The Downers wrote a book and may have cracked the Hannigan wall
Irish emigrant women hardly ever get their fathers written down anywhere accessible. And almost never a mother’s maiden name. They arrive as Bridget or Mary or Ellen, marry in a parish where the priest knows exactly who they are and doesn’t think to note it, and turn up in the census as “wife” with a husband’s surname and a birthplace of “Ireland”. When their death certificates do finally ask for a father’s name, the informant is a grieving son who may never have heard it.
So when I found Bridget Hannigan’s father, it threw me a bit that it wasn’t in an Irish record, a Catholic register or a death certificate. It was in a book about somebody else’s family.
Who Bridget was
Bridget Hannigan was born in Ireland in 1853. The sources can’t agree on the year: her gravestone says 1853, the 1900 census says 1854, and her death notice makes her younger still. This kind of year drift doesn’t seem to matter much, as people weren’t always writing it down themselves.
On 19 December 1878 she married Meltiah Nye Downer at Marlborough, in Ulster County, New York, and she stayed there for the rest of her life. They had six sons between 1879 and the early 1890s: Edward, Robinson Nye, Richard, John Allen, James and Joseph Meltiah. She died on 22 March 1924 at her daughter’s home across the river in Newburgh. She’s buried at St Mary’s in Marlboro, the same churchyard as half the immigrant Hannigans connected to my family.
The Downers weren’t an immigrant family, though. Meltiah was born at Lloyd in 1852, the son of Ambrose C. Downer of New Hamburg and Catherine Nye of New Paltz, and the Downers had been in America long enough that by 1900 someone had sat down and written them up in their own family genealogy.
That someone was David R. Downer, and the book is The Downers of America, with Genealogical Record, published at Newark, New Jersey, in 1900. It’s free on the Internet Archive.
Entry 2256
It boggles my mind that it was here since 1900….but here it is, as printed on page 204:
2256 MELTIAH N., of Marlborough (²²²⁷Ambrose C.), m 19 Dec, 1878, Bridget, dau of Patrick Hanighan, of Bally-bofy, Ireland. Had, all b at Marlborough, N. Y., [six sons follow]
So I have a father’s name, Patrick, and a place, Ballybofey, the market town on the River Finn in the civil parish of Stranorlar, County Donegal.
This is the only document I’ve found anywhere that names Bridget’s father. Or any father of all of the Newburgh and Marlboro Hannigans. FamilySearch’s shared tree has her with fourteen sources and no parents at all. Nobody else has published a parentage for her, so there was no competing claim to test against. And…we have LOADS of DNA matches whose epicenter is : Ballybofey.
What a published genealogy is, and what it isn’t
A book like this is a derivative source. David Downer wasn’t copying a parish register. He was writing to his relations, collecting what they sent back and putting it into numbered paragraphs. For the Marlborough branch, whoever answered his letter was almost certainly Meltiah, or Bridget herself.
It was printed in 1900, while Bridget was alive and the marriage was twenty-two years old. If the informant was Bridget, that’s a woman giving her own father’s name, and it’s hard to beat that for the given name. If it was her husband, he probably walked into the kitchen and asked.
Sadly, the book names no mother, gives Patrick no dates and gives no townland really: Ballybofey is a town, and the family could have lived in any of the townlands around it. It may have been akin to living in a tiny village nobody heard of, but naming the biggest nearest place so that people would know roughly where it was. The spelling “Hanighan” turns up exactly twice in the whole book, here and in the index, which tells me the compiler (or his typesetter) was working by ear.
What I haven’t done yet is find him on the Irish side. Matching a Patrick Hannigan at or near Ballybofey in the Irish records is the job that’s still ahead and is part of the work I will be doing in the Valuation office. I can guarantee there is going to be more than one contender.
Bridget’s neighbours
When the paper trail runs out on one person, you widen the circle to the people around them: who they lived next to, who stood up at their weddings and who held their babies at the font. That’s the FAN club method (Friends, Associates and Neighbours), and around Bridget the circle is all Hannigan.
1875. Three years before Bridget married, the New York state census finds Michael Hannigan, newly married to Margaret Welsh, sharing a single dwelling at Marlboro with a second Hannigan family headed by Patrick, aged 30, with his wife Mary and two small sons. Two Hannigan men of an age, both Irish-born, under one roof. Michael is my 2nd great grandfather.
1880. The federal census puts the whole group in one enumeration district at Marlborough. The Downers are at dwelling 45. Patrick Hannigan is at dwelling 71. Michael and Margaret are at dwelling 385.
1889. This is my favourite. On 30 June 1889 St Mary’s baptised Bridget’s son, born on the 19th, and he wasn’t just James. He was James Hannigan Downer, carrying his mother’s maiden name as a middle name. His godparents were Patrick and Cecilia Hannigan. (The priest wrote the father down as Joseph M. Downer, which is Meltiah’s own first name surfacing; the book only ever calls him Meltiah.)
Under all of that sits a dense web of sponsorships between the Hannigans and the Welshes from 1875 onwards. Hannigans stood godparent to Welsh children six times and Welshes to Hannigans at least twice, which is the signature of families who came over together from one place. None of it proves a sibling relationship on its own, because godparent evidence can’t tell a brother from a first cousin. But taken together, Bridget isn’t a stray Hannigan who happened to settle in Marlborough. She’s one of a group.
The niece who came to stay
Then there’s the 1905 census, which has had a whole post of its own.
Read it here: The Two Marys of Marlborough, and a shot at the wall
The short version: on census day 1905 there’s an eighteen-year-old Mary M Hanagan in the Downer household, listed as a niece. She has to be a niece through Bridget, because Bridget is the only Hannigan by birth in the house, and the Downer book has no Hannigans anywhere else. So Mary is the daughter of one of Bridget’s brothers.
There were two candidates, both called Mary, both baptised at St Mary’s, born six months apart:
- Mary Catherine, daughter of Michael Hannigan and Margaret Welsh. She’d lost her mother in 1891 and her father in 1902, and her stepmother had remarried that November.
- Mary, a twin, daughter of John Hannigan and Bridget Gill. Her father died in 1900.
For a while the two were level, and the girl’s age actually favoured the Gill twin. What tipped it was the Newburgh city directories. In 1904 and 1905 they show Bridget, widow of John, as householder at 151 Ann Street, with Miss Mary Hannigan resident at the same address and working at a button factory and then a lace mill. If that’s the Gill twin, she was at home with her mother in Newburgh, not lodging with her aunt in Marlborough.
That leaves Mary Catherine, Michael’s daughter, as the leading candidate. And if she’s the niece, Bridget is Michael’s sister. And that means….Bridget’s father is Michael’s father too.
What it adds up to, and what it doesn’t
Put the threads together and I have a working hypothesis. Patrick Hanighan of Ballybofey was the father of a sibling group that emigrated to the Hudson Valley in the 1870s: James (about 1842), Patrick (about 1845), Michael (about 1848–50), John (about 1851) and Bridget (about 1853). They settled within a few dwellings of each other, stood godparents for each other’s children and took in each other’s orphans.
It’s a lovely shape, and it’s exactly the kind of story I’ve learned to distrust when it fits this neatly.
What it actually rests on is one printed sentence for the father, a neighbourhood for the siblings, and a niece for one sibling link. Only the book names a parent, and a published genealogy isn’t an original record. And even with the book giving me Ballybofey, finding the right Patrick there isn’t simple. I’ve spent the past few weeks building out the floating Hannigan families of the Finn Valley (Ballybofey, Cappry, Killygordon, Curraghomongan).
So the next step isn’t more paper about the neighbours. It’s asking the descendants.
Next steps: asking the DNA with BanyanDNA
If these Hannigans really were brothers and a sister, their descendants today should share DNA in amounts that fit second, third and fourth cousins. If they were only cousins of each other, the amounts should be noticeably smaller. And I do have descendants who’ve tested on more than one of these lines:
- Michael’s line, through two older Hannigan cousins on my side of the family, who are the fixed point for every comparison.
- Bridget’s line, through descendants of her Downer sons.
- Patrick’s line, through descendants of Patrick, who married Ann Cahill.
- John’s line, through descendants of John and Bridget Gill, most of them through, of all people, the Gill twin Mary and her marriage to Sherow. The “other Mary”, who I spent a whole post ruling out of the Downer house, turns out to be one of the most useful DNA lines in this family.
Raw centimorgans on their own won’t settle it. At these distances the ranges for sibling and cousin scenarios overlap enormously, and every number here falls inside the published ranges for several relationships. That’s where BanyanDNA comes in. I first used it on a Coughlan problem (Seven small matches, BanyanDNA and Patrick’s sister Catherine), and it does something a cM chart can’t: you give it the whole tree, every tester and every pair, and it simulates thousands of inheritances to see which version of the tree is the best fit.
So the plan, for each pairing (Michael vs Bridget, Michael vs Patrick, Michael vs John), is:
- Build three versions of the tree in Banyan: the two as full siblings, as half siblings, and as first cousins.
- Enter the matches: the same two base kits against every tester.
- Run each model at 3,000 trials, and compare how well each one fits, pair by pair as well as overall.
If Banyan leans toward “full siblings”, that tells me the paper hypothesis is consistent with the genetics. It doesn’t replace the certificate though. The documents still have the final word:
- Bridget’s own death certificate, number 15577 (Newburgh, 1924), which should name her parents.
- John Hannigan’s death certificate, number 23096 (Marlborough, 1900).
- Bridget and Meltiah’s marriage return of 19 December 1878, if one survives, which should name both her parents. The book named only one.
- And in Ireland, any kind of differentiating information about the Patricks of the Ballybofey region.
Results coming soon.