Poor Law Union Board of Guardians Minutes

My Rothwells and Mulvaneys lived in Kells, County Meath, Ireland, and immigrated to Brooklyn, NY, sometime in the early 1850s. In an effort to learn more about their story, I ordered the microfilm of the Board of Guardians Minute Books for 1851.

I had no idea what I was going to find. I don't actually know if the Mulvanys or Rothwells were in the workhouse, but I know they were poor, and that sometimes people ended up there until they could immigrate. I also didn't know whether there was much if any chance that they would actually be mentioned in the minutes if they were.

So far, having spent only a couple hours on these records, I haven't found my ancestors. But I thought I'd share a few of the things I have come across, so you know what kinds of gems may be found in these records.

By far the vast majority of inmates of the workhouse are not included in the minutes by name. Every week's meeting begins with an accounting of the number of inmates. The week ending Saturday, 31 May 1851, there were about 1300. Most weeks pass without any naming of inmates, but occasionally, there are notes like these:

"The master reported that a pauper named Betsy Gearty fell into a boiler of hot water in the laundry on the 29th Instant and was severely burned."

"Letter from the Clerk of Trim Union noting that the Board of Guardians discharged Margt Soraghan from Trim Workhouse as they assert she belongs to Kells Union."

"Moved by Mr. Dyas
Seconded by Mr. Arthur Radcliff
That James Hopkins Shoemaker, get a suit of Clothes on his going out of the Workhouse . . . . . . .Passed."

"Moved by Mr. John Christie
Seconded by Mr. John Radcliff
Resolved That John Brady, Edward Brady, and Catharine Brady, Inmates of this House, be allowed a suit of Clothes each to enable them to proceed to America, as their passage has been paid by their Mother . . . . Passed."

There's even some follow up on the Bradys: letters from the Poor Law Commissioners asked how much was spent on their clothes, and then expressed approval of the amount, and finally an order approving spending a sum of money to defray the cost of their travel.

"The Clerk was directed to write to the Commss. to call their attention to the case of Paupers named Plunkett from Oldcastle Union, and also to the case of Soragham from Trim Union, and the request they will give directions to the Guardians of these Unions to admit these paupers."

"Letter from the Poor Law Commissioners [???], 28th June '51, stating with reference to a case of a Pauper named Thomas Divine from [???] Union, that the Attorney General has given it as his opinion that an Indictment by [???] a Board of Guardians for causing Pauper to be removed from said Union to another."

"Letter from the Poor Law Commissioners No. 40,518/57 - 1st August 1851 stating with reference to a pauper named Sarah Soraghan that according to the minutes of Proceedings of the Trim Board of Guardians on the 5th Ultimo, this Pauper was residing four years with her mother in the town of Kells."

If you determine that your ancestors were in the workhouse, these minutes have plenty of information about their lives, even if they're not mentioned by name. In Kells in 1851, the minutes talk about a scarcity of water due to broken pipes, about the Master's absence from the schoolroom due to travel and illness, about where the dead are going to be buried, and list what food and other provisions were purchased. You may also be able to find your ancestors here if they weren't in the workhouse, as the Board of Guardians is listed by name, and everyone who won a contract to provide food or fuel or build a storehouse was named. 

Online Resource: the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1841-1955

In an incredible boon to New York City genealogists and historical researchers, the Brooklyn Public Library recently announced that it has digitized the entire run of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, from 1841-1955. The earlier years, 1841-1902, were digitized some years ago through a grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), and the later years have just now come online through a partnership with Newspapers.com. They are all available for free, at the new website, http://newsstand.bklynpubliclibrary.org/.

It's true that the entire run of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle has long been available online through the Fulton History website, but I think that the two sites serve complementary purposes. I think the quality of the images on the Brooklyn Newsstand site is better, meaning that search results are more likely to be accurate. However, the library site's "Advanced Search" option includes only the ability to add a date or date range, which is not exactly particularly advanced. If you can navigate Fulton History's search function, you'll find a lot more flexibility there. Nonetheless, I do think that the Brooklyn Newsstand search function represents an improvement over the search function at the old Brooklyn Daily Eagle Online site through the BPL, as my searches have turned up results from the early years that I was never able to find at the previous site. (Although the original eagle.brooklynpubliclibrary.org site is still up, it will be retired in May 2014.)

While Newspapers.com is a paid site, access to the Eagle is free if you access it through the BPL. There are a few functions that are only available if you register for an account with Newspapers.com, but that should be free, as well. You can read more about these features here. It looks like there's even an option to save the articles you find to Ancestry.com! (Newspapers.com is owned by Ancestry.com.) I don't have a current Ancestry subscription, so I haven't tried it out, but it seems like a helpful function.


The Brooklyn Newsstand's "About" promises to digitize other Brooklyn papers "in the near future," so there may be even more to come. (The lag between phase I and phase II of the Eagle digitization was quite long, so I'm not sure what sort of time scale is being referred to when they say "near future.")

Irish Genealogical and Historical Resources

Happy St. Patrick's Day! 

In honor of the holiday, I'll be baking soda bread, eating corned beef, and reviewing some of my favorite resources for Irish genealogy!

Online Resources
-The 1901 and 1911 Irish Census
Earlier Irish Census records were almost entirely destroyed, so 1901 and 1911 are both the earliest extant censuses and the only ones that are currently available to the public. (1926 will be the next to be released.) Both the 1901 and the 1911 Census are available and searchable online at the website of the National Archives of Ireland.

-Griffith's Valuation
Griffith's Valuation, the property valuation overseen by Richard Griffith, serves as an excellent census substitute for mid-19th century Ireland. It was undertaken between 1853 and 1865, so it predates the earliest available census records, and lists the head of each household in Ireland, as well as the name of the landlord from whom the property was rented (source). Griffith's Valuation is available online from askaboutireland.ie.

-The Irish Family History Foundation
The Irish Family History Foundation (RootsIreland.ie) offers online access to Birth/Christening, Marriage, and Death/Gravestone records through the individual county genealogy centres. Now, this is not a website without its problems. Credits are expensive, there's no subscription option, you need to pay even to view search results, and the records you're paying to view are just transcriptions; there aren't actual images available. A search can yield many results, and you then have to pay to view each of them individually, at a cost of 2.75-5.00 Euros per record, depending on whether you've purchased credits in bulk. Nonetheless, the sheer volume of records available makes this a valuable resource, and when you search intelligently, the cost can be reasonable. Using the technique outlined in this tutorial has made all the difference for me!

-Irish Church Records
While most Irish church records are most easily accessed, for a fee, through the Irish Family History Foundation, lucky researchers with ancestors from the counties of Kerry, Dublin, and Carlow, and the Diocese of Cork & Ross have a FREE option! Parish records from these areas can be accessed through the Irish governmental site http://churchrecords.irishgenealogy.ie/. (Availability varies by year and denomination; for more information, see the list of available parishes on the site.) While my ancestors don't hail from any of those areas, my husband's family was from Kerry, so I've occasionally had opportunities to use the site, and it definitely made me wish this resource were available for my areas of interest.


Books
A New Genealogical Atlas of Ireland
This is one of the most useful, practical books for Irish research that I've come across. It has maps of each Irish county, divided into civil parishes, Catholic parishes, baronies, dioceses, and poor law unions. It's invaluable for helping figure out which jurisdictions you should be checking for records, and I definitely couldn't be as productive without it.

A New Genealogical Atlas of Ireland, Second Edition

Annals of the Famine in Ireland
This book, by 19th century reformer Asenath Nicholson, was assigned in an Irish history course I took in college, and I found it fascinating. It's not a book of records or a research aid, but it's a fascinating contemporary look at conditions in Ireland - particularly the west of Ireland - during the famine, valuable for anyone with famine-era Irish ancestors. Nicholson also wrote Ireland's Welcome to the Stranger before the famine struck, which is a book I haven't read yet but have on my list.

Annals Of The Famine In Ireland, In 1847-1849 (1851)

The Course of Irish History
This is another excellent book that was assigned in one of my college Irish history courses. It consists of expert essays on various topics in Irish history, arranged chronologically. They provide brief, usually quite accessible looks at these various topics, ranging from "Prehistoric Ireland" to "Ireland, 1982-94" and all major aspects of Irish history in between. As a result the book provides an excellent overview for any researchers who need to add some historical context to the search for their Irish ancestors.

The Course of Irish History

Enjoy the day, and take the opportunity to use some of these resources to delve a little deeper into your Irish ancestry!


Disclosure: This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links. This means that if you choose to make a purchase from Amazon after clicking one of these links, I will receive a small portion of your purchase price as a commission - and the price you pay doesn't change! I personally make a point of starting my Amazon shopping through the affiliate links of bloggers and friends whenever possible, so that large corporations are not the only beneficiaries of my purchases, and encourage others to do the same, regardless of whether they use my affiliate links or another blogger's.

Online Spotlight: Young & Savvy Genealogists

I don't do this often, but I'm taking a moment to stop and highlight a new blog - and online community - that I expect will do great things. Young & Savvy Genealogists focuses on connecting and highlighting the stories of those in the research community who are under the age of 30.

This is great! I've often thought that we needed a place online to do this exactly. Young genealogists are not exactly such rare birds as is sometimes supposed, but the stereotype persists. As is so often the case, the stereotype is damaging to everyone concerned. Genealogists in general are perceived as old, stodgy, and behind-the-times. (Untrue of most genealogists I know, regardless of age!) Young genealogists are sometimes thought of by other family historians as neophytes and inexperienced researchers who don't contribute to the larger community. (Also largely untrue!) Their non-genealogy peers just think they're nuts. (Potentially true.)

In reality, of course, genealogists of all ages - particularly those in the online community - are frequently tech-savvy early adopters. (I'm not, but I'm not representative of either my hobby or my generation.) Genealogists of all ages are - or should be - excellent researchers. The ones who aren't aren't limited by their age. Personally, I found that entering the world of family history research and writing directly from the world of academic research and writing in college meant that my research skills were at their peak.

In other words, young genealogists are really no different from the field at large. And yet, they - we - have some particular advantages and unique challenges that are addressed infrequently in the larger community. The best way to encourage the participation and leadership of the younger generation is to have a space where they can meet people like themselves, address the unique issues of their youth, and share their own stories. Young & Savvy Genealogists is a new endeavor, but I hope that between the blog and the Google+ Community, it can become a place where young researchers can come together - from newbies to regular guys (like me) to experts and leaders in the field - and discuss the issues that bring them together and the traits that they share.

If you're under 30, definitely check it out!

Brooklyn Catholic Churches Map

I recently added a new Brooklyn Genealogy Resources page featuring, among other things, a map of Brooklyn Catholic churches. I created it a number of years ago, to assist in my own research, but I've always hoped it could be useful to other people, too. I've featured it in posts in the past, but thought I'd like to have it more prominently featured and more readily accessible. A number of people have told me they've found it helpful when I've linked to it on mailing lists and elsewhere, so here it is, permanently accessible. I am not the most tech-savvy person, so it had literally never occurred to me that I could embed it, other than in a post, until a couple of weeks ago.


View Brooklyn Catholic Churches in a larger map

The map currently includes the Brooklyn Catholic churches founded through 1900, though I hope to one day update it to include younger parishes.

Google has unfortunately rather gutted the functionality of this map since I originally created it. It used to be possible to take a custom map like this one, and then search for an address, like the address where you've found your family in census records. That address would then show up on the custom map, surrounded by the markers for the nearest churches. Now that searching for an address brings up that marker on a new map, you have to use two different tabs, or otherwise make sure that you're looking in the right neighborhood, rather than being able to plot the addresses against each other. It's still useful, I think, and I return to it frequently to work on different family lines, so I hope that my readers with Brooklyn roots will find it helpful, too - along with the other resources highlighted on the Brooklyn Genealogy Resources page.

This map was compiled using information from the Local Catholic Church and Family History & Genealogical Guide by Ann Mensch as well as the page Roman Catholic Churches of Brooklyn, N.Y. by Tim Desmond.

Online Resource: The Bowery Boys' podcasts

I recently discovered the Bowery Boys podcast, and can't believe I've never heard of it before. The podcast covers various aspects of NYC history, focusing on a different topic each episode.

I started with last year's episode on Red Hook, of course, since that's where all my people lived.  I've been picking and choosing the episodes most relevant to my family's history since then, but I'd love to work my way through the entire archive. (Luckily, I have a few days of important but rather tedious and mindless work to do in the coming weeks, so I've got lots of listening time available.) The recent episode on New York City's consolidation is a must-listen for anyone researching in NYC who might not be familiar with what exactly constituted "New York City" and when. (Hint: it looked very different before 1898.) A couple of the topics that they've covered that I most want to listen to are the Civil War Draft Riots, Collect Pond and Canal Street, and Old St. Patrick's Cathedral.

Although this sampling tends to be biased towards the era and geography of my own family's history in New York, the same bias is in no way reflected in the topics covered by the Bowery Boys, which extend from Peter Stuyvesant to JFK Airport. I highly recommend these podcasts to anyone with an interest in New York City history, or anyone with family who lived here at any point, as it will add history and context to your research.

The Genealogy Event

I spent Friday and Saturday of this weekend at The Genealogy Event in NYC, and had a fantastic time. Although it wasn't quite on the scale of what I understand something like RootsTech or Genealogy Jamboree to be, it was the first event of its kind that I was able to attend, as the West Coast conferences aren't really a feasible option for me.

Although I'd been looking forward to The Genealogy Event for a while, I neglected to register until last week, and so was unable to preregister for any of the speaker sessions. This had me really worried, but I needn't have been. On-site registration on Friday was limited to 3 session per person, but after the rush subsided, I was able to go back to the registration table and get tickets for all of the other sessions I wanted to attend, too.

My only complaint would be that the "30-minute power learning sessions" didn't offer enough time to explore topics in depth. I would have preferred that the sessions be longer, or that there be offered both quick overviews and in-depth explorations of various topics in different sessions.

On Friday, one of the best sessions I attended was Judy G. Russell's talk on The ABCs of DNA. It was a good, engaging, and informative overview of DNA research. Although there wasn't much presented that I didn't know, she did make one point that was revelatory: because autosomal DNA isn't associated with surnames, you shouldn't be trying to match surnames, but rather times and places. This seems self-evident - I wanted to slap myself in the forehead and say "Duh!" when I heard it - but I had never come across it stated so plainly. I got home that night and immediately sent an e-mail to my closest match on FamilyTreeDNA, with whom I haven't yet been able to document a connection. (Still no luck, but we're working on it.)

I also attended Maureen Taylor's session, Photo Stories - Following the Clues; Shellee Morehead's session on Italian Genealogy; Terry Koch-Bostic's session, Read All About It! Finding Spicy Stories of New York Ancestors in Newspapers Online; and Joe Buggy's session on Planning a Genealogy Trip to Ireland. (God willing, we'll be able to take a trip to Ireland one of these days, though it may be years before we can accumulate enough vacation time to even see all the ancestral hometowns we'd like to visit, much less to have enough time to research all of those lines while we're there!)

One interesting-looking resource that was included in this last talk on Irish Genealogy was the website localhistory.ie, home of the Federation of Local History Societies in Ireland. These local groups are listed by county, and several exist for most counties. I imagine many are terrific resources to use when you've pinpointed your Irish ancestral hometown. I was also able to talk to Joe after the session to get a remedial lesson on Irish geopolitical divisions (Registration District vs. Civil Parish vs. Townland and so forth), because no matter how often I look this up, I can never keep them straight. The book he referenced for me was A New Genealogical Atlas of Ireland, Second Edition by Brian Mitchell, and it went straight on my Amazon.com "genealogy" wish list.

After attending alone on Friday, I was joined by my husband on Saturday. Saturday was a longer day, but, I thought, somewhat better organized. The three session limit for on-site registration had been lifted, but I didn't want to seem greedy, so I only registered for 4 in the morning, and then went back a little later to get tickets to a few more sessions, because I didn't want to worry about closing other attendees out.

I attended Lou Szucs's session Castle Garden, Ellis Island and NYC: Their Impact on Your Family History as well as her session Hidden Sources. The former seemed to be directed more towards people who had ancestors come through NY than those of us who spend every waking minute researching our NYC ancestors, but it still reminded me of any number of sources that went on my lists as places that need to be checked again, more thoroughly, or in a more organized fashion. I really enjoyed the session on How to Plan and Organize a Family History Book by Nancy and Biff Barnes. While I'm not an author, I've got a handful of half-baked ideas rolling around in my brain, covering everything from wanting to put my research into book form to make it more palatable to relatives, to having come across one story that's interesting enough to maybe be attractive to the general public, to trying to type up a couple of family stories in a booklet in time for this Christmas. Never having given much though to the how, when, or why or any of these projects, the information in this session was invaluable. I also attended Michael Worrell's session on Irish Based Genealogical Resources; Laura G. Prescott's session, Timelines: Putting Your History into Historical Perspective; and Maira Liriano's session on Genealogy at the New York Public Library.

I had tried to register late for the Timelines session, and they were already out of tickets by then, so I almost didn't go. Luckily, there were extra seats available, and I was able to get in anyway, because it was a particularly interesting session. I walked out with a list of timelines I need to make, including a Brooklyn history timeline, for general comparison with my family's history and an Italian history timeline, to back up (or not) the stories about why my great-grandfather immigrated to this country.

The NYPL talk didn't present much that I didn't already know, but it reminded me of some things I had forgotten, and it got me really fired up to get back to the library, a resource in my own backyard that I have been seriously underutilizing.

One of the best parts of the weekend were the vendors and booths. Although the DNA session wasn't an in-depth look at issues in genetic genealogy, I was able to meet the folks from FamilyTreeDNA at their booth and ask them some specific questions I had about my test results and matches. I was introduced to the Irish Family History Forum, a local Irish-focused genealogical society that meets right on Long Island, and that I'm now seriously considering joining. (But they meet on Saturdays, and my weekends tend to be so busy I'm afraid I'd never make it!) And, perhaps most exciting to me, the NYG&B provided me with on-site, online access to an article in their database about a topic I was interested in, which cleared up something I'd been wondering about for ages. (19th century New York "Bodies in Transit" records were created for any bodies being moved into NYC, not for those being moved out of NYC, which means that they were not created for the many, many, many individuals who died in Manhattan but were transported across the East River to be buried in the cemeteries in Brooklyn and Queens.)

All-in-all, I thought it was a terrific weekend, and I hope that the organizers found to be as successful as I did, because I'm really hoping that this becomes an annual event.

(This post contains Amazon.com affiliate links.)

Online Resource: Rockland County Messenger

I don't have Rockland County ancestors - although my descendants will - but I wanted to highlight an online resource I came across for people researching in Rockland County, NY. The New City Library - which houses our library system's Local History Room, including genealogical resources - is digitizing and making available online editions of the Rockland County Messenger, which was published weekly from 1847-1898.

Not all years are included, and I don't know whether the ones that are missing will be added in the future or are simply unavailable. The system offers both a "browse" and a "search" function. At first I thought that browsing didn't work, but then I realized that you just have to wait for the links to individual issues to load - and that during the time you're waiting, nothing appears to be happening. Trying clicking on a year to browse, and then counting to 15. I know we're not used to that in the internet age, but try to remind yourself how much longer than 15 seconds it would take to drive to New City and scroll through microfilm. Search is faster, but not necessarily better. Whether it's a function of the text recognition technology being used, or is due to the quality of the images, the OCR software seems unfortunately prone to reading text as strings of gibberish. I imagine this would affect search results, so I might recommend browsing during the time periods you're looking at as a supplement to searching.

It appears that the library has plans to make additional collections available in this manner, which could really be a boon for local researchers. Although I don't have any ancestors in Rockland during this time period - my people didn't arrive until the 1950s - I'm enjoying searching on the names of old inhabitants and places I'm familiar with to see what I can find out about the area!