Tewksbury Almshouse Inmate Biographies

American and Canadian almshouse records from the 19th century have always been fruitful hunting grounds for information about immigrants from Ireland. I have previously written about Saint John Almshouse in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada and now it is the turn of Tewksbury, located in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Tewksbury Almshouse first opened in 1854 and quickly saw more admittals than the number it was built for.[1] Those who were admitted came from all over Massachusetts. What is very interesting about this institution is that detailed notes taken from a patient's intake interview have survived. Known as 'inmate biographies,' many of these are lengthy, detailed narratives that cover the person’s full life history, focusing on family relations, work, and health.[2]

The first phase of this digitization project has seen records from 1854 to 1883 come online, however, there are very few records from before 1860. There are currently records for approximate 40,000 individuals that can be viewed online. The final phase of digitization will see records added through the 1890s. There are records from after these years, but they will not be placed online. Some of the original records are at the Museum of Public Health in Tewksbury, while transcriptions of other original records, since destroyed, are available on microfilm at the Massachusetts State Archives. The digitized records come from both of these institutions. 

The records are heavily populated with immigrants from Ireland with the following example showing the genealogical gold they contain: [3]

Mary Stanley, inmate biography, 1873

Reg. No:              41109

Age:                     56

Name:                  Mary Stanley

From:                   Boston June 4 1873

Condition:           Well

Discharged:         June 24 1873

Removed:            Boston

By Whom:           Tupp [?]

For Nos:

56 b[orn] Ire[land] Co. Roscommon Land[ed] Quebec Ca[nada] May 15 1837 per Ship Emerald. Direct to Boston and resided in Boston since.  M[arrie]d Henry Stanley in Boston 1838. N.N. [?] No R[eal?]. Est[ate?] No taxes Laborer died Boston Jan[uary] 1856. Son Thomas Stanley stone mason resides #25 Northampton St. Daug[hter] Mary H[ouse?] w[i]f[e] of Benjamin Washington. #5 Smith's Court off Joy St. P[arents?] Richard and Ann O'Brien d[ied?] Ire[land]. Last lived rear of 383 Harrison Ave with Mrs Dayley. Says [she was] in no other inst[itution]. Officer Prouty [?] of Station 5 knows her. Rheum[atism?] In City Hosp[ital] 2 years ago. No M[oney?]. No Home.

As best that I can tell, the website on which this collection is hosted, University of Massachusetts Lowell Digital Initiatives, does not have a standalone database where you can search this collection. Instead, the search facility searches all digitized collections. However, all names from the Tewksbury Almshouse collection have been indexed.

You can read more about the collection here and access the records here. Browsing the records is also available, beginning here.

My thanks goes to R. Andrew Pierce, a professional genealogist in Boston, for telling me about this digitization project.

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[1] Meltsner, Heli. The Poorhouses of Massachusetts: A Cultural and Architectural History. Massachusetts: McFarland, 2012, pp. 32–33.

[2] Fisher, Joseph. 'Tewksbury Almshouse Intake Record Collection at UMass Lowell,' Highlights. Boston Library Consortium (https://blc.org/special-highlights/tewksbury-almshouse-intake-record-collection-umass-lowell): accessed 19 February 2017.

[3] Tewksbury Almshouse, 'Tewksbury Almshouse Intake Record: Stanley, Mary,' No. 41109, 4 June 1873; Digital Initiatives @ UML, University of Massachusetts Lowell Library (http://libhost.uml.edu/items/show/1807): accessed 19 February 2017.

History Of The Fire And Police Departments Of Minneapolis

History of the Fire and Police Departments of Minneapolis was published by The Relief Association Publishing in 1890. It provides an historical overview of the city's fire department from about 1850 and the police department from 1855. Traditionally, many Irish immigrants and their descendants joined both departments throughout the United States, making this publication very useful if you had such as ancestor in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

The detailed history of both departments provides a vivid idea of what it was like to work as a fireman or policeman in the city. The majority of the publication is given over to the fire department and there are many illustrations of the tools they used, as well pictures of those who occupied the higher ranks of both institutions.

Of particular interest to genealogists will be chapter 16, Date of Organization of Companies (p. 163), and chapter 17, Company Quarters and Fire Apparatus (p. 172). Both chapters list the members of each engine company in the city as they existed at the time of publication. Name, rank, age, country of birth, and previous occupation are provided.

The example, below, shows the strong Irish influence in Engine Company no.1, with nearly all members born in Ireland, or U.S./Canadian born with traditionally Irish surnames.[1]

 The publication of this book was timely as it can serve as a census substitute for the destroyed 1890 U.S. Federal Census. It is a  niche resource, but incredibly useful for those with ancestors in that niche. 

Access the book on Internet Archive.

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[1] History of the Fire and Police Departments of Minneapolis. Minneapolis, MN: The Relief Association Publishing. 1890. Available online at https://archive.org/stream/historyfireandp00costgoog#page/n168/mode/2up: accessed 16 January 2016.

Emigrant City - New NYPL Project

Crowd-sourced, online transcription and indexing projects have become popular in genealogy over the last few years. Both Ancestry.com, through their World Archives Project, and Familysearch Indexing ask people to volunteer their time to transcribe and index genealogy records. The New York Public Library recently launched a transcription project called Emigrant City. Developed in collaboration by two departments of the public library (NYPL Labs and the Irma and Paul Milstein Division of United States History, Local History and Genealogy), "Emigrant City invites you to help transcribe recently digitized mortgage and bond record books from the Library’s collection of Emigrant Savings Bank records."[1]

The Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank, based in New York City, was founded by the Irish Emigrant Society and opened its doors in 1850. It was originally located on Chambers St., beside the current Municipal Archives, a location ideally suited to attracting a large number of Irish depositors who lived in Lower Manhattan. In all over 170,000 accounts were opened between 1850 and 1883 with the vast majority in the names of Irish men and women.[2] The 6,400 mortgage and bond books that are to be transcribed date from between 1851 and 1921[3].

Inevitably, there will be a healthy number of bank customers in the books who were Irish-born or the American-born children of Irish immigrant parents. In fact, the second person who received a loan from the bank was New York-born Mary O'Connor. She received a $2,000 loan on 22 January 1855.[4]

This is a project to keep an eye on, especially if you have New York City Irish ancestry. You can read more about the Emigrant City project on the dedicated NYPL website.

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[1] Armstong, William. Emigrant City: An Introduction. 4 November 2015. New York Public Library. http://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/11/04/emigrant-city: accessed 7 November 2015.

[2] Salvato, Richard. A User’s Guide to the Emigrant Savings Bank Records. New York, NY: New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division. 1997. Available at http://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/emigrant.pdf: accessed 17 December 2012

[3] Sutton, Philip. Emigrant City: Two Stories. 4 November 2015. New York Public Library. http://www.nypl.org/blog/2015/11/04/emigrant-city-two-stories: accessed 7 November 2015.

[4] Sutton, Philip. Emigrant City: Two Stories. 4 November 2015

Mortuary Records Of The Catholic Order of Foresters Talk

I got to attend my first Back To Our Past conference in Dublin a few weeks ago and there was one talk in particular that I had earmarked to attend: Finding Your American Cousins - A New Source for Massachusetts Mortuary Records, 1880 - 1943. This talk was about a topic I have blogged about before, the mortuary records of the Catholic Order of Foresters (COF) (access here and here). 

To quickly recap, the COF was a fraternal life insurance organization founded in Boston in 1879 by a group of Irish immigrants. Over the ensuing decades, the organization spread throughout the state and by the end of the 19th century there were ninety-five branches throughout Massachusetts.[1]

Mary Choppa, of the Massachusetts based Irish Ancestral Research Association, and Joanne Riley, an archivist at the Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston, crossed the Atlantic to give the talk. They started by outlining what the Catholic Order of Foresters was, what information was contained in the mortuary records, and how they came into the possession of TIARA and then the Healey library.

The genealogical strength of the mortuary records lie in the considerable level of detail that a person had to provide to get an insurance policy and the efforts and correspondence that were undertaken to ensure all relevant parties received a payout when the policy holder passed away. I hope to have an example of such a mortuary record on this blog in the next couple of weeks but for now I'll summarize the main points that were discussed.

• Women were admitted to the Order, starting in 1894
• The branches that were set up all over Massachusetts were called courts and there are surviving records of the activities of each court
• There are 79,000 records available and they cover the years 1879 up to the late 1960s/early 1970s.
• Each record contains between 8 and 29 pages
• Information in the records include details such as name, address, information about parents and siblings including when and how parents died, name and address of one friend, details about beneficiaries including maiden and married name of females, names of family members even if they were not beneficiaries
• The beneficiaries were sometimes family members who lived in Ireland. The records for such a person include correspondence between the family members in Ireland and the COF.
• They are currently open for people to access up to 1943. A 72 year rule of access applies and as each year passes, one more new year of records will be accessible to the public
• A different death certificate was supplied than the state/city issued civil death certificate, which can potentially have different information
• The court that a person was a member of can indicate where the person resided in the state

The speakers noted that practically every Irish American family in Massachusetts today has at least one ancestor who can be found in these records. Currently, you can search an index of names through 1935 and apply to the Healey library for a copy of the documents. Records for the years 1936 to 1943 are also available and contact should be made with the Healey Library to search those years. An added bonus was disclosed at that talk in that the records up to 1935 will be making their way onto Familysearch.org in the future.  They will be indexed and all images will be digitized. No date was provided so keep an eye on the regular Familysearch.org new record announcements.

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[1] TIARA. Tiara Foresters Project. 2011. http://tiara.ie/forest.php: accessed 16 December 2013.

Catholic Cemetery, Norfolk, Virginia

The land for St Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Norfolk, Virginia was purchased in 1854. Since that date, it has served as the resting place for Catholics from the Norfolk, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach areas of the state. This is an area of the United States that did not see a lot of immigration of Catholic from Ireland. As a result, the few Catholic parishes and cemeteries that they helped to create are important resources for genealogical research.

The About section of the cemeteries' website has a link to a database of interments that is hosted on the US Gen Web Archive. The database is considerable, with burials from the 1850s to the 21st century included. What makes this such a useful resource is that the information provided for each person was drawn from a number of different sources including original cemetery records, parish records, local death records, headstone inscriptions, obituaries and other records.

Names, dates of burial, dates of death, estimated years of birth, actual dates of birth and a link to an image of the headstone are provided for those in the database. Significantly, place of origin in Ireland is also included for some of the deceased.

For example, John M. O' Connor died on 16 October 1908. He was born about 1866 in Galway. Even though he is buried in Norfolk, Virginia, he died in Baltimore, Maryland.[1] Patrick McCarrick was born in Ballina, County Mayo on 16 June 1821 and died 3 February 1888. He was a captain in the Confederate Navy.[2]

Note: It is important to remember that the information in this database is a secondary source and was derived from primary source documentation. It is possible that mistakes occurred in the creation of this database so the primary source should be obtained wherever possible in your research.

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[1] Alesia Raper, Tim Bonney, Robert B. Hitchings, Bill Inge, Colin Boklage, Marian Rudd, Emilie Hauser, Connie Kean & Candice Cheshire. St Mary's Cemetery Interment Database - O. Date Unknown. http://www.usgwarchives.net/va/norfolkcity/cemeteries/stmarys/sm-o.html : 10 October 2015

[2] Alesia Raper, Tim Bonney, Robert B. Hitchings, Bill Inge, Colin Boklage, Marian Rudd, Emilie Hauser, Connie Kean & Candice Cheshire. St Mary's Cemetery Interment Database - McC - McK. Date Unknown. http://www.usgwarchives.net/va/norfolkcity/cemeteries/stmarys/sm-mcc-mck.html : 10 October 2015

My Ancestors Were From Cork

Having ancestors from Cork comes up time and time again when speaking with people in the American genealogy world. The names of these ancestors can sometimes be very 'Cork-like,' such as Cornelius Mahoney or Jeremiah Murphy. This came to mind when I wrote two of my recent posts (U.S. Census Series: Ward I, Boston 1860 and U.S. Naval Enlistment Records). In both, Cork has, by far, the largest representation from those who had their county of birth recorded. This is a potentially interesting observation and is worth looking at in more detail.

Can we say that if you don't know where your ancestors are from, and you want to play the percentages game, then Cork is the best place to start looking?

Before we go with this hypothesis it is worth highlighting three important points:

(i) about 10% of Irish people in the Naval enlistment records and 57% of Irish people in the Ward 1, Boston census returns recorded a place of birth. As this is the case, caution should be used before extrapolating any findings from the subset of records that record place of birth. 

(ii) these examples are just two record sets, one a point in time survey (census) from 1860 and the other (naval enlistment records) is a record set created via self-selection, as in some people chose to enlist, while others did not.

(iii) while it can't be measured, a maxim I have learned is that leaving from Ireland via the port of Cobh (known as Queenstown from approx. 1849 to 1922) can sometimes turn into 'born in Cork,' as family stories are passed down through the generations.

Despite all this, two interesting observations can be made if we look at statistics that can help with genealogical research. First, in the 1851 to 1880 period, county Cork had the largest number of emigrants leave Ireland (table one). 

Table 1: County with the highest number of emigrants leaving Ireland, 1851-1880[1]
1851-1855	1856-1860	1861-1870	1871-1880
1. Cork	1. Cork	1. Cork	1. Cork
2. Tipperary	2. Antrim	2. Antrim	2. Antrim
3. Limerick	3. Down	3. Tipperary	3. Down
4. Kerry	4. Tipperary	4. Limerick	4. Donegal
5. Galway	5. Limerick	5. Kerry	5. Tyrone

Second, Cork had the largest population of all counties in the 1851 to 1881 period (table two).  

Table 2: County with the largest population in Ireland, 1851-1881[2]
1851	1861	1871	1881
1. 653,512 Cork	1. 544,818 Cork	1. 517,076 Cork	1. 495,607 Cork
2. 410,919 Dublin	2. 410,252 Dublin	2. 405,262 Dublin	2. 421,913 Antrim
3. 352,912 Antrim	3. 368,977 Antrim	3. 404,015 Antrim	3. 418,910 Dublin
4. 333,650 Tipperary	4. 308,913 Down	4. 293,449 Down	4. 272,107 Down
5. 328,860 Down	5. 271,478 Galway	5. 249,720 Galway	5. 241,212 Mayo

It could be inferred that the reason Cork had the highest number of emigrants was because it was the county with the largest population. However, Dublin was the second most populous county in the same time period but did not produce the second highest number of emigrants. A casual observation for Cork and Dublin could be there that there were less economic opportunities in a large rural county than in a predominantly urban one. However, the 'large population = lots of emigrates' trend re-emerges with Antrim, the county with the third highest population and home to the second largest city on the island, Belfast.

So, to answer the question posed at the start: based purely on emigration numbers, probably, but even though Cork had the largest number of emigrants, that percentage is probably going to be small.

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[1] Miller, Kerby A. Emigrants and Exiles: Ireland and the Irish Exodus to North America. New York : Oxford University Press, 1985.

[2] Census of Ireland for the Year 1891, Preliminary report with abstract of the enumerators' summaries 1891. Dublin: Alexander Thom. 1891.p. 13.  Available online at

http://www.histpop.org/ohpr/servlet/PageBrowser?path=Browse/Census%20(by%20geography)/Ireland/1891&active=yes&mno=437&tocstate=expandnew&display=sections&display=tables&display=pagetitles&pageseq=13&zoom=4: accessed 14 May 2015.

Emigration And The Single Woman

@RTÉArchives is a very interesting twitter account to follow to learn about Ireland over the last 50 years. Last week, they tweeted about a 1995 Radharc documentary called Emigration and the Single Woman. This clip discussed the Mission of Our Lady of the Rosary for the Protection of the Irish Immigrant Girls that existed in New York City in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The records of this organizations are digitized and available for free online. They were quietly released in March 2014, of which you can read more about in my post from when they went online. Researching in them is a must if you have female immigrants from Ireland who came to New York during that time period.

Emigration and the Single Woman, from Radharc via RTÉ Archives.

Click here or here to read Townland of Origin posts about how other Radharc documentaries can help with genealogy. 

Archives Of Irish America

The Archives of Irish America is a repository of primary research materials at New York University that aims to transform our understanding of the Irish migration experience and the distillation of American Irish ethnicity over the past century.[1] Sometimes, it is not obviously apparent how a university archive collection can help with genealogy, but searching through the catalog can reveal some hidden gems.

The oral history collection contains a large number of interviews with Irish-born immigrants and those who are descendants of Irish immigrants from previous generations. Some of the interviewees from Ireland were born in the 1930s and could possibly give an insightful understanding about coming to America and assimilating in the first half of the 20th century. Places of origin in Ireland and the names of parents and grandparents could also possibly be provided.

The Archives also houses the Gaelic Society of New York Collection and the John T. Ridge Collection, among many others. Both of these collections have documents and information from the 19th and 20th centuries. Many Irish immigrants joined fraternal, cultural, social, and political organizations in the U.S. These collections cans shed light on their involvement in such organizations and possibly provide pertinent genealogical information.

For a full list of the collections, click this link and select Archives of Irish America (AIA) Collection at the top of the page.

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[1] New York University. Archives of Irish America. Year Unknown. www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/research/aia: accessed 7 May 2015.

Catholic Order Of Foresters Indexing Project

In January 2014, I wrote about The Irish Ancestral Research Association and highlighted the databases on their site. One database contains information about the records for the Massachusetts Catholic Order of Foresters. This was a fraternal life insurance organization founded in Boston in 1879 by a group of Irish immigrants. Over the ensuing decades, the organization spread throughout the state and by the end of the 19th century there were ninety-five branches throughout Massachusetts.[1]

An archivist from the Joseph P. Healey Library, University of Massachusetts-Boston got in touch to let me know about the efforts that have led to the creation of an online index for this set of records on the library website. This index facility includes more search parameters and also contains the most recent versions of the indexing efforts, a project that is still ongoing. Records for the Foresters, which are housed at the library, are available through 1942, with the index currently covering the years up to 1935.

Read more about the Catholic Order of Foresters, access the indexing project database, and learn where to write to for copies of the records by clicking here.

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[1] TIARA. Tiara Foresters Project. 2011. http://tiara.ie/forest.php: accessed 16 December 2013.

U.S. Census Series: Wheeling, West Virginia 1880

About 30,000 residents were enumerated in Wheeling, West Virginia in the 1880 U.S. federal census. Irish immigrants accounted for about 5% of the population at that point. J.L Stauton[1] was the census enumerator in the first sub-district of the 6th Ward. This section was in the downtown area where Market, Main and 20th Sts. straddle Wheeling Creek as it flows into the Ohio river. As he went about his work, he recorded the county or province of birth for about 55% of Irish immigrants that he enumerated.

Page from 1880 U.S. federal census, Wheeling, West Virginia

The 1880 federal census also asked for the place of birth of the person's parents and he also recorded this information. This can be particularly useful if one of the parents is deceased. For example 23 year old Alice Moran, is living with her mother Mary at 31 Main St.[2] Alice is listed as being born in West Virginia, mother born in Kilkenny and father born in Dublin. There is no male of the correct age living with the family so he may be deceased. Despite this possibility, we know what county in Ireland he most likely came from.

It is interesting to note the strong presence of people from Connaught, with Mayo, Galway, Roscommon, and Connaught itself, all heavily represented. The numbers for place of birth information from this 6th Ward sub-district are:

Galway 13

Mayo 13

Connaught 6

Roscommon 5

Cork 3

Derry 3

Ulster 3

Tyrone  3

Kilkenny 3

Sligo 2

Donegal 2

Laois (Queens) 1

Longford 1

Dublin 1

Carlow 1

Down 1

Munster 1 [3]

Cavan    1
Total 63

Ireland  50

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[1] That is my best effort at interpreting his signature at the top of the census pages.

[2] Ancestry.com, 1800 US Census, Ohio County, West Virginia, population schedule, City of Wheeling 1st Supervisors District, Sheet 2B, House 17, family 21, Alice Moran; digital image, Ancestry.com http://www.ancestry.com: accessed 2 February 2015; citing Family History Film 1255410 Roll 1410. 

[3] This could refer to Munster, Germany

St. Joseph's New Cemetery, Cincinnati

St. Joseph's New Cemetery in Cincinnati, Ohio opened in 1854 and was purchased due to the original St. Joseph's Cemetery—located closer to the center of downtown—filling up. That first cemetery housed the remains of the growing German and Irish Catholic population of the city and was open from 1842 to 1853. [1]

The website for the new cemetery has an extensive database of over 120,000 interments, covering the time period from the 1850s to 2008. There is also a helpful browse option, useful for names that have been erroneously transcribed or spelled in an unconventional manner. Information returned from the database includes name of deceased, date of interment, and where known, age, date of death, spouse's name, and parents' names.

The cemetery is located at 4500 Foley Road, to the west of downtown Cincinnati. 

Click here to access the database.

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[1] Blevins, Michael J. St. Joseph Cemetery Association. 18 November 2008.  http://www.stjoenew.com/history.html: accessed 13 January 2015. 

Irish In Cleveland Book

Many states, cities, and towns have a seminal publication about the Irish community that lives there. In Cleveland, Ohio it is The Irish Americans And Their Communities of Cleveland. The book was published in 1978 and written by Nelson Callahan and William Hickey.

The book begins with a brief overview of Irish history and Irish immigration to North America, before focusing on the Irish immigrants who came to Cleveland. Chapter 3, Settling in Cleveland, forms the core of the first section and follows a broadly chronological path through the 19th century. Beginning with those who first came in the 1820s, it moves on to those who lived on Whiskey Island and in Irishtown, focusing on such topics as employment, crime, the Civil War, and politics along the way.

The Catholic Church is a central theme that runs through the second half of the book. As in many other urban areas, it played a defining role in the lives of 19th century Irish immigrants who moved to the growing American cities. Readers will learn about the parishes and cemeteries in the city, which can lead to useful genealogical information. There are also maps, photographs, and information about Cleveland Irish organizations as they existed when the book was published.

While not aimed at genealogists, the book will be valuable to those who have ancestors in the city. Luckily it is available to read for free on the Cleveland Memory website, click here to access. 

Saint John Almshouse Records

I have featured a number of databases on this blog from the New Brunswick Irish Portal over the last number of months (see the end of this post for a full list of links to previous articles). Another one worth highlighting is the Saint John Almshouse Records, primarily for the Irish place of origin information in these records.

This database covers the years 1843 to 1897 and is made up of two different sets of registers - St. John [sic] City Almshouse Admission Registers, 1843-1897 and Saint John Almshouse Admission Registers, 1843-1884. A number of city institutions are covered in these registers, namely the Alms and Work House, the Emigrant Infirmary, and the St. John Emigrant Orphan Asylum. These institutions were created due to the arrival of large numbers of poor emigrants from Europe, in particular Ireland.

The structure of the search facility is slightly different when compared to the websites of the commercial and non-profit behemoths. Firstly, you can pre-select the amount of information that is returned from searches. Some of the information, such as collection, page, given names, and surname is automatically returned, but there is a sizeable list which is optional. This include: admitted by, age in years, age in months, age in days, condition, nativity, date landed, died/discharged, date of death/discharge, place of origin, parish of residence, time in house, time in province, vessel, vessel type, vessel master, religion, departure, landed, and remarks. However, information was not necessarily collection for each heading.

Secondly, the collections can be filtered and they are categorized by archival number. St. John [sic] City Almshouse Admission Registers, 1843-1897 make up the MC249 collections and Saint John Almshouse Admission Registers, 1843-1884 make up the MC700 collections. It is recommended to read the introduction and 'About the Records' to fully understand this record set and database.

Many of the records for those born in Ireland return a county of origin, making this a particularly useful database to consult.

Access the database by clicking here.

Note - I have previous written about other databases from the New Brunswick Irish Portal: Brenan Funeral Home records, Fitzwilliam Estate Emigration Books, Irish Immigrants in New Brunswick Census 1851 & 1861, Teachers Petition Database, and Irish in 19th Century New Brunswick Newspapers.

St. Peter's Catholic Cemetery, Baltimore, MD

St. Peter's Catholic Cemetery in Baltimore, Maryland is located on Moreland Ave., to the north-west of the downtown area. It opened in 1851 and was associated with St. Peter the Apostle parish which was founded on the corners of Hollins and North Poppleton Sts. in 1842. This parish, known as the "mother Church of west Baltimore", was built to provide a place of worship for the growing Irish population who moved to the west side of the city to work on the B&O Railroad.[1]

Three different online indexes of burials for the cemetery, in .pdf file format, are available to view for the years 1851 to about 1970. Each of these indexing efforts come from different sources and cover a majority of, though not all, entries. It is recommended to read the 'Preface' for each set of files to understand from what source they were transcribed and what years they cover. You can access all three sets by clicking here and a cemetery map by clicking here.

Note: St. Peter the Apostle parish is now closed. In 2004 it merged with St. Jerome and St. Martin to form Transfiguration Catholic Community. Phone: 410-685-5044 or visit the parish website for more information, such as the location of parish registers.

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[1] Spalding, Thomas W. The Premier See: A History of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, 1789-1989. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 1989.

Biographical History Of The American Irish In Chicago

Biographical History of the American Irish in Chicago[1] is an 1897 publication that falls into the category of books that highlight the origins, life, and achievements of notable Irish-born immigrants and first generation Irish Americans in the United States. In total, the book contains information for about 300 such people who lived in the Chicago area in the 19th century.

For almost every entry, the place of origin in Ireland is given for those who were immigrants. The place of origin of their parents is noted for many of those who were first generation Irish American. Other useful genealogical information is included for many entries such as year of immigration, early movements in the US for immigrants, employment history, who they married, how many children they had, and date and place of death and burial. Pictures and signatures are also included for some of those written about.

This example gives a flavor of what is contained in the publication:[2]

As with almost all of these 19th century biographical publications, there are no citations from primary sources. Use the information as a guide in your research and, as much as is possible, verify any information with primary documents.

You can read the book in full on the always excellent Hathi Trust website.

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[1] Ffrench, Charles. Biographical History of the American Irish in Chicago. Chicago, IL: American Biographical Publishing Co. 1897.

[2] Ibid. pp. 10-11.