Another Piece To The McGarr Puzzle

     

     A while back I blogged about my search for the parents of Daniel McGarr of Ballyraggan, Kildare.  Daniel was my great-great-great-grandfather.  He never came to America, but many of his children did including Maria my great-great-grandmother; around the time of the famine.  In my previous post I wrote about the possibility that Daniel was a brother of John McGarr, who like the others settled in Auburn, New York.  As luck would have it, John married Mary Kelly in Auburn and the record of that marriage contains the names of his parents, John McGarr and Catherine Murphy.  Obviously, if he and Daniel were in fact brothers, they would probably have the same parents.  To make it even more interesting, Daniel back in Ballyraggan named his oldest daughter Catherine, and of his two sons, the youngest was named John. 

      Now that the NLI has put their Catholic registers online, I've been poring over Baltinglass records, the parish Ballyraggan residents were part of, but it occurred to me-- Rathvilly Parish is very close to Baltinglass Parish; Ballyraggan townland is almost as close to Rathvilly village as it is to Baltinglass village. If Daniel was born as little as a mile or two from Ballyraggan his birthplace could very well have been in Rathvilly Parish, and my hunch paid off.  Daniel and John's births appear to have been too early to be recorded, but in 1802 Richard McGarr was born in Garretstown, County Carlow, (near Ballyraggan), to John and Catherine McGarr.  In 1805 Elizabeth McGarr was born there, and in 1808 Edward McGarr, all to John and Catherine. Incidentally, the other of Daniel's two sons was named Richard, not a terribly common name, and John Jr. also had a Richard.  But there's more, in 1801 a child whose name unfortunately I can't make out, was christened at Rathvilly.   His godparents were Michael and Winifred Hore, the address was also Garretstown.  I believe Michael and Winifred Hore were the grandparents of James Hore who married Daniel's daughter Maria McGarr in Auburn.

     One of the oldest, and first McGarrs in Auburn was Mary McGarr nee Hayden.  Her broken tombstone in that city bears the inscription, "Native of Ballyraggan"!  Burial records from Holy Family Parish there refer to Mary, daughter of William Hayden and Honora Kavanaugh, aged 98.  Three years after Mary's death in 1866, another entry in the Holy Family burial register records the death of Eliza Kelly, married daughter of Michael McGarr and Mary Haydon.  I make note of this because...in 1802 Elizabeth McGarr, daughter of Michael and Mary, was baptized at Rathvilly.  Her address?  Garretstown!  So... wait, back up a minute, I just realized there are two Kelly's in this blog, the one who married John McGarr in Auburn and Patrick Kelly who married Eliza McGarr.  This is why I blog, it organizes my thoughts like nothing else.  And of course to attract cousins, which coincidentally happened recently, and will be the subject of my next blog...

     Summing up, it's beginning to look like Mary Hayden McGarr, the "native of Ballyraggan", may have been born there, but moved the short distance to Garretstown after her marriage to Michael McGarr.  And John McGarr (brother of Michael?) (father of Daniel and John Jr.?), was also living there in Garretstown.  And great-great-great-grandpa was likely born at Garretstown.  And the Hore family was also near by.  None of this is proof, but these tantalizing clues seem to point to my theory being right.  While it IS only a theory, the evidence continues to mount.

Friday's Photo/Jailbait?

Mary O'Hora & Lawrence Warner 1928

     Here's another old photo from my parent's house, it shows my grandparents Mary O'Hora and Lawrence Warner.  This photo is dated July 1928 on the reverse, three years before their marriage and... wait, wait just one second, that would make Grandma fifteen and a half years old, and Grandpa twenty-one!  I don't think that would fly today, that would be like a high school sophomore dating a college junior!  Maybe they were just friends at that point..but they look pretty chummy.

      This made me wonder if the laws concerning such things were perhaps different in the early 1900's, and as it turns out they were.  I found an article on the very subject, (is there any subject you can't find an article about on the net?), Statutory Rape Laws In Historical Context.  I'm not implying any hanky-panky here by the way, just to be perfectly clear.

     The writer of said article delved into the history of statutory rape laws and how they evolved over the years.  Also included on page 23, (page 15 on the toolbar), is a table of the changing legal age of consent for all the different US states, along with permissible, "age spans", the age difference between the subjects.  My grandparents lived in New York state so in looking at that section I saw that in1885 the age of consent was ten.  Yes, ten years old -- and if you think that was weird, in Delaware it was seven!  By 1890 it had risen to sixteen in New York, and to eighteen by 1920.  By 1999 it had been lowered to seventeen.  The allowable age span was five years. The table isn't detailed enough to show exactly what year the age changes occurred, but I feel confident that in 1928 the age of consent in New York was not fifteen and a half.  Seems like Grandpa may have been playing with fire but by December, when Grandma turned sixteen, they were at least within the five year age span!

     

Thoughts On The NLI Parish Registers

     

Married Cornelius Ryan & Alice Dwyer in presence of John Lacey, Mchl Ryan & Tim Dwyer Churchfield

     I have to start by saying I haven't found alot in the registers that is new, although I'm far from done.  I began by confirming the dates of events I had collected over the years from other sources and was pleasantly surprised to find they were all correct.  Several years ago I commissioned Tipperary Excel Heritage to find my Ryan and Dwyer ancestors in South Tipp, (I had no choice, only they had Cashel & Emly records), they sent me among other things, a transcription of the record from Anacarty/Donohill Parish, of the marriage of my 3rd great-grandparents Cornelius Ryan and Alice Dwyer, witnesses John Lacey and Michael Ryan.  That was all correct, but in looking at the actual image, (see above),  I found there was a third witness to the marriage, Tim Dwyer!  In browsing through the marriage register it became clear that having three witnesses was rather common in Anacarty Parish.  

     Another thing I discovered was that every other entry in the baptism and marriage records of that particular parish contained the surname Ryan and/or Dwyer, and I'm not exaggerating.  Sometimes it was even a Ryan marrying another Ryan or vice versa!  Imagine how overwhelming it would have been to travel thousands of miles to Ireland, with a limited time to stay, and finding those entries, many with the same forenames as well.  It would have taken the whole trip to even begin to sort them all out... after I finished crying.

     Seeing those registers online brought home how hard they can be to decipher and how many gaps there are.  Even when the date you're seeking is included in the available records, the particular page you need may be unreadable.  The page upon which I'm sure Uncle John Crotty's baptism in Tramore Parish resides is virtually blank.  All that remains now, 200 years later, are a few ghostly faded loops of what were once letters, widely scattered on a  glaring white page.  The following page however,  is infuriatingly legible.  Another interesting thing was the language the parish priest used to record the events.  Some parishes were in English, as seen above, others in Latin.  Here in the USA, all the 19th century Catholic records I've seen are written in Latin.

     I'm quite annoyed the parish records of Tramore in County Waterford are not complete.  On the pay site RootsIreland I found the baptism of my great-great-grandfather Philip Power in Tramore on 20 November 1857.  The online baptisms at the NLI site stop at October 1831.  I know those later baptism registers exist, why aren't they online I wonder?  Same with Listowel Parish in County Kerry, the free site Irish Genealogy Limited, has a transcription of the 1860 baptism of great-great-grandma Mary Gunn, but the NLI site has no baptisms for Listowel after 1855.  I really don't mean to complain, this site is an amazing milestone in Irish genealogy and well done; it's easy to navigate, has maps to help you locate the correct parish and surrounding parishes along with an added feature I didn't notice at first, the dates of the register pages being viewed appear in the upper left corner--so helpful.  A big thank you to the NLI!

Friday's Photo/Phil Power & Lawrence Warner Manchester, NY

     This photograph was found stuffed in the back of a drawer at my father's house.  I never expected to find as many ancestor's pictures there as I have, since the house is a 50's ranch with no attic, but they keep turning up every now and then.  Lawrence Warner on the right was my grandfather and Philip Power, holding the shovel, was his uncle, the brother of his mother who passed when he was only 18 months old.  Both were employed by the Lehigh Valley RR.  Lawrence as an engineer, and Phil in the roundhouse.

     Philip Power's father Philip Sr., was from Tramore Parish in Waterford and his mother Mary Gunn was from Listowel Parish in Kerry.  They met and married in this country.  Grandpa Lawrence's  mother Maggie was their firstborn, in 1883.  When I was small Grandma Warner used to tell me about meeting Grandpa's grandparents and their lovely Irish brogues.  I often wish I could have heard it too.

Stop Calling My Grandpa A Pedophile/A Word About Find A Grave

     Find A Grave started out as a wonderful, wonderful idea.  It enabled researchers who couldn't make the trip to an ancestor's far off grave the chance to visit it, if only online in a photograph.  Something happened along the way however, now the site is full of "memorials" containing no tombstone photos, but plenty of speculation by the poster.  I've personally found several cases of what I know to be erroneous information, I've even tried contacting the person responsible to no avail...even when presented with irrefutable proof...I give up.  I read somewhere the site had degenerated into a competition of who can post the largest number of these memorials and tombstones and I'm starting to believe that is truly the case.

     Just yesterday I received an email stating a correction I had sent was not accepted.  The correction?  Pointing out that an eight year old girl could not possibly have given birth.  It's a well documented fact that my 6th great-grandfather Captain Jeremiah Vincent had two wives, the second one, Mary Merritt, quite a bit younger than he, (but certainly not that young).  Most of his children are from his first marriage to an unknown woman, but I constantly see the children of the first marriage attributed to the second.  This particular memorial even had the correct birth dates for Mary and her "daughter", (who was actually the daughter of Jeremiah's first wife).  They were born eight years apart.  Does it really make sense that Mary was this girl's mother???

     I think this annoys me so much because some researchers may mistakenly believe that the data on this site all comes from an actual tombstone or a cemetery record.  It doesn't, nor is all of it accurate.  While it's still a very worthwhile source, please be sure to double check before accepting the information found on one of the memorials with no photograph of the stone.

Friday's Photo/Cpl. Harry J. McCabe & Sisters

Caroline, Grace, Harry and Florence McCabe

     This photograph was given to me by my cousin Rita. Pictured are four of the seven children of James McCabe and his wife Bridget Finnerty of Auburn, NY-- making them the grandchildren of my 3rd great-aunt Mary O'Hora and her husband Patrick McCabe.  I'm not sure exactly when the photo above was taken, though the uniform of a World War I soldier gives away the time frame.  The names of the individuals are written on the back of the photo, but I have my reservations about the young woman in the middle.  She is purported to be Grace, but I'm not so sure.

     Harry enlisted at Auburn in May of 1917 and was assigned to Company M of the 3rd Infantry which a few months later, became the 108th.  This enlistment is where the question arises.  Grace McCabe died in 1914, there is no question about that. Her obituary and funeral announcements appeared in the Auburn papers that year. But if her brother Harry didn't enlist until 1917, how is it that she is pictured with him in his uniform? 

     Harry, along with young men he had known since childhood, eventually found themselves in the nightmarish trenches of France, surrounded by mud, rats, and an enemy bent on their destruction.  Sadly, he watched several of his comrades lose their lives in the fighting. Harry fought in one of the most important engagements of the war, he was there on September 29, 1918 when the Hindenburg line fell to the Allies. That same day Harry was gassed.  His official record states he was "severely" wounded by this attack, but by the time of his discharge in 1919 had recovered.  In a letter home to his widowed mother Bridget shortly afterward, he makes light of his injury, clearly so as not to worry her, but it was obviously a serious matter.

Harry's military record

     Harry returned home after the war and worked as a prison guard at the Auburn State Prison in the city; he was there at the time of the 1929 prison riots.  Not so very different from trench warfare.  He and his wife Anna purchased a home in nearby Owasco where they and their son Paul lived until Harry's death in May of 1950 at age 54.

     Harry's sister Caroline, known as Carrie to her family, married Thomas Monahan in Auburn where she passed away in 1940.  Grace died at her parent's home at age 22 of heart problems while studying to be a nurse. Florence married Lawrence Dalton and they moved to Georgia where she died in 1985.  

     I can't help but wonder if "Grace" in the above photo was in fact her sister Sarah McCabe, born a year earlier than Grace. She married Carl Meyer, and lived until 1985.  It makes sense to me that before Harry went overseas, he posed for a snapshot with his three surviving sisters, but I don't supposed I'll ever be sure.

The Leaving Of Liverpool

     

 Packet Ship America

    I have finally found the ship that brought my 3rd great-grandmother to America!  I've been searching a long time for this, a lack of online records and ever-changing surnames conspiring to keep the ship and arrival date of Grandma Mary Hore unknown.  Sometimes the name was Hore, some days Hora, and at other times O'Hore or O'Hora.  Today I decided to give Ancestry another try.  I typed in "Mary Hore" since that appeared to be the earliest form of the name, along with birth date 1795 +/- 10.  Five hits came up.  The first three appeared to be for the same person who arrived in 1828, much too early to be Grandma Mary who arrived around the time of the famine.  Another was an 1871 arrival, too late to be her since she appeared in the 1855 New York census.

   The remaining hit was the one. Mary Hore, who was born in Ireland in 1802, sailed into New York Harbor on board the packet ship "America" on the 13th day of August in 1852.  I scoured the ship's manifest, but I couldn't discern anyone who seemed to be traveling with her.  I hope some family member at least accompanied her to the port in Dublin, forty five miles away from her home in Ricketstown, County Carlow, and put her on the boat to Liverpool.  By 1852, many of her children were already in the United States; John had left four years earlier with his wife and infant daughter, and James (my great-great-grandfather) a few years after that.  Mary's other children Michael, Edward and Mary Jr. had also left Ireland and were awaiting her arrival in Auburn, New York.  Mary's son Patrick/Peter would make the trip after her.  In fact, only Mary's oldest daughter Winifred remained in Ireland with her husband Thomas Lawlor.  How heartbreaking it must have been to leave Winifred and the three grandchildren who had been born before Mary's departure.

      The first page of the manifest had some interesting details, like the fact the ship sailed direct from Liverpool, (some stopped first in the Cork seaport of Queenstown), the name of the ship's Master or Captain, (Joseph J. Lawrence), and the date of arrival in New York.

First Page of America's Manifest

     After finding this record, I did an internet search for the packet ship she arrived on, but couldn't find much.  The ship America was part of the Black Star Line.  A more general search revealed that American packets like this one were much preferred over  British ships, especially if one was Irish.  Conditions and food were better, as they were regulated by law, as was the number of passengers allowed.  There was also less bigotry aimed at Irish Catholics on the American ships.  I like to think Grandma had a fairly easy crossing.  There was only a single death recorded on this voyage, that of one month old Mary Robinson on July 30th.  Try as I might, I couldn't find the date the ship left Liverpool though the average crossing was four to five weeks at that time.  I'm sure it's recorded in the Liverpool Mercury, which in 1852 was still a weekly newspaper.  In fact after an advanced search of the "British Newspaper Archive" site I believe it's recorded in the July 16th edition on page 7 which would put it right on schedule, but here at Ellie's Ancestors headquarters we are averse to paying $15 to read a news article so that will have to wait.  The New York Times Archives site is a good place to look for ships arriving in and leaving New York.  Here you can subscribe for unlimited views, but non-subscribers can view ten free articles per month.

     During my search, I did find Captain Lawrence's obituary.  As a young man his parents were bent on sending him to Yale when he upped and went to sea.  After years of sailing the packet ships for the Kingsland brothers, he graduated to steam ships.  He retired in 1868 at the age of 48, "with a fortune" and married Sarah Gillette Pond.  Their marriage was tragically short, Sarah died eight years later leaving the Captain with three young daughters.  He suffered a heart attack three weeks before Christmas of 1893, dying immediately.

     This reminds me once again to re-check sites periodically to see what may have been added since my last visit.