The earliest known ancestor in my Fagan line is Peter Fagan, whose family were living in Hazleton, Pennsylvania by 1850. He, his wife, Elizabeth, and their oldest three children (Julia, Garret, and Elizabeth) were all born in Ireland. As the family tombstone states both he and his wife were born in Westmeath, I had thought that's where I'd find the family records, but recently uncovered evidence that there may be yet another Dublin story in my family tree. The records I found also appear to knock down a little brick wall regarding discrepancies in the records of Elizabeth Fagan's maiden name.
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Garrick, Samuel Walters
National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution
Gift of CIGNA Maritime Collection |
The past few years of focusing on my O'Reilly ancestors has given me some valuable experience in dealing with Irish records and the problems they can have. If I've learned anything, it's that sometimes there's more to a record than just what it says - names can be misspelled, dates can be estimated, and sometimes you have to look at the overall pattern of the document instead to determine if it might be "your" people. It was a passenger record that fits this description that actually got me started. This was the manifest of a ship named the "Garrick", which left from Liverpool and arrived in New York in September 1848. The ship was in its time the fastest packet traveling the New York-Liverpool route, and a wonderful painting of the Garrick exists in the collection of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, depicting it at sail off the northern Welsh coast. The manifest of the September 1848 arrival in the port of New York included a family group recorded as:
- Pat Fegan, age 33
- Eliza Fegan, age 19
- Julius Fegan, age 5
- Garrett Fegan, age 3
- Eliza Fegan, infant
Now, I could look at this and reject it in hand on grounds that my family was spelled Fagan, the father's first name was Peter, and the eldest child was a girl: Julia, not Julius. But when you take into consideration that these manifests were written by other people (many of the passengers were themselves illiterate), likely working in a hurry to record hundreds of names per voyage, you can forgive human errors in the records. Much else about this manifest corresponds to the known ages and names of the Fagans (particularly the children) in the Hazleton records. The overall
pattern fits. And taking into account that this ship left from Liverpool rather than Queenstown (Cobh), I gambled on a notion that there was a possibility the Fagan family had passed through Dublin first, perhaps picking up better paying work in the city to pay for their passage. On a hunch, I decided to search the Dublin church records for them, and did it ever pay off.
The image shows a page from the register of St. Andrew's Catholic Church in Westland Row, Dublin, containing a marriage record - dated 30 January 1842 - between Peter Fegan and Eliza Grogan. A further search through that parish between that marriage year and 1850 turns up only three baptisms for Fegan/Fagan with parents named Peter and Eliza/Elizabeth. In birth order, those children were named Julia, Garret, and Eliza - exact matches to the known Fagan children born before the Fagans came to the United States,
and their baptismal dates line up with the ages of the Fagan children in the Garrick's passenger manifest. This marriage record also can rule out two of the possible surnames for Elizabeth Fagan that were listed in the death certificates of her children Robert Fagan -
Rogan - and Elizabeth Fagan Dougherty -
Brogan. If the couple married in this record are the correct people - and I believe that they are - the correct surname for their mother is evidently the name that was recorded on the death certificate of another of the Pennsylvania-born Fagan children, Michael:
Grogan.
Sources:
"
New York Passenger Lists, 1820-1891." Database with images. FamilySearch. http://FamilySearch.org : 14 June 2016. Citing NARA microfilm publication M237. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, n.d.
Painting, Garrick - The National Museum of American History
Irish Catholic Parish Registers -
unindexed images may be browsed at the National Library of Ireland and an index may be consulted for free at
FindMyPast with registration of a free site account.
Ancestry.com.
Pennsylvania, Death Certificates, 1906-1964 [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2014.
