In August, I visited one of the oldest cemeteries in Burlington, to do some RAOGK for a couple of people who had ancestors buried there. I was able to locate the stones after lifting up some grass but they were very old and worn so I did some rubbings. It was a pretty windy day and I kept seeing things out of the corner of my eye in the corner of a cemetery, near the entrance. As I was trying to decipher what was written on stone, I started to say things out loud like "Ok George, help me out here" A few minutes later, a shadow came up beside me and past my right shoulder. I figured it was the shadow of a tree branch and looked over my shoulder. I saw a tall thin man with grey hair, black pants, a white dress shirt & suspenders behind me looking over my shoulder at what I was doing. It startled me so bad I shrieked and fell back. I turned around to tell the guy he just scared the hell out me but when I did, there was no one there. I convinced myself I was imaging things and stayed a couple more hours, freaking myself out the whole time because I continued to see someone out of the corner of my eye, in the corner of the cemetery. I told some co-workers about my experience who are probably thinking I'm a bit off and said I had the feeling that there was something someone wanted me to find in that corner of the cemetery.
Being the chicken that I am, I returned to the cemetery briefly a couple of weeks later with my son in tow to take a picture that I missed. I didn't have any strange feelings or sightings this time.
In October, I was doing some research at the library and came across the transcription of the cemetery. I found entries for a couple more people in the cemetery with the same last names that had brought me there in August. For whatever reason they are not listed on the cairn. I decided last week to take a quick look for them over my lunch hour. I walked around the cemetery looking at the exposed stones for a bit but didn't find them. I returned to the entrance and went to the area where I kept seeing someone out of the corner of my eye and..... there was buried stone there, with only the top part peeking out. It took a few minutes to pull the grass back and dirt to uncover the name on the stone but when I did....it was for the woman that I was looking for (who shares the same last name as George). This stone too is quite worn and difficult to make out everything that is written on it, so I need to go back when I have more time. And yes, I told her out loud not to worry, that I would be back.
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Sunday, November 11, 2012
Monday, September 17, 2012
The DesJardins Canal Catastrophe
I've lived almost my entire life in Burlington and Oaville, Ontario and I've never heard about the DesJardins Canal Catastrophe. I was in one of the older cemeteries in Oakville (St Marys) over the weekend whose claim to fame is Chisholm family plot, Colonel William Chisholm being the founder of Oakville.
My research for a fellow genealogist from Michigan took me to the Husband family plot surrounded by the Chisholms but a different stone is what caught my eye. It lay broken in three pieces in the ground under a tree and not really close to other stones. It read ".... of Michael and Rose who were killed at [the] DesJardin Canal Catastrophe March 12 1857". It was a memorial for two sisters, Mary Devine, aged 15 and Ellen Devine aged 20. I decided to dig a bit further and discovered that one of my favorite places in Burlington was the scene of a rail disaster. The Great Western Railway company built a railway swing bridge 40 feet above the DesJardins Canal near Cootes Paradise. On March 12, 1857, the front axle of a passenger train broke as it approached the bridge. As a result, the train jumped the tracks, crashed through the bridge, and fell through 2 feet of frozen canal, destroying the engine and submerging the two passenger cars. The second passenger car apparently landed on it's front end, sticking up out of the water. Mary and Ellen were on their way to see their brother in Hamilton and various newspaper report state they were from Port Nelson, now Burlington. Mary and Ellen died together and did not appear to have been thrown apart as many families riding the train had. Their brother instead of picking them up at the nearby station, ended up identifying their bodies. Poor sisters and poor family. What a tragic way to end young lives.
While many died gruesome deaths, there were also a few miraculous survivals. I've found a number of websites about this disaster the last one including accounts of the rescues:
The Sarnia Observer, March 19, 1857 (full newspaper text online): http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=57&dat=18570319&id=2QcIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=fDYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2175,107185
Full details of the railway disaster of the 12th of March 1857 at the DesJardins Canal of the line on the Great Western Railroad:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=_J--6kixwUUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
The DesJardins Canal Disaster on the Hamilton Public Library website:
http://www.hpl.ca/articles/desjardins-canal-disaster
My research for a fellow genealogist from Michigan took me to the Husband family plot surrounded by the Chisholms but a different stone is what caught my eye. It lay broken in three pieces in the ground under a tree and not really close to other stones. It read ".... of Michael and Rose who were killed at [the] DesJardin Canal Catastrophe March 12 1857". It was a memorial for two sisters, Mary Devine, aged 15 and Ellen Devine aged 20. I decided to dig a bit further and discovered that one of my favorite places in Burlington was the scene of a rail disaster. The Great Western Railway company built a railway swing bridge 40 feet above the DesJardins Canal near Cootes Paradise. On March 12, 1857, the front axle of a passenger train broke as it approached the bridge. As a result, the train jumped the tracks, crashed through the bridge, and fell through 2 feet of frozen canal, destroying the engine and submerging the two passenger cars. The second passenger car apparently landed on it's front end, sticking up out of the water. Mary and Ellen were on their way to see their brother in Hamilton and various newspaper report state they were from Port Nelson, now Burlington. Mary and Ellen died together and did not appear to have been thrown apart as many families riding the train had. Their brother instead of picking them up at the nearby station, ended up identifying their bodies. Poor sisters and poor family. What a tragic way to end young lives.
While many died gruesome deaths, there were also a few miraculous survivals. I've found a number of websites about this disaster the last one including accounts of the rescues:
The Sarnia Observer, March 19, 1857 (full newspaper text online): http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=57&dat=18570319&id=2QcIAAAAIBAJ&sjid=fDYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=2175,107185
Full details of the railway disaster of the 12th of March 1857 at the DesJardins Canal of the line on the Great Western Railroad:
http://books.google.ca/books?id=_J--6kixwUUC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
The DesJardins Canal Disaster on the Hamilton Public Library website:
http://www.hpl.ca/articles/desjardins-canal-disaster
Loyalist it is
Well turns out that my sister-in-law's 5x great grandfather was in fact, a loyalist. On Oct 24, 1776, in a letter adddressed to the Right Honorable Richard, Lord Viscount Howe of the Kingdom of Ireland and his excellency the Honorable William Howe Esq., General of his majesty's forces in America, her 5x great grandfather along with hundrends of other New Yorkers signed a pledge of alligence to George the third.
I found the transcrption at archives.org in a book entitled " published in1861.
http://archive.org/details/newyorkcitydurin00merc
Now on to find his land grant and prove he was in fact a UEL.
I found the transcrption at archives.org in a book entitled " published in1861.
http://archive.org/details/newyorkcitydurin00merc
Now on to find his land grant and prove he was in fact a UEL.
Friday, June 22, 2012
UEL? Hessian? Revolutionist?
I've turned my focus back to my sister in law's PEI ancestors. I've managed to trace back her 5x great grandparents. Her 5x great grandfather born sometime in the late 1700s was born in the US. Based on census research he was an American of German descent and he married a woman born in Ireland. I've known this for awhile and I've also found the family tree published online @ The Island Register. At this website it names her 6x great grandparents who immigrated from Holland. It also states that her 6x great grandfather pledged allegiance to King George III. He was one of several hundred people to publicly do so and it was published in the paper on Nov 4, 1776. I tried to contact the woman a couple of times to see if I could get her sources but I never heard back.
I had some wild dreams that he was a Hessian who went to America to fight but was captured in the Battle of Trenton, then swore allegiance to the king and stayed. That dream didn't last long - The Battle of Trenton occurred on December 26, 1776.
I've been very leery about relying on any information that I find on the web that is not properly cited but I decided to see if I could find the sources for the online family tree. Aside from a couple of other websites that have reused the information and are now throwing around UEL possibilities, I've found some pretty good New York records online:
http://www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com Where found an index entry for what is believed to be his first marriage in 1755.
http://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org Where I found a transcription of the marriage record and I also found a baptismal record for a son whom according to the online family tree, he had with his second wife in 1780.
Based on this latter date, I'm finding it hard to believe that he maintained his allegiance to the king without having been tarred and feathered at some point. I'm also starting to wonder if there is a generation missing and the child who was baptized is actually a grandson of the man who came from Germany/Holland.
My next steps are to try to find the second marriage record, a death record for the first wife and try to debunk a revolutionist theory. Maybe he changed his mind at some point and switched sides?
I had some wild dreams that he was a Hessian who went to America to fight but was captured in the Battle of Trenton, then swore allegiance to the king and stayed. That dream didn't last long - The Battle of Trenton occurred on December 26, 1776.
I've been very leery about relying on any information that I find on the web that is not properly cited but I decided to see if I could find the sources for the online family tree. Aside from a couple of other websites that have reused the information and are now throwing around UEL possibilities, I've found some pretty good New York records online:
http://www.bklyn-genealogy-info.com Where found an index entry for what is believed to be his first marriage in 1755.
http://www.newyorkfamilyhistory.org Where I found a transcription of the marriage record and I also found a baptismal record for a son whom according to the online family tree, he had with his second wife in 1780.
Based on this latter date, I'm finding it hard to believe that he maintained his allegiance to the king without having been tarred and feathered at some point. I'm also starting to wonder if there is a generation missing and the child who was baptized is actually a grandson of the man who came from Germany/Holland.
My next steps are to try to find the second marriage record, a death record for the first wife and try to debunk a revolutionist theory. Maybe he changed his mind at some point and switched sides?
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Confirming a line with an obituary
I had a nice little win a few nights ago. I've been struggling to make some headway on my husband's Dunn side. I knew that his gg grandfather was married to a lady named Rebecca sometime around 1848. I knew that Rebecca remarried and according to her marriage registration, her father was a carriage maker named William Henry Woods and her mother was named Catherine Wood. In 1901 her immigration year was recorded as 1861. Armed with this information, I quickly found William Henry Woods carriage maker in the 1861 Census in York with a daughter Rebecca, a number of siblings and a wife named Charlotte.
I made an assumption that this was the correct William Henry and that he possibly remarried or that Rebecca's mom was actually Charlotte.
Rebecca's 2nd husband's mother's name was Catherine and I thought it might have been recorded in error. Under this theory I proceeded to research this Woods line in Ontario.
I left the line alone for more than a year and the other night decided to research obituaries for Dunn ancestors on the Toronto Star's Pages of the Past website. I have an account with the Brampton Public Library and I'm able to access the website from home, for free.....
After finding a few Dunn obits I decided to give the Woods line a try. I already had Charlotte's 1916 death registration so I looked her up. To my surprise there was a writeup on her as well as a picture. In the obit it stated that she was a pioneer of Toronto, immigrated with her husband and young family in 1850, married at 17 and was the last surviving member of a family of 23. It also stated that when they came to Canada they lived on the site of the current post office located on Toronto Street and that she leaves 200 descendants. Sure enough it proceeds to list out the names of all of her children one of them Mrs Whittaker. Rebecca's second husband was Robert Whittaker. To remove all doubt that Mrs Whittaker is in fact my Rebecca, the article goes on to give the names of her 2 great grandsons who were serving in WWI, both brothers and Rebecca's grandsons.
After I did my happy dance, I decided to turn to England. I found Charlotte in the 1851 Surrey census with Rebecca and her sister. The husband, a carriage maker was not at home at the time. I looked a bit more and actually obtained a copy of Charlotte and William Henry's 1849 marriage record at Newington Holy Trinity. Both father's were named and Charlotte's dad Nicholas was a bookseller. With a bit more research, I've found Charlotte in the 1841 census with her dad Nicolas, wife Jane a brother Henry and his wife and children as well as a sister Ann and her husband.
With a little more work I hope to find Rebecca's baptism record to confirm that her mother is in fact Charlotte and also that Jane in turn is Charlotte's mother.
Obits can be such an important piece of the puzzle that I don't think people consider enough. I got lucky this time because the image was online but I've also done the leg work to manually look up newspapers at the local archives with in one case similar results that have allowed me to successfully narrow down my research of people with common fore and surnames in England.
Woo Hoo!
I made an assumption that this was the correct William Henry and that he possibly remarried or that Rebecca's mom was actually Charlotte.
Rebecca's 2nd husband's mother's name was Catherine and I thought it might have been recorded in error. Under this theory I proceeded to research this Woods line in Ontario.
I left the line alone for more than a year and the other night decided to research obituaries for Dunn ancestors on the Toronto Star's Pages of the Past website. I have an account with the Brampton Public Library and I'm able to access the website from home, for free.....
After finding a few Dunn obits I decided to give the Woods line a try. I already had Charlotte's 1916 death registration so I looked her up. To my surprise there was a writeup on her as well as a picture. In the obit it stated that she was a pioneer of Toronto, immigrated with her husband and young family in 1850, married at 17 and was the last surviving member of a family of 23. It also stated that when they came to Canada they lived on the site of the current post office located on Toronto Street and that she leaves 200 descendants. Sure enough it proceeds to list out the names of all of her children one of them Mrs Whittaker. Rebecca's second husband was Robert Whittaker. To remove all doubt that Mrs Whittaker is in fact my Rebecca, the article goes on to give the names of her 2 great grandsons who were serving in WWI, both brothers and Rebecca's grandsons.
After I did my happy dance, I decided to turn to England. I found Charlotte in the 1851 Surrey census with Rebecca and her sister. The husband, a carriage maker was not at home at the time. I looked a bit more and actually obtained a copy of Charlotte and William Henry's 1849 marriage record at Newington Holy Trinity. Both father's were named and Charlotte's dad Nicholas was a bookseller. With a bit more research, I've found Charlotte in the 1841 census with her dad Nicolas, wife Jane a brother Henry and his wife and children as well as a sister Ann and her husband.
With a little more work I hope to find Rebecca's baptism record to confirm that her mother is in fact Charlotte and also that Jane in turn is Charlotte's mother.
Obits can be such an important piece of the puzzle that I don't think people consider enough. I got lucky this time because the image was online but I've also done the leg work to manually look up newspapers at the local archives with in one case similar results that have allowed me to successfully narrow down my research of people with common fore and surnames in England.
Woo Hoo!
Friday, December 2, 2011
Thinking outside of the box phonetically
With a little help, I've knocked down a brick wall. Another co-worker of mine asked if I could research her family. Her maternal great-grandparents came from Germany and settled in Nova Scotia. Their lives and in particular her great grandfather's is shrouded in mystery, one being the circumstances under which he came to Canada. I started the research about 8 months ago and it was a bit of a struggle to find any details about him through ancestry. He told the family that he came to Canada around 1899, went out west and then signed up and served in the Boer War. When he came back to Canada after the war, he said he was given the land in which he settled in Nova Scotia. I've yet to find any record of him serving and a few months after I started, my co-worker was able to get some of his land records which show he got the land well after the war, in 1914. His marriage record from 1903 stated his ethnicity to be German and his father's name was ßeth. With some creative digging and manual searches I was able to find him in the 1911 census where it was stated his ethnicity was Austrian. I was able to build the family tree for her very nicely from Canadian records but it was information her family already knew. They really want to know about his life in Germany/Austria and what might have brought him to Canada. I had come across a boarder crossing record for Johann in 1914 when he crossed through Maine on his way to Maryland. He stated his next of kin to be his brother Joseph in Vienna, Austria - strange that it was not his wife in Nova Scotia but I won't complain since now I had the names of both his dad and brother. I revisited the record a couple of weeks later and discovered that there was a second page. This page contained the country and town of his birth. The handwriting was really difficult to read but it looked like Masterlinek, Austria. I spent quite awhile trying to find anything close to the name of this town but no luck.
Fast forward 8 months. I am currently one of the admins of the Canadian research genealogy group on facebook - as well as the polish group If you haven't checked these groups out or the family search wiki lately, check them out. Everyone is very helpful and passionate about genealogy and sharing what they know. I've started to add content to the Halton County wiki page:
I'm going to plug these initiatives in another post to give them the attention they deserve.
Anyways, I decided to like the German/Prussia facebook group, provided the image of the town as written in the boarder crossing record and hoped for help. Karl-Michael Sala, a professional German genealogist and admin of the German/Prussia page, did some searches and could not find a match for this town or village either.
I sat down two nights ago and it occurred to me that perhaps Johann had provided the name of his birth place but not the spelling and/or the guard wrote what he heard phonetically (maybe without bothering to ask). There is a pretty good database on the JewishGen website which will do special soundex searches for towns/villages and cities in Eastern European countries called ShtetlSeeker. When I first found the name of the town I tried to use the engine to lookup the town without success. I decided to revisit it. I came up with nothing, no matter what spelling I tried. So in desperation I decided to try a long shot. About the only letters I was certain of in the name of the town was the Ma, the lin and the k at the end. I decided to try a soundex search of "lin" and I got thousands of hits. I found the ones in Austria and tried to imagine what town would sound like Masterlinek. I found one that I thought might be close but probably not- Matzling.
I posted a followup message to the facebook group, letting them know what I tried and what I came up with which I did not think was a match.
Well woo hooo, Karl-Michael told me it was the closest match I would get. Phonetically, Matzling sounds like Maeteslinck and so the brick wall has come tumbling down.
The next step is to try to determine which church/parish in Matzling Johann and his family would have belonged to so I can start searching microfilms (and get a crash course in German). It pays to think phonetically and to ask for some help when researching information for a country and in a language you are not familiar with!
Fast forward 8 months. I am currently one of the admins of the Canadian research genealogy group on facebook - as well as the polish group If you haven't checked these groups out or the family search wiki lately, check them out. Everyone is very helpful and passionate about genealogy and sharing what they know. I've started to add content to the Halton County wiki page:
I'm going to plug these initiatives in another post to give them the attention they deserve.
Anyways, I decided to like the German/Prussia facebook group, provided the image of the town as written in the boarder crossing record and hoped for help. Karl-Michael Sala, a professional German genealogist and admin of the German/Prussia page, did some searches and could not find a match for this town or village either.
I sat down two nights ago and it occurred to me that perhaps Johann had provided the name of his birth place but not the spelling and/or the guard wrote what he heard phonetically (maybe without bothering to ask). There is a pretty good database on the JewishGen website which will do special soundex searches for towns/villages and cities in Eastern European countries called ShtetlSeeker. When I first found the name of the town I tried to use the engine to lookup the town without success. I decided to revisit it. I came up with nothing, no matter what spelling I tried. So in desperation I decided to try a long shot. About the only letters I was certain of in the name of the town was the Ma, the lin and the k at the end. I decided to try a soundex search of "lin" and I got thousands of hits. I found the ones in Austria and tried to imagine what town would sound like Masterlinek. I found one that I thought might be close but probably not- Matzling.
I posted a followup message to the facebook group, letting them know what I tried and what I came up with which I did not think was a match.
Well woo hooo, Karl-Michael told me it was the closest match I would get. Phonetically, Matzling sounds like Maeteslinck and so the brick wall has come tumbling down.
The next step is to try to determine which church/parish in Matzling Johann and his family would have belonged to so I can start searching microfilms (and get a crash course in German). It pays to think phonetically and to ask for some help when researching information for a country and in a language you are not familiar with!
Thursday, November 10, 2011
Long nights researching Long Island and a vindication
One of my co-workers gave me a challenge. Prove that his family descended from Italian royalty. He didn't give me alot to go on:
-his grandparents names
-that they were Italian Americans who lived in Corona, New York
I started my search on ancestry and was able to find his paternal grandparents and one great uncle quickly in the 1930 US census.
We had some more conversations and I started to get a bigger picture of the family. His paternal grandmother's line was rumored to have descended from Italian royalty illegitimately and as a result of the illegitimate birth, they (not sure who "they" is) left Italy and came to Canada.
What really sparked my interest was his paternal grandfather though. Family stories said my co-worker's great grandmother abandoned her husband and three children in New York and ran off with another man taking her two youngest children (A girl and a boy with her). Being a mom myself I was really surprised to hear it. I am sure it was not altogether uncommon but it just didn't sound right. So I decided to big deeper.
I did some searches in ancestry and found three of the brothers in a place called Nazareth Trade School in Oyster Bay New York. My co-worker confirmed that his grandfather was indeed in an orphanage after his mother had abandoned the family. Armed with the names of three of the children, I got a match on an ancestry tree for the boys which included the names of their parents (Pasquale and Isabella). My co-worker didn't know the name of his great grandparents and the tree entries do not cite any sources and are limited only to the basics, some names and bmd dates which I already knew. I tried to contact the owner to no avail.
Going under the assumption that Pasquale and Isabella were in fact his great grandparents I started searching like crazy for either one of them in the 1910 and 1930 census records with no luck.
I switched to researching the Corona area to try to narrow down what church they would have attended and discovered St Leo, an Italian American church built in Corona in 1903: http://saintleoparish.com/NuestroNegocio.aspx
I contacted the archivist and provided what I knew about the family. I asked if she could provide any information such as a marriage record for Pasquale and Isabella or baptismal information for any of the children. I've followed up a couple of times but have not heard back.
At the same time I started to research the Nazareth Trade schools. It turns out that the school was built in 1906 and run by the Dominican sisters.
http://www.fbhsli.org/Historical_Anecdotes.htm
I also found a very nice video about the trade school:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk0DOBCVyNA&noredirect=1
Through my research I determined it was meant to be a place where orphaned children or children with only one living parent could be sent to live and be educated in a trade.
Additionally there was a special 1925 census done in NY and some kind soul transcribed the trade school:
http://www.panix.com/~cassidy/1925orphan.html
I looked for the boys but it seems they had already left the school by then.
I contacted the Dominican Sisters and left a message in the hopes that they might have some information. I didn't hear back so called again and this time I was able to speak to the archivist. She explained that she couldn't make out all the details in my message like a return phone number and the last name of the boys so she couldn't find anything nor get back to me. I provided the details again and she let me know she would give it a shot.
I didn't stay idle in the meantime. I had decided that I was determined to find the family in the 1911 census even if it meant going manually through the sheets line by line, which in the end is what I had to do. I tried to narrow my search down by enumeration district first which was no small task.
I brought Corona up in google maps and made note of the main street names. Next I used a nice little online tool to get the EDs: http://stevemorse.org/census/index.html. Then the line by line search of Queens began. I came up empty handed.
I expanded my area of research the next night and bingo they turned up, not in Queens but in Brooklyn. Their last name was pretty difficult to decipher which accounted for not being able to find them in indexes of the census. The nice thing about this census is they wrote the streets name of the people vertically along the left side of the page. I went back to google maps, located their street and the closest RC church: The Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary which, as I expected was an Italian catholic church at the time.
Riding the wave of euphoria I called the church the next day to see if I could get a marriage record for Pasquale and Isabella as well as a death record for Pasquale who I was starting to suspect had died and was the real reason the boys were sent away. Well what can I say, when a wave goes up, it must come down. I must have caught the secretary on a bad day, she explained that inquiries could not be made over the phone and I would need to come into the church by appointment. When I explained that I lived in Canada she let me know that looking up the old records was a considerable amount of work and she would do it for $100/hr only if I knew the exact dates of the event!
With a little luck the big kahuna of a wave came along. The archivist for Nazareth Trade School contacted me. She let me know that the boys were admitted to the school on Dec 20th 1913. Their father Pasquale had died and their mother Isabella (woo hoo I got her maiden name) was sick and unable to care for them. Relatives had tried to care for Isabella and her 6 children but they weren't able to care for all of them. It was sad to read that they were admitted 5 days before Christmas but I really hope that the experience resulted in a better childhood than they would have gotten otherwise. I did get the news I was hoping for: On February 16, 1922, the boys were discharged to Isabella and her second husband who were living in Corona. The eldest boy would have been 18 at the time and too old to continue at the school.
Now that I had Isabella's new last name I went back to the 1920 census to search for her and found her quickly. She married another man name Pasquale (Pat) who was a widower with 9 children! Her daughter and youngest son from her first marriage were living with them. There is a gap in the years the children of the house were born between 1914 and 1917 so I have a suspicion that the three children born between 1917 and 1921 were a result of Isabella's new marriage and the sheer number of people living under the same roof can partially explain why she was not able to collect her boys sooner from the Nazareth school.
-his grandparents names
-that they were Italian Americans who lived in Corona, New York
I started my search on ancestry and was able to find his paternal grandparents and one great uncle quickly in the 1930 US census.
We had some more conversations and I started to get a bigger picture of the family. His paternal grandmother's line was rumored to have descended from Italian royalty illegitimately and as a result of the illegitimate birth, they (not sure who "they" is) left Italy and came to Canada.
What really sparked my interest was his paternal grandfather though. Family stories said my co-worker's great grandmother abandoned her husband and three children in New York and ran off with another man taking her two youngest children (A girl and a boy with her). Being a mom myself I was really surprised to hear it. I am sure it was not altogether uncommon but it just didn't sound right. So I decided to big deeper.
I did some searches in ancestry and found three of the brothers in a place called Nazareth Trade School in Oyster Bay New York. My co-worker confirmed that his grandfather was indeed in an orphanage after his mother had abandoned the family. Armed with the names of three of the children, I got a match on an ancestry tree for the boys which included the names of their parents (Pasquale and Isabella). My co-worker didn't know the name of his great grandparents and the tree entries do not cite any sources and are limited only to the basics, some names and bmd dates which I already knew. I tried to contact the owner to no avail.
Going under the assumption that Pasquale and Isabella were in fact his great grandparents I started searching like crazy for either one of them in the 1910 and 1930 census records with no luck.
I switched to researching the Corona area to try to narrow down what church they would have attended and discovered St Leo, an Italian American church built in Corona in 1903: http://saintleoparish.com/NuestroNegocio.aspx
I contacted the archivist and provided what I knew about the family. I asked if she could provide any information such as a marriage record for Pasquale and Isabella or baptismal information for any of the children. I've followed up a couple of times but have not heard back.
At the same time I started to research the Nazareth Trade schools. It turns out that the school was built in 1906 and run by the Dominican sisters.
http://www.fbhsli.org/Historical_Anecdotes.htm
I also found a very nice video about the trade school:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk0DOBCVyNA&noredirect=1
Through my research I determined it was meant to be a place where orphaned children or children with only one living parent could be sent to live and be educated in a trade.
Additionally there was a special 1925 census done in NY and some kind soul transcribed the trade school:
http://www.panix.com/~cassidy/1925orphan.html
I looked for the boys but it seems they had already left the school by then.
I contacted the Dominican Sisters and left a message in the hopes that they might have some information. I didn't hear back so called again and this time I was able to speak to the archivist. She explained that she couldn't make out all the details in my message like a return phone number and the last name of the boys so she couldn't find anything nor get back to me. I provided the details again and she let me know she would give it a shot.
I didn't stay idle in the meantime. I had decided that I was determined to find the family in the 1911 census even if it meant going manually through the sheets line by line, which in the end is what I had to do. I tried to narrow my search down by enumeration district first which was no small task.
I brought Corona up in google maps and made note of the main street names. Next I used a nice little online tool to get the EDs: http://stevemorse.org/census/index.html. Then the line by line search of Queens began. I came up empty handed.
I expanded my area of research the next night and bingo they turned up, not in Queens but in Brooklyn. Their last name was pretty difficult to decipher which accounted for not being able to find them in indexes of the census. The nice thing about this census is they wrote the streets name of the people vertically along the left side of the page. I went back to google maps, located their street and the closest RC church: The Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary which, as I expected was an Italian catholic church at the time.
Riding the wave of euphoria I called the church the next day to see if I could get a marriage record for Pasquale and Isabella as well as a death record for Pasquale who I was starting to suspect had died and was the real reason the boys were sent away. Well what can I say, when a wave goes up, it must come down. I must have caught the secretary on a bad day, she explained that inquiries could not be made over the phone and I would need to come into the church by appointment. When I explained that I lived in Canada she let me know that looking up the old records was a considerable amount of work and she would do it for $100/hr only if I knew the exact dates of the event!
With a little luck the big kahuna of a wave came along. The archivist for Nazareth Trade School contacted me. She let me know that the boys were admitted to the school on Dec 20th 1913. Their father Pasquale had died and their mother Isabella (woo hoo I got her maiden name) was sick and unable to care for them. Relatives had tried to care for Isabella and her 6 children but they weren't able to care for all of them. It was sad to read that they were admitted 5 days before Christmas but I really hope that the experience resulted in a better childhood than they would have gotten otherwise. I did get the news I was hoping for: On February 16, 1922, the boys were discharged to Isabella and her second husband who were living in Corona. The eldest boy would have been 18 at the time and too old to continue at the school.
Now that I had Isabella's new last name I went back to the 1920 census to search for her and found her quickly. She married another man name Pasquale (Pat) who was a widower with 9 children! Her daughter and youngest son from her first marriage were living with them. There is a gap in the years the children of the house were born between 1914 and 1917 so I have a suspicion that the three children born between 1917 and 1921 were a result of Isabella's new marriage and the sheer number of people living under the same roof can partially explain why she was not able to collect her boys sooner from the Nazareth school.
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