*Brand New* Online Resource: NY City Clerk Marriage Index, 1908-1929

I am a big fan of the non-profit group Reclaim the Records, which is fighting to get public access to the public records genealogy depends on. Their first case, and first success, won the release of copies of the microfilmed indexes to the NYC City Clerk's Marriage Indexes for 1908-1929. These were put online at the Internet Archive today, and I got right to work!

The records indexed here are distinct from the Health Department records already indexed by the Italian Genealogical Group and available on its website, as well as at Ancestry and elsewhere online. Reclaim the Records says,

"These marriage records were kept by the New York City Clerk's Office, not the Health Department. And they are not the two-page certificates. Instead, they are a three-page document set, consisting of (1) the application of the couple wishing to get married, (2) the affidavit from the couple stating that they are legally allowed to get married, and (3) the marriage license granted to the couple so that they could go get married at a date in the near future. Therefore, the dates of the documents listed in this index were usually several weeks before the marriage; the date is not the same date that the wedding took place."

It seems that these records should cover the same couples covered by the Health Department Records (plus anyone who applied for a marriage license and then didn't actually get married), but they may contain additional information. What additional information, or how much of it, I'm not sure of.

I picked a couple to use as a test case - my trickiest set of great-grandparents in this time period. My great-grandmother, Maria D'Ingeo, was born in a still-undetermined location, and my great-grandfather, Domenico Gatto, was married once before, but I have no information on his first marriage. These seem like great records to possibly provide some information about one or both of these topics, so I wrote to the NYC Municipal Archives to request the record. Once I receive it and see what it contains, I'll be able to evaluate whether to pursue this set of records for each set of my great-grandparents who married in NYC.

Bonus Tip: Check the end of each section of the index! Apostrophes are tricky. The index is arranged by year, then by first letter of the last name, then by quarter, then by first two letter of the last name. So to find a Maria D'Ingeo who was married in October 1919, you would expect to go to 1919, then to the letter D, then scroll through to the last quarter of the year, and then go to the Di section. If you did this, you would read through every name that starts with Di and not find her. You have to then scroll through an extra 1.5 blank pages of pre-printed DIs to find "D'Ingea, Maria" at the very end. Always check the end if you don't find your subject where you expect to.

Screenshot: Index to NYC City Clerk's Marriage Records
1919 - D - Sep-Dec - Di
D'Ingea, Maria

Irish Catholic Parish Registers: Baptism Questions

As I explore the Catholic parish registers recently put online by the National Library of Ireland, I've realized that I don't know as much as I should about the conventions that would have dictated how they were created. In that light, here are the questions that are piling up as I browse:

• Was it standard operating procedure for an illegitimate child to have only one godparent/sponsor at baptism? I've seen this appear to be the case on two occasions, in two different parishes: different dioceses, different counties, different decades.  

• How common was it for the father of an illegitimate child to be publicly known? Most seem to have a father listed, even when that father appears to be married to another woman. What mechanisms were in place to discover the father of an unmarried woman's baby?  

• If a married woman was a godparent, would she be recorded in the register under her maiden or married name?  

• Were parents ever recorded by their titles rather than their names? (Specific to my family: What English-language name (or title) could be recorded as Mayistri?)

If I can find the answers to any of these questions, I hope to write some follow-up posts to provide as much context as possible.

What sources would you recommend to learn about the context surrounding birth and baptism in 19th century Ireland? What do you find yourself wanting to know about the Irish parish registers?

RootsIreland and Latin parish registers

The National Library of Ireland has recently digitized and made available online, for free, Catholic parish registers from throughout Ireland. This is an incredible boon to Irish family history researchers, many of had previously relied on the transcriptions made available, for a fee, by the Irish Family History Foundation at rootsireland.ie.

Relying on transcriptions is always a dicey proposition*, and around the web and throughout the Irish genealogy community, there has always been annoyance that you had to pay so much to access just a transcript. But I have never been as upset about it as I am now that I have access to the originals.

The RootsIreland website clearly states that "The records have been transcribed directly from the original Parish registers and Civil records in Ireland." Somehow it never occurred to me that it was strange that of the dozens of "records" I had paid to access, and hundreds of search results I had seen, all were in English.

Now that I've seen the originals, I can tell you that it's very strange that all of the "transcriptions" on RootsIreland are in English, because a substantial number of those are so-called transcriptions of Latin records. Those aren't transcriptions at all, but translations. I can't find any mention on the RootsIreland website of the fact that many of the records they provide are no longer in their original language. In fact, on their page about first names, they list the Latin names among "common variants," along with nicknames and abbreviations. As in, "Even if you knew your ancestor as Charles, don't be surprised if he shows up as Carolus instead." But never, in all my searching, did I find a Carolus, even though I'm now discovering that at least some of the results I was looking at came from registers written in Latin.

Take, for example, the sister of my 3x great-grandfather Richard Toner. She was born in 1828 and the IFHF had told me that she was Mary, daughter William Toner and Margaret Walsh. But here is an image of the parish register that recorded her baptism:

20 April 1828. Baptism of Maria Toner. Maynooth Parish, Co. Kildare, Ireland. registers.nli.ie

She is clearly recorded as Maria, and every other first name is in Latin, too. This is a particularly problematic example because there were plenty of women in Ireland named Maria. Searching the 1901 Irish Census returns over 21,000 women who gave their first name as Maria. 639 of those women were born within 5 years on either side of 1828. So while I'm fairly certain that my 4x great-grandfather was not called Gulielmi in his daily life, I can't actually assume, on the basis of this record, that his daughter was named Mary and not Maria.

I don't know why the Irish Family History Foundation thought they could make that assumption, and try to sell me the record without being open about the assumptions - and changes - they were making.


*And I should note that responsible researchers didn't "rely" on them, of course, but for many areas accessing the originals or microfilmed copies was difficult or impossible unless you were in Ireland.