This is the companion piece to Four surnames and not one was hers. That post was about my second great-grandfather’s second wife, Julia, and the ruled column that finally gave up her maiden name. It ended with a list of things still open to look into – and one of the items on that list was a woman called Anna.
John Francis Hannigan — my great-grandfather’s elder brother — married Anna L. O’Rourke at Marlboro, in Ulster County, New York, on 25 June 1897. I have known that for years. What I did not know, and could not find, was who Anna was. But – the surname was in the tree already.
Born September 1878 in New York. Married at eighteen. Eight children I can name between 1897 and 1922, and a ninth the 1910 census counts that no record names. Named in brackets beside her husband in all nineteen Newburgh city directories the run holds between 1923 and 1949 — “John F (Anna)”, then “John F (Anna L)” — year after year, at the same address on the brickyard road. Widowed in April 1949, dead on 6 February 1957, buried under one granite monument with her husband and their daughter Marie in Section 35 at Cedar Hill Cemetery, Newburgh.
A whole life, and not one record in it that named her father.
Why the question mattered more than it looked
Anna’s parentage was not just a loose end on her own line. The 1900 census asked married women how many children they had borne and how many were still living, and Julia O’Rorke, my 2nd Great Grandfather’s second wife answered three and three — and not one of those three was in the house. She had brought an O’Rourke family into the Hannigan marriage, and all three of her children were somewhere else.
I had identified her eldest, Mary O’Rourke, born 1874. The other two were blanks.
And here was an Anna L. O’Rourke, born September 1878 in New York State to two Irish-born parents, living at Newburgh, who had married into the Hannigans in 1897.
I definitely had to look further at her.
Where I had looked, and why my negative was wrong
I had looked for that marriage record more than once, and concluded it was not indexed online.
That conclusion was wrong. I had searched FamilySearch andAncestry— its New York county marriage collection, its New York Marriages 1686–1980, its New York City marriage records. Three searches, three zeroes, one repository family.
The entry is indexed, though. It is on Findmypast, in the Catholic Heritage Archive’s New York Roman Catholic parish marriages, a collection FamilySearch and Ancestry do not carry at all.
It is indexed there under O’Rourky, which the register itself does not say — worth knowing before you decide a surname is absent from an index, and worth remembering when you finally read the page.
I had recorded an absence of record when what I had was an absence of the right subscription to find it. (My most urgent tip : find out what collections are unique to each service and save up a ‘to find’ list…then subscribe for a month, and go find them all.)
The line, and then the line under it
The register itself is not online in any form. It exists on microfilm at the Marlboro Free Library – nowhere you can reach from a kitchen table in England. A connection on my Welsh side, working her own line, went to the library and photographed the pages. Page 12, year 1897, six marriages, Rev. E. J. A. Kenny officiating at all six. The third entry down reads:
June 25 Hannigan, John F. of Michael, & Margaret Walsh
to O’Rourke, Annie L. of Andrew, & Julia O’Connell,
Wit. Michael Hannigan & Julia Hannigan
E. J. A. Kenny.
Read the second line and the question of who she is is answered in half a sentence. Annie L. O’Rourke, of Andrew, and Julia O’Connell. She is Julia’s daughter. No hedging on that one — it was written down at the wedding by the priest who performed it, and the couple standing in front of him were the ones telling him their parents’ names. Julia’s second child of three has a name.
That is a good day’s work and I would have taken it and gone home.
Then I read the third line.
The witnesses
Wit. Michael Hannigan & Julia Hannigan
Michael Hannigan is the groom’s father. The entry says so itself, one line above. And I know it otherwise even if it hadn’t been written down.
Julia Hannigan is the bride’s mother. She is Julia O’Connell, who had married Michael Hannigan on 20 September 1891 — a Sunday afternoon, at the house of Rev. J. L. Hoey at Milton. By June 1897 she had been Julia Hannigan for nearly six years.
So the two people who stood as witnesses at this wedding were the groom’s father and the bride’s mother, and they were married to each other.
John Francis Hannigan married his stepsister.
Not a blood relation of any kind. Anna was the daughter of Michael Hannigan’s second wife by her first husband; John was the son of Michael Hannigan by his first wife. They shared no ancestor. They didn’t even share a household – Julia had left Anna someplace else when she married Michael and was raising John Francis. Anna would have been 13 years old when Julia married Michael and began raising that family separate from Anna’s.
And the first child came quickly. Gertrude Margaret Hannigan was born on 15 October 1897 at Roseton — one hundred and twelve days after the wedding — and was baptised at St Mary’s on the 31st. Her sponsors were Michael Hannigan and Mary O’Rourke: the baby’s paternal grandfather again, and, on the likeliest reading, the baby’s maternal aunt, Julia’s eldest daughter.
One from each side at the wedding, one from each side at the font, four months apart.
Five years later they were on opposite sides of a courtroom
Michael Hannigan died at Middlehope on 21 September 1902, intestate.
Fifty-two days later, on 12 November 1902, his widow married Anthony O’Shaughnessy. Anthony Shaughnessy already owned property in the same town, a mile away, bought the year before. So Julia moved down the road.
On 2 December 1902, John Francis Hannigan swore a petition for letters of administration on his father’s estate. He signed himself John Hannigan Jr, and he swore it before a notary and it was filed at Orange County a week later. His petition named the seven heirs at law — the widow Julia and the six surviving children — valued the personal estate at not more than two hundred dollars, and put the real property at fifteen hundred.
This is important further down the post.
On 23 December the court sat at Newburgh before Surrogate Obadiah P. Howell. The petitioner appeared by his attorney. And the minute records, in one line, that this was not going to be straightforward:
John Rusk appears for Julia Hannigan — widow
New citation issued, matter adjourned to 6 January 1903.
On 30 December the citations went out at Middlehope. One was served on Julia. The other was served on all six children at once by Daniel Welsh — the same Daniel Welsh who had witnessed Michael and Margaret’s marriage in 1875 and stood godfather to one of their sons, and who now swore that he “knew the persons so served to be the persons of the same name”. Whether he was Margaret’s brother or her cousin is still not established by any record I have read. What this file shows is that a family handed him legal process for its children and he could vouch for personally knowing every one of them. (He also bought land adjacent to them).
On 6 January 1903 the parties appeared as before. The Surrogate found “conflicting claims as to the value of the said personal Estate”, held that Julia was the one entitled to letters, and ordered them issued to her on a bond of one thousand dollars with two sureties.
On 16 January she swore her own petition — in Ulster County now, as a resident of Marlborough — and signed it “Julia Shaughnesy formerly Julia Hannigan”. Her valuation of the personal estate was about seventy dollars, against her stepson’s two hundred.
That is the conflict the Surrogate names, and it is a conflict about roughly a hundred and thirty dollars. His own order carries a third figure, five hundred, which fits neither petition and may be a slip of the pen. Courts are records like any other and they make mistakes like any other.
The son lost to the stepmother.
John Francis was suing his wife’s mother
Now put Anna in the room.
The man petitioning the court was her husband. The woman he was petitioning against was her mother. The dead man whose estate they were arguing over was her stepfather, and had been a witness at her wedding.
I have found nothing that says what she thought about it, and I do not expect to. What I can say is that the marriage survived it by forty-six years.
Why there was anything to fight about
Michael Hannigan bought land at Middlehope from James and Bridget Keefe in 1881 — recorded at Liber 302, page 231, two pages away in the same book from William Welsh’s purchase from the same sellers in the same year. He farmed it for two decades.
And in 1902, the year he died, he conveyed it to Julia. Orange County Deeds, Liber 460, page 518, Michael Hannigan to Julia Hannigan.
John Francis’ petition for administration included the value of the farm, which indicates he may not have known that it could not be included in the estate – because Julia owned it.
In deeding the property to Julia, Michael effectively disinherited his children from the family farm. He may have done this specifically to disinherit them, or to ensure Julia could remain and look after his children if something happened to him. Perhaps there was ill will between the eldest children and their stepmother, and this was a protective act – widows with their husband’s children are not exactly put into a good situation as they typically own nothing (nothing to bring to a remarriage). We probably will never know, but I hope to learn more if I can ever get my hands on the actual deeds themselves.
Amusing post script : part of the process required the independent valuation of the estate. A Mr William Welsh was one of the valuers – very likely Michael’s first wife Margaret’s brother or cousin, who bought property at the same time Michael did, on adjacent parcels, from the same Keefe.