Most brick walls are built from missing records. This one was built from not looking. Then when I looked, we created another touchpoint to break the wall by bumping along under it.
It is a single line in the New York State Census of 1 June 1905, taken at Marlborough in Ulster County, and it reads:
Mary M Hanagan, 18, Niece
One word — niece — and a whole identity hangs on it. This is the story of how that word nearly sent me down the wrong family line and how I caught it.
The family are the Hannigans, Catholic emigrants from – we think – the parish of Stranorlar in County Donegal who settled along the Hudson Valley in the 1870s. By 1905 the suspected sibling/cousin generation, including a 2nd Great Grandfather, was scattered between Marlborough in Ulster County and Newburgh, across the river in Orange County.
One woman, Bridget, had married a local man — Meltiah N. Downer — in 1878 and stayed at Marlborough. And in her husband’s household on census day 1905 sits an eighteen-year-old Mary M Hanagan, described as a niece.
So who is this Mary anyway?
My second great grandfather Michael Hannigan had married Margaret Welsh, and in the 1880 census the young couple appear at Marlborough with their first children. Among their later children was a daughter, Mary Catherine, born at Marlboro on 8 June 1887 and baptised at St Mary’s four weeks later.
The 1900 census seemed to confirm the identification: there is Mary, thirteen, in Michael’s Newburgh house.
The woman listed as Michael’s wife in 1900 is Julia — and the Ancestry index duly prints “Mother: Julia Hannigan” against every child in the household. Julia was not their mother. She was Michael’s second wife; Mary’s mother, Margaret Welsh, had been dead nine years.
So is this Mary a Hannigan ‘the’ niece?
The relationship column records the relationship to the head of the household, and the head was Meltiah Downer, not Bridget. On paper Mary could as easily have been a Downer niece or ‘niece’ used as ‘niece by marriage’.
But – Bridget Downer was a Hannigan. And the niece – she was a Hanagan; Bridget is the only person of Hannigan birth in the house; and the published family history, The Downers of America (1900), records no other Hannigan anywhere in the Downer line. So the niece comes through Bridget — she must be the daughter of one of Bridget’s siblings. (AND we have really good DNA matches down this Downer/Hannigan line, too.)
The obvious candidate from a household that fell apart
Mary’s mother Margaret Welsh died in 1891. Michael remarried — a widow, Julia — and Michael himself died in 1902. Then, on 12 November 1902, Julia married Anthony O’Shaughnessy at St Mary’s and moved to Roseton.
So by the end of 1902 Mary Catherine was fifteen years old with no mother, no father, and a stepmother remarried into another family. A stepmother who left her previous marriage to marry Michael, and left her own three biological children behind may well have left her older stepchildren as well. (Joseph, my great grandfather and the youngest of the siblings did grow up in Roseton with her).
So Mary turning up in a house by 1905 with an ‘Aunt Bridget’ is not exactly a surprise in this scenario.
The problem of Ancestry ‘hints’
Then the hint engine tried to hand Mary a whole biography. Ancestry’s “suggested records” chained my Mary onward to a Mary C. Hannigan who married a Jerry Sherow in 1913, and from there into six later censuses, a grave and an obituary — a complete, tidy adult life.
It was the wrong life. The county marriage return — the one record in that chain which actually names parents — gives the bride as Mary Cecelia Harrigan, daughter of John Harrigan and Bridget Gill. A different woman entirely. (That said, we also have lots of DNA matches down that line, so John Hannigan/Bridget Gill and that daughter are related somehow).
John Hannigan had married Bridget Gill at the same St Mary’s church. He died at Marlborough on 30 May 1900, and his widow headed her own farm in the June 1900 census — in the Downers’ own enumeration district — with six children, among them a daughter Mary, born 28 December 1886, a twin.
| Mary Catherine Hannigan | Mary, the Gill twin | |
|---|---|---|
| Parents | Michael Hannigan & Margaret Welsh | John Hannigan & Bridget Gill |
| Born | 8 June 1887, Marlboro | 28 December 1886, Marlborough |
| Baptised | St Mary’s, 4 July 1887 | St Mary’s |
| Age on 1 June 1905 | 17 | 18 |
| Married | Daniel A. Dakin, 1909 | Jerry Sherow, 1913 |
Both Hannigans. Both baptised at the same font. Both potentially nieces of the same aunt (if John and Michael were siblings : again we have lots of DNA matches down John’s line too).
The first Mary was tied with an equally good rival. This is the least comfortable and most important move – it’s hard to stay objective when you’re excited 😀
So, how could we possibly disambiguate these two?
If age won’t separate them, what about the initial? The schedule says Mary M. Her rival is Mary Cecelia. That looked like the thread that would pull the balance back — and here the parish registers were more interesting than I expected.
At her baptism, Mary Catherine is not a Mary M at all. Her baptismal entry of 4 July 1887, in Rev. J. F. Mee’s hand, gives the name in full: “Hannigan, Mary Catherine, at Marlboro … of Michael, & Margaret Welsh. Sps. Patrick & Catherine Welsh.” Mary Catherine, after her godmother, Catherine Welsh. Not an initial — a name, written out. C. Just like Mary Cecelia. My heart sunk.
Yet at her marriage on 18 April 1909, the same parish calls her Hannigan, Mary M. And searching the register for the years between, I found her once more: on 30 July 1906 she stood as witness at the marriage of her own brother, Michael E. Hannigan, to Edith M. Ferguson — recorded as Mary M. Hannigan.
Two attestations of the M now, not one. Case closed?
Both M entries are in the same hand by the same Reverend. Rev. E. J. A. Kenny wrote the witness line in 1906 and the bride’s line in 1909. The Catherine is Mee’s from her 1887 baptism. What the parish books actually demonstrated was that one priest wrote her as M and another wrote her as Catherine — two clergymen, two habits, twenty-two years apart. Neither M is a signature; in both entries the priest is writing her name, not taking her hand.
An argument that rests on two records from one pen is not an argument. It is a sample of one.
The county clerk settles it
The test, then, was to find her name written by somebody who had never seen Fr Kenny’s register. That turned out to be free, official, and online.
From 1908 New York required a marriage licence, applied for by the parties themselves at the town clerk’s office before the ceremony. Ulster County’s Marriage Record Index 1908–1935 is searchable at the County Clerk’s Archives:
Date of License: 3 April 1909
Place of License: Town of Marlborough
Groom: Dakin, David I(?)
Bride: Harirringer(?), Mary M
The licence was issued fifteen days before Kenny married them. The M was on the civil record before any priest wrote it. It is a form she gave to a county clerk herself.
Catherine while they lived, Mary M after they died
Line the attestations up against the deaths in her family and a pattern falls out. Every Mary M postdates the death of both parents. The only Mary Catherine predates both, a name given by her parents. If the M stands for Margaret, it is her mother’s name she took up — though both her parents’ names begin with M, so the letter alone will not say which of them she was carrying.
It is a satisfying idea but there is a nineteen-year hole in the middle of it. I have one record of her name before 1906 and nothing whatever between 1887 and 1906. The change is located only to somewhere in those nineteen years. It is correlated with the deaths of 1891 and 1902 but it is not dated by them. A confirmation name, taken at twelve or fourteen — so around 1899 to 1901 — sits inside the same gap, needs no bereavement at all, and would put the change before her father died (but after her mother did).
Every surviving record calls her Mary C while her parents lived, and Mary M after they died. That is true and checkable. She began using M after her parents died is a bit of a different claim.
Where it stands
Two women, then, and the scales are not level so much as loaded on both ends. The age favours the Gill twin by a year – but one year in these times is not much to squabble over. Census ages vary tremendously. The initial favours Mary Catherine, now on civil as well as parish authority. The circumstances favour Mary Catherine — no parents, no household, a stepmother married out.
And the test that would have ended it turns out not to exist. The plan was simple, and I had it written down for weeks: read the 1905 schedule for Bridget Gill’s own household. If her Mary was at home on census day, the girl in the Downer house is Michael’s daughter. If her Mary was missing from home, she is the one staying with her aunt. One page decides it.
There is no page. Bridget Gill’s household is not at Marlborough in 1905 — the town’s other Hannigan families are all there and correctly indexed, and hers is simply not among them. She had gone. By September 1906 she was dead at Newburgh, across the river in Orange County. And Orange County’s 1905 schedules do not survive. The state’s own copies of every New York census before 1915 burned in the State Library fire at Albany in 1911, leaving only such county copies as had been kept — and Orange’s had not. Ulster’s had, which is the only reason I have the Downer household at all. Two counties, one river between them, and one of them still has its 1905 while the other has nothing.
That is worth sitting with, because it is the ordinary condition of this work rather than a special piece of bad luck. Records do not survive because somebody judged them important. They survive because a particular clerk in a particular county happened to put them somewhere dry — or because a fire in Albany reached one shelf and not the next.
So I went looking for what a city keeps instead.
What the directories say
Newburgh published a city directory most years, and a directory does something a census cannot: it comes out annually, and it lists working people by name, address and occupation.
And there she is. Hannigan, Bridget, widow of John — 45 Johnes Street in 1902 and again in 1903, 151 Ann Street in 1904 and 1905, and 6 Lander Street by 1906. So the Marlborough farm was given up within two years of John’s death. By 1902 the widow was in a Newburgh street, and she moved every year or two after that.
I had told myself the Gill twin was the less likely candidate because she had a mother running a farm a few doors from the Downers, and no reason to be lodging with an aunt. By 1905 there was no farm, and it was not a few doors away — it was a rented address across the river, in a household that had moved twice in four years.
Underneath the widow’s line in 1904 stand two more: Mary Miss, emp button fcty. res 151 Ann and Nellie Miss, emp button fcty. res 151 Ann. By the next year Mary is at a lace mill and Nellie at a hat factory, both still res 151 Ann.
Those abbreviations are the whole point. h is householder. res is resides. bds is boards — and it sits four lines down the same column, where Michael Hanrahan boards at the U. S. Hotel. This directory keeps the three apart. So the page is not merely putting Mary at the same street number as the widow. It says that Bridget, widow of John, kept the house at 151 Ann, and that Mary lived in it.
And the books date themselves, which is how I know the 6 Lander residence belongs to 1906 and not 1905. Ancestry files two annual volumes under a single 1905 label — you can tell, because the Hannigans turn up twice in what is meant to be one alphabetical run. But each book prints deaths in the year it was compiled in, right there in the sequence. The 151 Ann book carries Anna A. Miss, died Jan. 18, 1905. The 6 Lander book carries James C. clerk, died Dec. 14, 1905. So the volume that puts Mary in her mother’s house at 151 Ann is the one canvassed in the months around census day — and the move to 6 Lander belongs to the year after, by which time a John, lineman has appeared at the address as well, old enough at last to be listed.
If that Mary is the Gill twin, then she was living at her mother’s Newburgh address and going out to a mill in exactly the years I need her placed — and she was not the eighteen-year-old in the Downer house at Marlborough. Which would make the niece Mary Catherine after all, and Bridget Hannigan Downer the sister of Michael.
So Michael’s daughter moves from tied to ahead.
What ends it
There is a death certificate for John Hannigan — Marlborough, 30 May 1900, number 23096 — and unlike a census schedule or a directory, a New York death return names the dead man’s parents. The trouble with NY Death Certificates : the current wait is over 4 years….
