Huron, New York, not far from Wolcott.  I can't find any connection with that couple and the Grays or Galloways, but at age eight I wouldn't think Charles was working for them.  An online surname index for the Wayne 1865 census here, shows the Arnots still in Huron, but nobody by the name of Gray.

     After much searching, I finally found the man I believe to be Daniel Gray's father living in the town of Ulysses in Tompkins County, New York in 1830; Edward Gray, also a miller, who was granted a patent in 1840 for an improvement to the grinding mechanism of grist mills.  Edward had another son, Jacob S. Gray, who was also a miller as you recall was Daniel.  Edward was living in Kane County, Illinois in 1850 where he presumably died sometime before 1857, the year his second wife, Sophronia Harriman married George Holliday.  The 1850 census of Illinois showed Hannah from New York, (the future Mrs. Cole who would later take in Daniel's son George), living with her father Edward that year. 

     It's Hannah and her family I've been looking at today.  It seems she returned to New York where she had older siblings living and married Jesse Cole in Cayuga County. The New York census of 1865 showed her there in Cayuga with Jesse and their three children and gave her birth county as Tompkins, linking her further to Edward Gray.  The poor soul had three children, all of whom she outlived, and died in a horrible accident when her clothing caught fire.  She raised Raymond C. King, the child of her daughter Ida after Ida's death and he too would perish before Hannah, at age twenty-four.  Part of her obituary reads,  …her early life was passed in the western states but on losing both parents she came to the town of Throop at about age 18 to reside with her brother Jacob Gray who was proprietor of a mill in that place.  The obituary confirms she was living in a western state, like Illinois, and sounds as if her mother had died there, but given the vagaries of newspapers I would need more proof of that.  Hannah was born in 1833 so if she left Illinois at age 18 Edward must have died around 1852.

     I felt terrible for Hannah, and for Jesse.  Losing all their children and their grandson; it was too much. What on earth had happened to Raymond?  And where was his father Ellery King?  I had to know.

     Using the website Old Fulton Postcards and the New York State Death Index I found Raymond died in 1914 in Ulysses in Tompkins County, where Hannah had been born.  What was he doing in Tompkins County?  His obituary gave his cause of death as tuberculosis and mentioned his father Ellery lived in Syracuse, so I began looking for Ellery.  I found him in Syracuse in 1910 living in a boarding house, while he claimed to be married no spouse was with him.  I found his marriage record to Louise McKinley in 1913 and they are together in the 1915 NYS census in Syracuse so perhaps the 1910 census is in error. No obituary has turned up yet but I doubt it would contain any information about his former father-in-law or Daniel Gray.

      I still don't have definite proof Daniel Gray was the son of Edward but I strongly believe he was.  None of Daniel's sibling's obituaries mention him, but early twentieth century newspapers rarely gave the names of predeceased brothers.  That's another reason I need to see Daniel in the NYS 1855 census, that census gave the birth county for those born in New York State.  If his entry says Tompkins, I will be ready to close the book on Daniel.

     

     

     

Update To The Sad Story of Ellen Hennessey & Edward Welch

      

Welch monument in St. Anne's Cemetery Palmyra, NY

     This tale began with a blog about Oliver Ryan, the only child of my second great-grand-uncle Cornelius Ryan. Cornelius came to America from the townland of Golden Garden in South Tipperary with his parents Alice O'Dwyer and Cornelius Ryan Sr. in 1860, settling in Palmyra, New York.  Cornelius met another young immigrant, Anne Hennessey, there in Palmyra and the two were wed in 1869 at St. Anne's Catholic Church in the village.  The following year their son Oliver was born.  Tragically, Cornelius passed away when Oliver was seven and his mother Anne when he was eight.

     In surrogate court held at Lyons, New York, Ellen Hennessey Welch, a sister of Oliver's mother, was named his guardian along with her husband Edward Welch.  Tragedy struck Oliver's young world once again when Ellen died shortly after that.  To say Ellen's much older husband Edward was undone by her death would be an understatement, the grief stricken man fatally shot himself on her grave on 25 May 1879.

     Not surprisingly, newspapers of the time were less than accurate with the facts.  One reported Edward shot himself two weeks after her death, others remained silent on the timing.  I knew two weeks wasn't accurate because Edward had made his will on April 22nd, a will in which he left everything  to Oliver, making no mention of Ellen at all so she had to have been gone by that time.  Yesterday, I couldn't stand staying at home any longer, I had to do some genealogy!  Outdoors of course.  So I drove to the cemetery where Ellen was buried.  And I stayed there, walking up and down until I found her and Edward.  For some reason I hadn't noted the location of their stone on my last visit and the dates on it were so heavily encrusted with lichen back then that I couldn't read much of it.  Yesterday I came prepared with a soft toothbrush and a squirt bottle of water.

     It cleaned up quite well, the photo looks even better than the stone actually.  In the first blog I theorized Ellen had died earlier in April before Edward made his will.  Looking at the photo above you can see it says Ellen passed on Mar 31, 1879.  Edward's epitaph below looks like it says May 29th was the date of his death, though newspapers maintain he shot himself on the 25th.  However, several also report he was still alive when he was found lying unconscious on Ellen's grave so perhaps he lingered a few days before joining her in the afterlife.

     I don't know why it took me so long to go back to the cemetery, but I'm glad I did, it was wonderful to get out!

     

Epigenetics, DNA, And How Did I know That?

     One of my earliest childhood memories is of my mother laughing when she served me a salad with dinner.  Why did that amuse her?  Because invariably the first thing I would do is remove the onions from the salad and place them in my mashed potatoes with a large dollop of butter.  At times some of the lettuce found its way in as well.  It seemed the most natural thing in the world to me, onions belonged in mashed potatoes didn't they?  While we consumed large quantities of mashed potatoes in my family, I had never seen anyone else do this, in fact my parents both found it quite odd, but I was very fond of it.

     Fast forward to my young adulthood.  While browsing Irish recipes for a traditional meal to prepare on St. Patrick's Day I came across a recipe for something called Champ.  The ingredients were potatoes, butter, milk and...scallions or onions!  My mind went back to those family dinners and my childhood version of Champ.  Would it be fanciful to think it could be genetic memory?  I admit it's a trivial thing, but still, I wondered.  I actually looked up the history of Champ, finding it had been eaten in Ireland as early as the 1700's.

     The whole idea of inherited memory is a controversial subject with some scientists dismissing it outright while others believe there is a basis to consider it.  Perhaps memory isn't even the right word to use, it's more of a feeling.  Experiments done with mice have shown that rodents who were trained to avoid a certain scent passed that aversion on to their offspring.  In another study, mice trained to navigate a certain maze were also able to pass that ability on.  That being the case, why couldn't pleasant sensations, like that generated by eating delicious potatoes and onions, pass to following generations?  The famous psychologist Carl Jung thought they could be.  Researchers today theorize environmental influences, such as food, can leave chemical marks on genes that do not alter their sequence, but do modify their activity and could indeed be passed down. This emerging field is called epigenetics.

     Genetics and DNA is a fascinating subject to me, as well as a bit confusing.  My father's DNA changes every time Ancestry does an update, though I understand the reasons for that.  At present his ethnicity is 80 percent Irish and 20 percent Scottish at Ancestry, while FTDA puts it at 72 percent Irish and 28 percent Scandinavian. Scandinavian?  Must be those Vikings.  His maternal great-grandparents were all born in Ireland.  On his father's side, all but two were born in Ireland.  One great-grandfather was born in Warwickshire, England where his Warner family had resided for centuries.  That man's wife was born in America to family that came from Lincolnshire, England in the 18th century.  So it follows, three of his four grandparents were Irish and one was English.  It further follows, his mother was Irish and his father half Irish and half English. Yet neither testing site mentions a smidgen of English DNA.  I guess that's possible if Dad's only genetic inheritance from his father was his Irish DNA, but still somewhat surprising.

     I wish I understood this all better.  I think I need a class or two. In the meantime, I'll just keep enjoying my Champ and believing my affinity for it was a gift from the grands. 

Follow Me Up To Ricketstown

 

     Waking up to another gray morning here in New York, I thought it would brighten my day to take a stroll to Ricketstown in County Carlow; the birthplace of my paternal second-great-grandfather James O'Hora, who arrived at Manhattan's docks on a spring day in 1849. I pulled up Google Maps, did a search, switched to street view, and attempted to set myself down on the red marker that indicated Ricketstown. That resulted in my being bounced right back to the starting point. All right, if I couldn't get to the townland at least I could get fairly close. I set off down R726 near Rathvilly heading south. 

     After a few minutes I came to the road that branched west off of R726 towards Ricketstown and Graney. Moving along it I passed several modern homes, most enclosed by low walls or fences, a yellow dog, and a campaign sign for the "hard working" John Pender.  Ahead was a small cottage, a yellow rose bush blooming in it's gated front yard, then a brick home with laundry drying on a line in the back. The scenery after that consisted of trees and green fields bordered by low stone walls, distant mountains rising beyond them.

How long ago had those stones been piled there by a farmer clearing his land?  Had James passed by them as he traveled to Rathvilly on market days?  Perhaps the last  time he made his way down that lane, as he departed for America, they were there bidding a silent farewell?  Off to the right I began seeing wooden fencing around large fields, horses grazing within. I was now approaching the turn off for Ricketstown as indicated on the map, not sure how much further the site would allow me to go.  As I arrived at the road to Ricketstown, what I saw is pictured below.

          Why was the only road to Ricketstown impassable?  Another view on Google Maps showed a large, three story house sitting on a slight rise to the left of the gates.  It looked as though Ricketstown was now a giant horse farm.  Did that mean I wouldn't ever be able to visit?  How very disappointing, the townland was one of six I absolutely had to see should I ever make it to Ireland.  At least I was able to get a look from afar.  The owners couldn't fence out the views, the same ones that had greeted James as he stepped outside his parent's home.  He saw those same mountains in the distance, topped by lowering clouds.  The same fields were there in the mid 1800's and somewhere across those fields he and his family had once lived though nothing was now left of the cottages that once nestled there.  

     Then it came to me, Ricketstown wasn't that little red marker. That may be the center of Ricketstown, but the townland was all around it, even across the road as can be seen on the Griffith's map below.  Top left underlined in green is Ricketstown North, center is Ricketstown, and bottom is Ricketstown South. The gate pictured above is the green mark right under Ricketstown.  I'm not sure exactly where James lived, the only document I've seen of his that contained an address was his baptismal record and the parish priest at no point wrote anything more than Ricketstown. He made no mention of North or South anywhere in the register though some of his parishioners must have lived in Ricketstown South as Griffith's Valuation identified that place as the most populous. 

     It makes me a bit melancholy the way time moves on, inexorably effacing the past.  Even the little village I grew up in looks remarkably different today than it did when I was a child.  I guess I should not be surprised at this gate...

Did I Dream That? Charles Wiggins In The Civil War

    

     Have you ever tried to find a vaguely remembered fact about one of your ancestors? An ancestor whose name you also can't remember? I do that more often than I like to admit. None of my trees have a search function for that sort of thing, so even though the information is recorded, I lose it. However, my blog does have that search feature. So after spending an hour finding the ancestor and his information today, I'm telling his story here where I can find it easily if I forget again. And I will.

     The faded memory was of an indirect ancestor who I recalled was wounded in the civil war and whose case was mentioned in a book about civil war injuries.  After looking through name after name in my records I finally found him; Charles W. Wiggins, member of  Company G of the 9th New York Heavy Artillery, who was wounded during the siege of Petersburg on 25 March 1865. Only two weeks later Lee surrendered to General Grant.  Poor Charles came so close to escaping the war unscathed. The forgotten book was, "Surgical Memoirs of the War of the Rebellion", published by the US Sanitary Commission and available on Google Books. I strongly recommend at least a cursory search of that site when doing research, I've made numerous finds there. Not just famous people made it into publications.

     Until I read to the second paragraph below, the seriousness of Charles' injury escaped me--

Charles Wiggins, aged 21, wounded March 25, 1865. Admitted to Finley Hospital March 28. The ball passed two inches below and an inch within the coracoid process of the scapula, and passed out through the body of the scapula, behind. On the 7th May hemorrhage occurred to the amount of fourteen ounces and the outer third of the right subclavian artery was ligated. He progressed favorably, and was discharged from service on August 3d, 1865.

Pension Examining Surgeon M. D. Benedict reports, August 2d, 1865: "musket ball through right shoulder and axilla, resulting in partial paralysis of corresponding arm and hand; limb is entirely disabled at present; will probably improve. Disability total. Duration two years." In 1872, this pensioner's name was still borne on the rolls

     After reading that and a bit more research, the deadly seriousness of the wound became apparent. As noted in the article, and visible in the photo below, there is a major artery that passes directly in front of the top of the scapula, that large flat bone in the picture, which in Charles' case is the spot the minie ball exited. The corticoid process is the small finger shaped bone sitting atop the left side of the scapula near the artery. The ball that hit Charles passing two inches below that must have missed his artery by a fraction of an inch.

     Minie balls, made of soft lead and cone shaped, inflicted devastating, splintering injuries to bone and terrible damage to tissue when they struck. Charles' case must have been somewhat noteworthy to be included in the book of injuries. Or perhaps the really remarkable thing was the skill of the surgeon whom it appears may well have saved Charles' life when he sutured his artery forty-three days after the initial injury.

     Charles, born in 1842 in Wolcott, New York, was himself the son of a doctor, my third great-grandfather Dr. Richard Wiggins and his wife Hannah Ostrander. They had both passed away by the time Charles was 15, afterwards he lived with his aunt Maria Ostrander Parker, a sister of his late mother, in Cayuga County, New York. Charles enlisted at Fair Haven in Cayuga County on 22 July 1863, a few weeks after the battle of Gettysburg, joining Company G of the 9th NY Heavy Artillery, the same unit his older brother William, (my second-great-grandfather), had enlisted in the previous summer.  In 1865 both brothers were stationed at Petersburg, Virginia during the siege of that place.

     Things in Petersburg had been fairly quiet in early March, but on the twenty-fifth all hell broke loose. The injury that would so alter Charles' life may have been inflicted when the Confederates stormed Fort Stedman at 4 a.m. on the morning of March twenty-fifth, temporarily capturing the fort. Company G was also involved in fighting at Battery Lee and Fort Fisher in Petersburg that same day so any of those may have been the site of his injury.  I hope his brother William was with him to offer Charles what comfort he could.

     At the time of his enlistment Charles stated he was married, so I was surprised to find him after his discharge again living with the Parkers but no wife in the 1870 census. The real surprise was found in column 18 however, the one that asks if deaf and dumb, blind, idiotic or insane? The response was insane! I wonder if Charles suffered from battle fatigue, defined by Webster's as a mental illness that is caused by the experiences of fighting in a war and that causes extreme feelings of nervousness, depression, etc. Today we would call it PTSD, but the effects are the same.

     It would seem Charles' wife had either passed away or left him by 1870. In April of 1879, Charles' marriage in Fair Haven to Sarah, "the widow Fairbanks", was noted in the Lake Shore News. Sarah was older than Charles by twelve or thirteen years, suggesting he may not have been exactly desirable husband material. The 1880 census found Charles and Sarah living in Wolcott, New York, with a border, Charles' nephew Josiah Ostrander, who had also formerly resided with the Parkers. Charles was employed as a farm laborer that year but by 1892, though only 51 years of age, he was not working and wouldn't ever again. He may have still suffered from anxiety or was perhaps in pain or disabled from his old wound. Fortunately he did have the disability pension.

     Sarah died in 1907 in Fair Haven, Charles followed her about two and a half years later in Wolcott. I've had no luck locating the widow Fairbanks before her marriage to Charles or her maiden name. Charles never had children of his own so I'm not surprised neither he nor Sarah have a tombstone.